"GAIJIN YOKOZUNA: A BIO-GRAPHY OF CHAD ROWAN" BY MARK PANEK; LATITUDE 20/UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I PRESS, PAPER, $24.95

When I first moved home to Hawai'i, it was in the glory days of the Hawai'i-Japan sumo connection, when hon-basho (sumo tournaments) were broadcast free on local cable television and we celebrated our Hawai'i-born rikishi (wrestlers) Akebono, Musashimaru and Konishiki in song, on T-shirts and with parties around the TV.

I fell in love — not with our local boys, though I cheered for them, but with Terao, a compact wrestler with one of the lightest physiques in the dohyo (sumo ring) and a profile like a Greek god. I'd shriek with excitement when he used his famous tsuppari (slapping) technique to defeat an opponent many times his size. But watching these tournaments left me with so many questions; I wanted to know so much more about the lives of these men — what was behind the expressionless faces and ritual gestures?

Now, in an era when the number of foreign-born rikishi is limited by sumo's regulators, Mark Panek more than answers my almost-forgotten questions in his new biography of Akebono, who grew up in Waimanalo as Chad Rowan. (Just in time for the welcome news that Hawai'i might host a sumo tournament next June.)

Panek, who teaches English at the University of Hawai'i-Hilo, delves unflinchingly into the background and character of the first gaijin (literally "outside person") to attain the rank of yokozuna, the highest in sumo and one granted only 68 times in history. (Akebono was No. 64).

But if this book is of interest for its subject, it is even more interesting for its approach, one that Panek explains in a prologue, an afterword and in various asides. There is, first, the subtitle: "A biography of Chad Rowan." That it is "a" biography, not "the" biography, is due to Panek's conviction that any story has as many versions as it has tellers, and that every story is as much about the teller as it is about the subject. Further, he acknowledges that no life is transparent enough, straightforward enough, simple enough to be explained in a single telling — particularly a life that spans several cultures.

Rather than standing invisibly out of the frame, Panek steps in and out of the action as appropriate. He tells "the story of the story" — how he came to meet Akebono and to be chosen as his biographer, how various tales of Akebono's life were gathered from family and friends, how the early drafts fell short and the manuscript didn't come together until he adopted this approach, with the advice of experts at the University of Hawai'i Center for Biographical Research.

As often happens, the book's strength also creates a weakness. Because Panek often examines a single incident or aspect of Akebono's life from the viewpoints of several different characters, as well as his own observations, there's repetition. I asked myself more than once whether I would have kept reading had I not been reviewing the book — not because the book isn't well-written or the subject worthy of study, but because I felt in several places that I'd got the point already, let's move on. But keep reading I did, and I'm glad.

Panek begins this project with an important question: What did Chad Rowan have to go through to become Yokozuna Akebono?

How does a non-Japanese find his way into one of the most ritual-bound innermost circles of a notoriously xenophobic society? Had he become Japanese? Was he acting? What parts of himself was he forced to shed?

Having lived in Japan, Panek knew intimately how physically draining and psychologically exhausting it is to live day after day in a place where you can't even order a meal or buy a pair of socks without taxing your language skills and encountering social and cultural sinkholes.

Here was a country boy, by his own admission a poor student in English (let alone Japanese), not (unlike his brother) a natural athlete, separated from a tight-knit family, thrust into a fanatically hierarchical and competitive environment where few (if any) of his companions wished him well and the clamorous Japanese press was eager to document any misstep. How had he survived at all, let alone conquered this esoteric world?

Panek tells this story masterfully, tracing and retracing his research footsteps, through oral histories with everyone from Akebono's imprisoned brother (the one whom stable owner Jesse Kuhaulua really wanted to draft) to his drinking buddies in Japan, through grueling weeks on jungyo (exhibition tours), through tournaments and press conferences, through official appearances for wealthy patrons and very unofficial parties with the champion's 'ukulele-strumming homies, through stories that have become legend (the day Akebono faced off against his teacher, the night another champion incited him to rage, the practice bout that put a stop to a comeback that might have changed history, the tear-washed hair-cutting ceremony that ended his career).

Panek concludes that it was not that Akebono "became" Japanese, nor yet that he only "acted" Japanese — though elements of both are in play. Rather, he says, it was Chad Rowan's own innate character that drafted him across so many barriers. As he reveals himself in pidgin-accented interviews and excerpts from an early journal, Akebono is a man who likes to look about him, observe and think before he speaks. He took seriously his father's advice to be humble, not to "make big body." He also had an inner core of defiance; he was determined to prove his detractors wrong. There is an element of laid-back local boy; he has a natural joie de vivre and doesn't sweat the small stuff. And there was the fact that, when he started, this sumo thing was his one shot at financial security for him and his family; he couldn't let them down.

There is a bittersweet end to the story, not least because, as Panek told me in an e-mail after I had read the book, Akebono's is a feat unlikely to be repeated. "I don't think there will be any more local boys recruited for sumo (Percy Kipapa was the last, going up in 1991) because they were too, too dominant," he wrote. "And even given the relatively high number of foreigners from other places in the ranks now, the chances of anyone doing what Jesse Kuhaulua, Akebono's teacher, has done — sticking it out for life, AND recruiting a gaijin of yokozuna caliber — are pretty slim."

Which only adds to this book's value.