by Kenzaburo Oe
Finally, on a sunny Thursday morning, Ikuo appeared at his door, without giving any explanation for having taken two and a half weeks off. His reticence wasn’t the result of some self-centered insecurity, but a willful decision to keep what he wanted to say within him, a stance that made Kizu all the more concerned. To top this off, something about Ikuo’s nude body seemed unfamiliar. As artists are wont to do, Kizu looked at him intently as if he were listening to some strange sound. In contrast to his attitude when he came into the apartment, Ikuo was now quick to react. With the luxuriant foliage of the wych elm behind his right shoulder as he posed, the strong sunlight, which they hadn’t seen in a while, above him, Ikuo kneaded the tight skin around his washboard abdomen.
“These past two weeks I’ve been training like crazy,” he said. “Coaching recreational swimmers doesn’t keep me in shape. My stomach’s gotten pretty buff, but I’m worried the lines won’t be the same as the last time I modeled.”
“That’s not a problem,” Kizu replied. “Right now I’m concentrating on the swell of the shoulders. Your whole body does look quite toned.”
Still seeming concerned, Ikuo kneaded the flesh of his abdomen, pulling it toward his navel. The movement pulled his soft but heavy penis away from his thick pubic hair and over toward his thigh.
Feeling Kizu’s gaze, Ikuo fidgeted the muscles of his buttocks and tried, without success, to hide his genitals in the shadow of his thick thigh. Soon his penis started curving to the right, pointing toward the wych elm outside the glass door as it swelled to life. This was different from Kizu’s recent erections, reminding him of the uncontrollable, autonomous erections of his younger days.
Finally, Ikuo relaxed his pose and covered his penis with both hands, decisively turning a stern but blushing face to Kizu and looking straight at him for the first time that day.
“Actually, there’s something I need to talk with you about,” Ikuo said, “and thinking about it got all these personal emotions welling up. And now look what’s happened. You’ll have to pardon my confusion. Calling it personal emotions might sound a little strange, but you’ve taught me so many things. Sometimes I can’t believe how kind you’ve been to me. These past few months I’ve felt less lonely than I have for years. I know it’ll seem ungrateful, but I’ve given it a lot of thought and I’ve decided to quit my job in Tokyo.
“When we first met in the pool drying room I was already thinking of doing this. I’ve worked there a full two years already. Fortunately, that allowed me to meet you, to get this modeling job, and to be able to study with you. I’m thankful, but if I just continue as a swimming coach, I’m never going to be able to solve any of the problems I’m facing—problems connected with what we were talking about last time, about being a free person.
“So the past two weeks I’ve been training like crazy and doing some thinking, and I came to the conclusion that I’ve got to leave. Yesterday I submitted my resignation to the athletic club. Since I didn’t give them two weeks’ notice I won’t be getting any severance pay, though.”
Kizu felt as if the cells of his body were being surrounded by an overwhelming force of invaders, and he was choked by a visceral sense of grief. At the same time he was convinced that this is how people are abandoned. Now that he’d reached his fifties, he wondered, confused, was this all life had in store for him?
“Well,” he said, “you’re an independent spirit. I never imagined you’d be a swimming instructor for the rest of your life, let alone an artist’s model. Wanting to set off for somewhere is perfectly natural. Though it does make me wistful, I guess you’d say, or regretful.”
As he said this, Kizu heard ill will mixed in with the sound of his pumping blood. Ikuo turned fervent eyes toward him, and with one totally unexpected question, laid bare all of Kizu’s recent fantasies.
“Professor, are you gay? Sometimes I’ve wondered whether you’ve been kind to me just to try to have a relationship with me, and whether the whole thing might not end with me having to beat the crap out of you. But I don’t have those hostile feelings anymore, and, since this is the last time, if you’d like to do some kind of gay thing to me, I wouldn’t hate you or anything. That’s what I was thinking about, and—well, you can see the result.”
Kizu was struck by an unexpected emotion: This must be what they used to call heartrending grief, he thought. He stood up. Ikuo reacted defensively by protecting his genitals with his cupped hands. His pride wounded, Kizu said in a parched voice, nearly shouting, “That’s not what’s going on here! I don’t know anything about homosexuality; I don’t have any experience with it. Still, you have a beautiful body, and I do feel some sort of urges. I haven’t been planning anything, but sadly, I do feel a kind of yearning. Maybe it’s that time in my life. I don’t know.
“This may sound like sour grapes, but why do you have to leave? Are you sure you’ll never come back here again? Can’t you seek your goal of being free together with me?”
Kizu fairly groaned this out. Not knowing how to continue, he collapsed in his chair, burying his face in his hands. He was crying. Through the spaces between his fingers, he could see Ikuo get down from the dais he’d been posing on, pressing down with one hand the bounding movements of his penis as he walked over to stand uncertainly in front of him, his waist slightly jutted forward. Kizu took himself by surprise, releasing his tear-stained hands to grasp Ikuo’s buttocks, aiming for the anarchically moving penis and grasping it in his mouth. He opened his mouth wide, taking care not to hurt it with his false teeth, unsure how much pressure he could apply, getting the energetic penis to come to rest against his upper palate, wrapping his tongue around it as Ikuo held his head tightly with both hands.
Kizu acted like some old veteran, and when Ikuo ejaculated for what seemed like forever, Kizu couldn’t have been happier. He let go his fingers from where they’d dug into the muscle and dimples on Ikuo’s rump, and Ikuo’s penis, still too large to be held in one hand, hung down next to Kizu’s lips. Ikuo asked, vaguely, if there was some way he could repay him for all his kindness. Kizu gently shook his head, hoping to show that this was enough, and wiped away the excess semen dripping from the corners of his mouth with the back of his hand.
Kizu and Ikuo lay down side by side on wicker lounge chairs, the Venetian blinds half drawn to shut out the intense sunlight as they gazed up at the brilliant outline of the leaves of the wych elm against the cloudless autumn sky. They discussed how they would live now in Tokyo, after Ikuo quit his athletic club job and continued as Kizu’s model. They decided not to make any quick decisions about the details. Occasionally they fell silent, simply enjoying the feeling of closeness. Ikuo was stretched out fully beside Kizu, who reached out to trace with his fingernails the circuit-board design of the skin—skin like the finest paper—on Ikuo’s concave belly. Ikuo gazed down at this as if he were watching a drawing develop. Kizu saw how the movement of his fingernails made Ikuo’s penis rub against his thigh. The head of the penis was dry, with fine reddish wrinkles, but looked wet. Embarrassed because it was starting to glisten again, Ikuo covered it with his dark shiny palm, and Kizu laid his own wrinkled palm on top.
Kizu dozed for a while and then awoke, as if his consciousness had been speared by a gaff, to see Ikuo still stretched out beside him. Ikuo’s muscular shoulders—their layers like seams of armor—and his waist and buttocks were covered with droplets of sweat. Kizu raised himself up, choking with excitement, picked up the tissue paper box from the side table, and, lying so close to Ikuo he could feel the warmth of his body, began to masturbate. As he ejaculated a small amount of semen into the tissue, a light brownish color mixed in, Ikuo, whom he thought was asleep, reached over without moving to lay a sweaty hand on the artist’s wizened thigh. Eyes closed, Ikuo shifted around, wrapped Kizu’s weak-looking body in his strong arms, and lovingly kissed Kizu’s shoulders. Kizu guessed it was a gesture to assuage his guilty conscience at not wanting to fellate him. But Ikuo’s face, close up as he gently
kissed Kizu, showed a rapturous satisfaction.
5
Kizu spread out on the floor the drawings he’d done for his as-yet still inchoate tableau with Ikuo modeling for him; Ikuo, Kizu’s worn-out dressing gown draped over his naked body, came over close to him to stare intently at one drawing in particular, a design Kizu had done on a separate sheet of paper and then attached to the bottom of one of the sketches of Ikuo. After a moment, uneasy, Kizu looked up and saw that, as often happened when he was concentrating on something, Ikuo had the clever, severe expression of a hawk or a falcon. He spoke in dreamy voice, his eyes glazed.
“A strange thought occurred to me that I’ve experienced this before. I can’t really remember, but something in my childhood....”
At first Kizu was startled. Around the time he determined he had had a relapse of cancer, he decided to take his sabbatical in Japan in order to search for that young man from long ago. When this desire had been at its height, he’d even drawn up a sort of wanted-poster sketch of the boy’s plastic model under the girl’s skirt. Now, without any particular idea in mind, he’d attached this sketch to the drawing he’d done of Ikuo. Kizu looked at this, then turned his gaze to the real Ikuo beside him. Memories of fifteen years before suddenly zoomed in, and in an instant he saw in Ikuo the fierce canine face and beautiful eyes of that young boy. Once he realized this, Kizu also understood how, ever since they’d first met in the drying room at the club, a voice had been nagging at him, berating him for not seeing the obvious.
In the midst of their now exultant conversation, Kizu laughed out loud a few times, while Ikuo fell into deep thought. Ikuo had arrived in the morning and didn’t leave until sunset; in the afternoon, a powerful cloud bank blew in from the southeast, forming into cirrus clouds with a reddish lower layer. Reflecting back on how full these hours had been, Kizu felt that everything that had happened to him over the past two or three weeks was a godsend.
“You’ve really captured that scene well in your sketch,” Ikuo had said repeatedly, unable to contain himself. “I don’t have any memory of how I actually appeared as a child myself, but this scene of the bulky model I busted my butt to make getting caught in that girl’s skirt, and her comically trying to keep her balance, is exactly as I remember it. And her little angry face glaring back at me—her whole pose seemed to be making fun of me.”
“I can’t forget it either, even a mediocre painter like myself, “ Kizu said, remembering how it was seeing that scene that convinced him he didn’t have any talent.
“I’ve been self-consciously drawing since I was fourteen or fifteen, and even allowing for the time when I didn’t paint, living as an artist has become—to use the expression you’ve used several times—an ingrained habit. You sketch on paper, synchronizing the speed of your hand movements, so that even if you aren’t holding a pencil you retain the scenery, objects, and people in a purely visual memory.”
Ikuo listened carefully to Kizu’s excited words, at the same time staring entranced at the drawing of the young girl balancing strangely on one leg. Kizu came back to reality.
“I know where this young girl is now,” he said. “The newspaper company told me. I even phoned once, trying to check it out on my own.”
“What did she sound like?”
“As you might expect, she’s a unique young woman. There’s a certainty in her voice, the way she talks, that you don’t find in young Japanese girls these days. And when I remember how she clutched your model, trying her hardest not to lose her balance and let it fall, she’s definitely not an average sort of girl. I don’t have many memories as clear as that one. It’s not just because of her, but she holds a treasured spot in my mind—along with the memory of the light I saw in a very special young boy who destroyed his own creation.”
“Up to that age I was just an ordinary child,” Ikuo said slowly, still lost in his own memories. “I was crazy about making all kinds of models, from preformed plastic pieces or from pieces of wood I carved with a knife; sometimes I’d go for days with hardly any sleep. Constantly making something made me feel like I was telling a story in words.
“What I remember is that the girl was a strange one. When she got caught up by the model it was like she was challenging me. I remember hating her because I lost the chance to win the top prize and get a free trip to Disneyland in California.”
“But now aren’t you a little nostalgic when it comes to her?” Kizu asked excitedly. “You want to start a new life, right? Aside from the question of being a free man, this might be a good opportunity for you. Think about it. It’s pretty extraordinary for that one day in the past to come back to life at a single stroke for three people. Why don’t we invite her for dinner? Considering the dramatic way you two first met, how could she pass up the chance for a reunion? We can use this sketch as a thank-you present.”
3: Somersault
1
The young girl, who fifteen years before had been pierced by Ikuo’s plastic model and yet managed painfully to maintain her balance, was now of course a grown woman, and when Kizu’s invitation came she readily accepted. Kizu was overjoyed to hear her say that after his first phone call to her she had remembered everything that happened on that long-ago day. She hastened to add that she was working now in the office of a religious movement and wouldn’t be able to spare much time. She asked if they could meet during her lunch break, near the Seijo Gakuenmae Station, not far from her office.
The way she responded was so typical of this new generation of Japanese, Kizu mused, for when he invited her out for a meal she immediately asked if she could go ahead and make a reservation in a French restaurant she knew. They decided on a date and time, and the next day a fax arrived for Kizu with a map indicating landmarks such as an old Catholic church and the route the buses take to Shibuya, as well as a photo of the restaurant itself, an old-style former Japanese residence with a large zelkova tree in front.
On Friday the three of them settled into their seats at the restaurant under a clear plastic roof and the lush foliage of the zelkova branches. The young woman sat by the window on one side, with Kizu seated across from her and Ikuo by his side.
“The way I remember you,” Kizu said to her, unwrapping the sketch from its cardboard cover, “is shown in this sketch, but I can still see traces of the young girl in you.”
The young woman, glistening chestnut hair cascading past her shoulders, gazed at the sketch, her mouth exactly as Ikuo remembered it, lips slightly parted. She straightened her thin cylindrical neck and looked at Ikuo.
“As soon as we met today,” she said, “I knew you were that frightening young boy. I remember you very well.”
Ikuo was overwhelmed, and Kizu interceded.
“Ikuo’s looks were definitely special from the time he was in grade school. When I met him again for the first time in fifteen years, it took me a while to recognize him, though subconsciously I think I was aware of who he was.”
Ikuo, blushing, turned his face from both of them. Kizu was reminded of the head of a young bull. The young woman, too, seemed to enjoy looking at him. The waiter came to tell them the lunch specials, and Kizu, constantly amazed at the high prices of wine in Tokyo, studied the wine list and ordered a California brand.
“I know you were a member of the ballet team that was going to perform at the awards ceremony,” Kizu said, “and I understand, from what someone at the newspaper told me, that you’re still involved in dance.”
“I study under a teacher in India, but I’m only able to go once a year for five weeks. I’ve given a few recitals in Tokyo, but mainly I’m just doing it for my own amusement.”
“Then how do you know when you’re making progress?” Ikuo asked, his large eyes fixed on her face.
Kizu was astonished at the unexpected question, but the young woman was unfazed. It had been sprinkling when they entered the restaurant, and now the rain was coming down hard on the zelkova.
The young woman looked up at the water drippi
ng off the clear roof. “It’s true my dance teacher lives far away,” she said, “but right next to me I have two teachers who instruct me in much more important things. They’re kind enough to make time each day to talk with me, though one of them is sick right now.... I’m sure you heard from the reporter about the people I work for now, Patron and Guide?”
She directed this question to Kizu. He nodded. The waiter poured him a glass of Napa Valley white wine, a type he’d often had in America, and turned a curious look at the young woman when she mentioned these unusual names. Ikuo, face red, shot him an intentionally cruel, violent look that made Kizu shudder when he imagined the potential for violence underlying his own relationship with Ikuo these past two months. However, the one who most clearly felt the danger inherent here was the waiter, Ikuo’s contemporary; after he finished pouring the wine he scurried off as if he had a sail attached to him and the wind at his back.
Only the young woman seemed unperturbed. She must have sensed the unusual roughness in Ikuo and seen the way the waiter acted, like a beaten dog with his tail between his legs, yet she didn’t flinch or even seem tense.
“The names Patron and Guide are a little unusual,” she said calmly, “and people who don’t know about the incident they were involved in tend not to want to have anything to do with them. People who actually meet them, though, find them quite extraordinary. To give you an example, my Indian dance teacher doesn’t dance himself anymore, but once he accompanied a dance troupe he used to choreograph, a troupe that’s become one of the mainstays of Indian dance, on a trip to Japan. I’d been going to his dance seminar in Madras since I was in high school, and my teacher was worried when he heard I wasn’t studying under a dance teacher here but was living with these religious leaders. When he came to see Patron, Guide, and me at our place, though, he was impressed.”