Rei Tsuruya is back in the Octagon this weekend in Macau, and the 23-year-old flyweight arrives with a different look and a different challenge. He has cut his shoulder-length black hair into short, spiky blonde locks, a change he says came down to simple practicality: the long hair was getting in the way when he trained.
That return matters now because Tsuruya has been absent for more than a year since UFC 313, where he lost to Joshua Van in a short-notice assignment. Van out-struck him by a considerable margin that night, and the 125-pound weight class has moved on quickly since then, with Van closing out 2025 as champion and then defending the title against Tatsuro Taira earlier this month.
Tsuruya built his place in the sport by winning the flyweight tournament on Season 2 of Road to UFC, then opened his UFC run with a unanimous decision over Carlos Hernandez. Those results once suggested a prospect moving cleanly through the division. Now he is trying to restart that climb against Luis Gurule, who stepped in after originally being booked to face Jesus Aguilar.
The matchup carries an edge that comes from timing as much as ranking. Gurule is taking the fight on short notice after Aguilar was forced out with an undisclosed injury in the days after Gurule’s unanimous decision win over Daniel Barez in Las Vegas, while Tsuruya is trying to show that the long layoff has not slowed him down. He said he got tired of the long hair, but the bigger point is that he wants to focus on fighting, not fixing anything that gets in the way of his training.
That makes this more than a simple comeback bout. Tsuruya has said he does not want to be left behind as the division changes, and he has made clear that he wants to catch up with the top-flight contenders and get back into the ranking conversation. The problem is that the flyweight picture has changed in his absence, and the fighter who left Macau with momentum will have a better claim to that next step than the one still trying to find his footing again.
This weekend in Macau, Tsuruya gets the chance to answer that in the cage instead of talking around it. If he looks like the same fighter who won his way into the UFC, the division will have a new name to watch again. If not, the gap between him and the contenders he is chasing will only feel wider.
