If much of fear is about the element of surprise, it could be argued that Naoya Inoue represents boxing’s best jump scare. For though he is small, his impact is considerable, and it is often the anticipation of this impact which causes the eyes of his opponent to grow larger and larger on fight night.

The opponent, having heard the horror stories, knows what is to come. They just don’t know when, that’s all. If lucky, they may catch the creaking of a door, or feet on floorboards, but that’s typically all they get by way of warning. Mostly it’s just silence, and in this silence they wait for the bang! They try in vain to forget the faces of previous victims. They try not to let the anticipation of what is to come destroy them before the monster has even revealed itself.

As the “Monster,” Inoue has so far won 28 professional fights and ended 25 of them inside the distance. Scarier to witness than to read, these stats are more commonly associated with boxers in divisions north of middleweight, yet Inoue began his career as a 108-pound junior flyweight. Even now, at the age of 31, he has gone only as far as a 122-pound junior featherweight, a division historically awash with fine technicians but few with the same power and air of intimidation as Inoue. It is in that realm he stands alone. He stands alone in the company of his predecessors and he stands alone in present company too, for nobody in boxing today can match the aura of Naoya Inoue, who defends his undisputed junior featherweight titles against Ye Joon Kim on Friday in Japan.

Whereas the other big punchers in the sport — say, Artur Beterbiev, or what’s left of Deontay Wilder —tease and telegraph their threat through their disposition, Inoue works in the opposite way. He attempts not to scare opponents but instead lull them into a false sense of security, with his image, more pop star than monster, implying a certain softness, safety. The same goes for Inoue’s dress sense and style. Watch him fight and you will frequently see him adjusting his fringe like someone who cares about order and appearance. You then wonder how he has it in him to be so conscientious and yet so cruel.

It is also a collaboration, this lulling. For not only does Inoue tend to play down his level of threat, but the people around him, and the Japanese crowd, are similarly respectful. Ask anyone who has ever fought Inoue in Japan, in fact, and they will tell you that during the time they spent in the champion’s country they were treated as well as any boxer could expect when on enemy territory. From these boxers, you hear only positive tales and rarely are there allusions to the usual shenanigans employed by other teams and promoters elsewhere in the world. Instead, in Japan, they seemingly kill you with kindness. They build you up to then ensure the fall, on fight night, is even greater, even more painful and shocking.

“They really looked after us at first,” says Paul Butler, the British boxer who challenged Inoue in December 2022. “They sorted out our hotels, our food, anything we wanted, and then on fight day — bang! Totally different. I was like, ‘Who are these people? We’ve been dealing with them all week and they were fine. What have they turned into?’

“It sort of flipped on its head. They were coming into the changing room and saying, ‘You’re going out in five minutes,’ and I hadn’t even got my gloves on yet. We were just like, ‘No, that’s not happening. You can’t fight without us. Get out and leave us alone.’

“Then, when I was putting my gloves on, they made me un-tape because they wanted to cut off a little drawstring on the gloves. To start with I couldn’t even get my hands in the gloves, so we put some Vaseline on my wraps to help them slide in a little bit. But they went ballistic when they saw that. They thought I was putting some sort of agent on my hands. I said, ‘Look, it’s just Vaseline. It’s just to get my hand in the glove.’ They then went and got some official in and we had to explain it all to them as well.

“I can see why he stays in Japan, Inoue, if I’m honest," Butler continues. "As soon as you get to fight day, everything changes and you are made to feel like he has everything in his control. I can see other people accepting that sort of treatment and it being seen as a bit of a win for Inoue’s team. But Joe (Gallagher, my trainer) wasn’t having any of it.”

In a sense Butler was given an early sample of what he could expect from Inoue when the first bell rang. That, too, was destined to be a jarring experience, with a feeling of whiplash being the best-case scenario. It would, for Butler, also be a surreal one as it would play out to a soundtrack of silence.

“The crowd there is very polite but they are very perceptive,” says trainer Joe Gallagher, who observed Inoue from the relative safety of Butler’s corner. “They do acknowledge very good work and show appreciation for good boxing. When Inoue turns the screw, you can hear them appreciate it. There is mostly silence, yeah, but when Inoue is doing good work, there is always a ripple of applause. You can tell how well Inoue is doing by the volume of the crowd. Once he starts turning the screw, the crowd becomes more and more vocal. It is then they can usually smell blood or sense that a finish is on the way.”

After Butler, they then turned their attention to Stephen Fulton in July 2023, considered Inoue’s main rival, and again showed their respect. They applauded the American on his way to the ring before later extending the same kindness as he departed the ring having been battered inside eight rounds. On all the same faces Fulton saw all the same smiles. The only thing that separated the end from the beginning was his own inability to offer one back.

Since that night with Fulton, Inoue has stopped three other opponents to further solidify his dominance at super bantamweight. We watched him pummel Marlon Tapales, a southpaw, on Boxing Day 2023, and following that he stopped Luis Nery, another southpaw, but only after surviving the first crisis of his career when Nery dropped him in round one.

Suddenly, in that moment, the shock was Inoue’s, for he had not seen it coming: The right hook, the power behind it, the result of it. Now, not only was Inoue for once the fighter on the receiving end, but he was unsuspecting, which made his ability to then recuperate and win the fight in round six all the more impressive.

Nery aside, the only other opponent to have troubled Inoue is Nonito Donaire, the legendary Filipino who, like Inoue, has traveled through the weights. In the first of their two fights, which took place in 2019, Donaire was utterly fearless in his approach and therefore as dangerous as he was vulnerable. He, unlike other Inoue opponents, deemed himself, at worst, Inoue’s equal in terms of talent and accomplishments and used this belief as his fuel. He then matched Inoue every step of the way, becoming the first man to hear the final bell in Inoue’s company since 2016 and, better yet, winning some of the 12 rounds they shared.

Nobody else has managed to go the distance with Inoue in the past five years and only Butler has made it into the championship rounds, something of which he is proud. Yet, of course, when the goal with Inoue is merely to survive and last longer than all the rest, and when the aim is not to win but rather lose in the least humiliating and painful way possible, you know you are dealing with a very different monster.

“In a way I was proud to get through that many rounds with him, but in another way, I wish I let my hands go a little bit more,” said Butler, who was stopped in round 11. “But if I let my hands go a little bit more, he may have taken me out of there early. It’s the shots you don’t see coming that do the real damage and he’s very good at timing stuff. He could have potentially got me out of there in three or four rounds if I had really gone for it early.

“The plan was always to have a look at him for four or five rounds because we knew how tight he was at the weight, then let’s see how his engine is in the second half. But I was just catching, catching, catching and not really countering too much. I think I got going a little bit in round six or seven, or eight even, but then he sort of changed everything up. He started putting his hands behind his back and dropping his hands to his knees and was trying to gauge something from me. I’m a little bit too knowledgeable for stuff like that, though. I do it with kids in the gym. He’s not going to catch me out doing that.”

Just as the shots you don’t see coming are the ones that do the most damage, perhaps the same can be said for fighters themselves. Inoue, for instance, doesn’t present the image or demeanor of a man who carries his kind of record, power or ability to scare, yet that only makes his behavior even more shocking on fight night. This was also true of someone like Gennadiy Golovkin; particularly the version of Golovkin who was once unbeaten and avoided and routinely showed up to press meetings in hotels closer, in appearance, to a hotel employee than the scourge of the middleweight division. That Golovkin, whom I encountered for the first time at a London hotel ahead of his fight against Martin Murray in 2015, stuck out by virtue of how benevolent and relaxed he looked out of office. In the hotel that morning he was followed everywhere by a gaggle of smiling girls, all strangers to him but natives of Kazakhstan, and he greeted everybody present with a bowed head and clasped hands. He then said, when asked to sell his upcoming fight against Murray, “This is boxing. It is just business. Nothing personal. We will see.”

Golovkin, as we all know, became something quite different on fight night. To Brits alone he did serious damage — both physical and psychological. He broke Matthew Macklin’s ribs in 2013, he punished Martin Murray mercilessly for 11 rounds in 2015, and he cracked the orbital bone of Kell Brook in 2016.

“What got me was how much pressure he was able to exert with just his presence alone,” Macklin told me. “He could cut the ring off so well and so quickly. He’d put a whole load of pressure on you without doing much.

“Also, you’re aware that he’s a big puncher so you’re burning more nervous energy and your movements are more urgent. You don’t glide effortlessly when you’re in with Golovkin. It’s tiring when you’re wary and anxious of someone’s power.

“Even though there was nothing heavy in the first round, I was still cut, I was still on the back foot, and I was still working much harder than I wanted to. I then looked at him and he looked like he hadn’t got out of first gear.”

One could easily switch the name “Golovkin” for “Inoue” and the same observations would ring true. After all, Inoue has a similar capacity to suffocate an opponent with the fear of what is to come and drain from them all the energy they require to then prevent this thing from actually happening. Often, too, by the time it does happen, the thing itself is not half as scary as the man on the receiving end had imagined it.

“His power was very, very good, as everyone knows,” Butler says of Inoue, “but when he hit me on the chin, it was surprising. I don’t know why it was surprising. Maybe because for 12 weeks building up to the fight I had been thinking, 'Wow, he must hit really hard, him.' I was watching sparring clips of him and seeing him put people away and I’m thinking, 'Wow, imagine what he’s like in eight-ounce gloves.'

“But when he did hit me … listen, they were hard and they were powerful, but I didn’t feel like he had shaken me to my boots or hit quite as hard as I had expected.

“When he did shake me to my boots, it wasn’t until the eighth round. At the end of the round, I got back to the corner, and I can’t remember to this day what Joe told me between those two rounds, the eighth and ninth. I just remember standing up to go out for round nine and my legs still feeling like they weren’t underneath me.”

“What a fighter,” adds Joe Gallagher. “As a coach, I’ve been up against some very good fighters in the past, including Vasiliy Lomachenko, Andre Ward and 'Canelo' Alvarez, and Inoue is right up there. He’s something else, that kid.

“I think his calmness is so impressive. He carries this air of confidence and assurance that all the greats had: [Marvin] Hagler, [Floyd] Mayweather, 'Canelo.' These men all had an air of authority about them and a real presence.

“One day that goes and an opponent isn’t bothered by it and gets stuck into them. But don’t forget: Inoue is blessed with the boxing skill to back up his power. He can do it all. He isn’t a one-trick pony. He’s also a model pro. He’s quiet, well-behaved. I tell my fighters all the time, ‘You don’t have to be flipping tables. The best in the world, [Oleksandr] Usyk, [Vasiliy] Lomachenko, 'Canelo' and Inoue — have any of them flipped a table? Do any of them talk trash to get attention? The answer is no. They let their hands do the talking. Proper fighters always do.’”

Alfred Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense, once said, “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it,” and it is hard, when recalling these words, not to picture Naoya Inoue standing in a boxing ring, bothered only by his fringe. For it is Inoue, more than anyone else, who brings to the boxing ring an anticipation of the bang rather than just the bang itself. It is also Inoue who manages to have the audience as anxious as the opponent; each of us shushed into silence because silence is the default setting when expecting something monstrous to happen. You stay still and you stay silent. You wait for it, listen for it. You have seen this movie before, so know both what to do and what happens next. You just don’t know when, that’s all.