Most competitive athletes eventually reach a point where the scorecard stops being the story. For Michael T. Mitsui, that moment arrived not in a single dramatic event but across a series of difficult years: an injury, a loss, a pandemic that closed studios and rerouted plans that had seemed fixed. His memoir, Against the Current, is the account of what he found on the other side of those disruptions and what they revealed about a career he had spent decades building.
Mitsui was born in Canada to Japanese parents whose lives were shaped by the Second World War and by Hiroshima. He grew up, by his account, carrying what those years left behind: a family culture of perseverance, humility, and unconditional love, rooted in the landscapes of British Columbia. It is the kind of origin story that a competitive dancer would not necessarily advertise in a championship program but that, Mitsui writes, turns out to be the foundation beneath everything else.
His career in rhythm dance, which includes cha-cha, rumba, mambo, bolero, and East Coast swing, produced what the memoir describes as eight Canadian national championships. Rhythm is a style that places a premium on musicality and connection with an audience, not only on technical accuracy. A good rhythm performance does not just display what a dancer can do. It communicates something human across the distance between stage and audience. That turned out to be useful material for memoir.
The Internet Movie Database lists a Michael Mitsui among the cast of the 2004 Hollywood film Shall We Dance?, the American remake of the beloved Japanese original, in which a Chicago attorney played by Richard Gere takes up ballroom dancing in secret. The film brought professional dancers into a mainstream Hollywood production at a moment when competitive ballroom was finding new audiences well beyond the competition circuit, a trajectory that accelerated sharply when reality dance competitions took hold on American television the following year.
Mitsui later moved to Japan, where, according to his account, he built dance studios and established a family. The direction inverted his parents’ journey from Japan to Canada and introduced a new set of demands. Running a studio in a second language and culture, sustaining a physical career through the middle years, and holding together an identity organized around performance when that performance is not always possible: none of it appears on a championship podium. The memoir is, among other things, a reckoning with how much of what mattered was happening offstage.
The COVID-19 pandemic arrived as an amplifier for questions that were already forming. When studios closed and live instruction was suspended, the routines Mitsui had organized years around fell away. What that pause made visible, he writes, was that success had been a moving target, and the definition he had been carrying may not have been entirely his own. The recognition is framed not as a crisis but as an opening.
Against the Current is the kind of book that competitive dance rarely produces: one genuinely interested in what the discipline costs, not just what it provides. Mitsui is not writing against the career. He is writing toward an understanding of it that took the harder years to reach. The losses, the physical reversal of injury, and the forced pause of the pandemic are not framed as detours from the real story but as the passages that made it possible to tell one worth reading.
The memoir asks readers to consider what their own crossroads have revealed. To go against the current, in Mitsui’s framing, is not simply to choose difficulty. It is to keep moving in a direction that is not the obvious one, trusting that the harder path may eventually clarify what the easier one would have concealed. That may be the closest thing competitive dance has to a governing philosophy, and the best explanation for why a champion found the most important things to say only after the trophies stopped being the point.
