Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “Was I wrong to say that?” Ikuo turned his dark, affectionate eyes to Kizu, who felt a surge of desire race through him. “Like I said yesterday, I’m serious about the end time. But she changed the subject. I wish I could have heard more about Patron.

  “This morning when I woke up, I regretted not asking for more details about what these leaders’ ten years of suffering was all about. All I remember from watching TV was this frivolous old guy blabbing on and on.”

  “Maybe this new beginning for them is a casual somersault in the opposite direction,” Kizu remarked.

  “Gymnasts sometimes move forward by doing one somersault after another,” Ikuo said. “Unless we talk to them directly, though, we’re merely tossing metaphors around.”

  “In other words,” Kizu said, “even if they’re phonies you want to meet this self-styled savior of mankind and his prophet, right? Well, you have a standing invitation from her. And I think I’d like to go with you.”

  “Let me get in touch with her first.”

  Kizu couldn’t read anything in Ikuo’s expression, but as he looked at Ikuo’s muscular chest and neck, exposed at the loose collar of the robe he’d thrown on over his nude body, Kizu found himself less interested in pursuing the meaning behind Ikuo’s expression than simply standing in awe at this young man’s magnificent physique. What a waste, he thought, for such a fertile body to be given to someone who has so much still to attain spiritually.

  No doubt Kizu was so involved in drawing Ikuo, preparing to create his tableau, because he wanted to capture this young man—for himself alone—before he leaped to the next stage, where that wonderful body would go hand in hand with spirituality. Kizu loved to imagine that Ikuo’s body was already lending a sense of solemnity to the privileged thoughts that lay within him. And what convinced Kizu that something special lay in Ikuo’s inner being was none other than what he had witnessed fifteen years before: beautiful eyes in the wildly ferocious face of someone who looked less a child than a small man.

  After he met Ikuo again, Kizu had remembered a paper presented at a symposium his institute had sponsored that used as its text etchings based on old French prints depicting the stages through which a human face evolves out of wild animals’ muzzles. When he first heard this presentation, showing how the crudest of human faces developed from the line that began with the muzzle of a bear, Kizu had thought of the young boy carrying his plastic model. However, the bear-man’s eyes were sunken and expressionless, while the young man’s, equally sunken, had been full of suggestive feeling.

  Kizu gazed steadily at his young friend. Ikuo sensed he was being looked at, stood up, threw his robe aside on the chair he’d been sitting on, and laid his naked suntanned body on the sofa. He spread his legs wide and beckoned to Kizu with a shy look. Though he was sunk back deep on the sofa, his long bountiful penis was clearly visible, already raising its head. Kizu went off to the bathroom first. Ikuo seemed ready to thank him for his help in bringing him together with the girl and Patron. Still, though, as he stood there, touching his own penis, which was already so hard he could barely get it out of his pants, Kizu allowed himself a feeling of unalloyed pleasure.

  In the afternoon, after Ikuo had gone home, Kizu was cutting his nails in the sunny spot beside the wide glass sliding doors. As he clipped the fourth toe of his right foot, he thought unexpectedly that it was like some good little beetle larva dug up from a mound of fallen leaves, very different from the other toes. The toe of his left foot, he found, was exactly the same. He’d lived with these toes for over half a century. Why was it only now that he found them so funny?

  Thinking it over, he paused in his clipping. It wasn’t that his powers of observation were fading, but rather—as the last vestiges of youth disappeared from every corner of his body—that his toes had really begun to change. These are the toes, he thought, of someone whose cancer is back, who’s going to end up an elderly corpse. If it hadn’t been for his sexual relationship with Ikuo, though, he never would have noticed.

  4

  On Saturday, Kizu attended an international awards ceremony for a Japanese architect who had, during Kizu’s time in the United States, garnered a worldwide reputation. He thought about inviting Ikuo, the former architecture student, but the girl they’d met had asked him to take care of something for her and he wouldn’t be back until evening, so Kizu went alone. Arriving at the hotel in Shimbashi, he found that only those involved in the actual ceremony were dressed formally, and he felt out of place in his tuxedo. There were no other familiar faces at the party, either, and Kizu’s relationship with the architect himself was superficial. When he had given a public lecture at the architecture department at Kizu’s university, Kizu had served as discussant when the architect showed slides of the art museum he’d designed in Los Angeles.

  Kizu greeted the architect and his wife and made an early retreat from the reception; next to the escalator, he ran across an American newspaper reporter he knew who wrote about the arts and architecture. The man, an old acquaintance, was also decked out in a tuxedo, and Kizu called out to him, kidding him he was going to stand out dressed like that. The reporter had been invited to a small dinner after the ceremony, but decided to bow out, instead inviting Kizu, whom he hadn’t seen in a long time, out for a chat. He led Kizu to a basement-level bar, and they settled in at the counter.

  They’d just finished one glass of white wine each and were about to order another when the reporter’s long-winded commentary on architecture connected up with the religious leader the girl was working for. It all started when the reporter mentioned an extraordinary place he ran across in the forests of Shikoku.

  “The area is like a solitary island,” he said, “in the hills about a two-hour drive from the airport. Makes you feel like you’re being shown around the remnants of Japanese mythology. You arrive at this dead end with a sea of trees blocking the way. And in a village of fifteen hundred souls, can you believe it, there’s an ultramodern chapel and dormitory!

  “Makes you wonder how there could be such large new buildings in a depopulated mountain village. What happened was a new religion arose in the village, and they hired one of Japan’s leading architects to build a headquarters. But the new religion broke up and disappeared. The village didn’t know what to do. They tried to find someone to take over the chapel for them. Then they came up with a plan to convert it to a village junior high school, but that would have been too expensive, so it came to nothing. I suppose they wanted to keep the headquarters building as it was, since it was designed by such a famous architect.

  “Finally a different religious organization expressed interest in the building, a group with a really unusual background. The Tokyo correspondent for The New York Times told me that”—at this point Kizu could guess what was coming—“ten years ago the two leaders had renounced their faith. They denounced all their own teachings, which was apparently a major shock! The religious organization itself, though, kept on going, with quite a few believers still involved. Followers who left the church maintained their own divisions, ranging from a group of radical revolutionaries to a co-op of gentle Quaker-like women. Sort of an interesting case—and not very Japanese, when you think about it.

  “Right now the activities of this church center around another headquarters, in the Kansai region, where they’ve kept their name and religious foundation status. Most of the followers work in Osaka or Kobe and donate their pay, minus a small amount for living expenses, so they were able to purchase this chapel. And during the last ten years they completed the dormitory, according to the architect’s original plans. Some Japanese certainly don’t give up, do they?

  “The religious organization, though, hasn’t moved to this chapel and dorm. Small groups of them visit, staying in the monastery, which is what they call the dorm, and praying in the chapel. They also work for a week, taking care of the building and grounds, before they leave.

  “I paid a visit to the building’s caretaker, a local wo
man, and asked if these poor little lost sheep, whose leaders had renounced the faith, still believe that the beloved pair will make a comeback. Her answer took me totally by surprise. (The old lady, by the way, was born in the village but spoke better English than the interpreter I brought with me.) ‘Outsiders to the church, myself included, don’t really understand this,’ she said, ‘but when believers pray in the chapel and raise their eyes upward, they say they see the souls of the two former leaders, separated from their suffering bodies so far away, hovering up in the air.’ It’s gotta be true—’cause how else can you explain their keeping the faith for ten years after their leaders denied it?”

  Kizu didn’t let on that he’d just met a girl who worked for these two former leaders. The reporter, for his part, didn’t go into much detail about this place with the modern buildings. The caretaker, afraid that tourist buses might start showing up, was wary of outsiders coming to visit. Through an introduction from an architecture journal, the reporter was able to view the inside of the chapel, but the woman never left his side and made sure he didn’t take any photos.

  Kizu, of course, had himself originally learned of the savior and the prophet of the end time through an interesting article in The New York Times. The leaders’ renunciation, their Somersault, he imagined, must have left an indelible impression on the two thousand or more followers they left behind, but even now, after meeting the young woman who worked for them, he couldn’t shake the notion that it was all rather comical.

  After hearing this reporter’s story of how the abandoned followers had worked hard to collect enough money to buy and add on to the building, however, the story of this church took on a sharpened sense of reality. These leaders must really be something extraordinary, to motivate their followers so highly after they’d abandoned them.

  And the followers who came to the building to pray, with great awe and sadness, insisted that the two leaders, after their Somersault, suffered so much that the souls of the two men took leave of their bodies and floated beside them as they prayed.

  “Who knows?” Kizu said to the American reporter. “Maybe the souls of those two men really do fly all the way to those woods and into that modern building.” And he sighed.

  4: Reading R. S. Thomas

  1

  On the day Ikuo phoned the office in Seijo, the young woman’s reaction was different from when he met her in the restaurant. Sounding tense, she asked him to come alone.

  During the morning of the Saturday awards ceremony Kizu attended, Ikuo had moved his things into Kizu’s spare bedroom. He whiled away the rest of the morning without unpacking and then drove Kizu’s car over to the young woman’s office.

  At four in the afternoon, Ikuo had phoned Kizu and told him the girl had had a car accident the day before yesterday at the entrance to the parking area of the hospital when she went to pay Guide a visit. She wanted badly to go see Guide that evening, but the young man she worked with was busy with preparations for starting Patron’s new movement. With her car still in the repair shop she’d have to rely on Ikuo driving her in Kizu’s car. Kizu still had to get ready to go to the architect’s reception—and get the tuxedo prepared he’d convinced himself he had to wear—so he had ended up calling a cab.

  Ikuo returned home late that night and told Kizu that the young woman wanted him to work as their official driver. His first assignment would be to pick up her car when the repairs were finished the beginning of next week. He’d already quit his job at the athletic club, and the office would pay him a salary, so Ikuo was enthusiastic about the idea. The working hours were open-ended, he said—though later on they proved not to be—he’d just go over whenever they needed a driver. It shouldn’t interfere with his modeling for Kizu. One more reason Ikuo was so drawn to this job offer was that driving for Patron would give Ikuo the opportunity to talk with him—although Patron had yet to say a word to him of any spiritual matters.

  Ikuo began to go every day for a full day’s worth of training at the office. Guide had still not regained consciousness, Ikuo reported, but in other respects was recovering nicely. Patron mostly stayed in his room; Ikuo had only been able to speak directly with him a couple of times but found him fascinating. “And the girl is called Dancer at the office,” Ikuo added, “so that’s what I’m going to call her.”

  A week passed, and word came that Patron wanted to meet Kizu, so he and Ikuo left for the office together. Kizu could sense Dancer at work behind the scenes to make this invitation possible. Ikuo had not yet had a good long talk with Patron, but starting on this day Kizu was able to.

  Patron’s voice was low but resonant. “I hear you’re an artist,” he said right off, skipping the usual formalities. “Even if I hadn’t known that, I could have guessed.” Patron was sunk deep into an unusually low armchair, his chubby, round face full of childlike curiosity. “It feels like you’re tracing the outlines of my face and body with a pencil.”

  Kizu was flustered and didn’t know how to respond. He and Ikuo had first been escorted to Patron’s combination study and bedroom by Dancer. Patron was still in bed. Dancer helped him over to the armchair and brought over a chair to face Patron for Kizu to use; Ikuo glided smoothly out of the room as if by previous arrangement. Kizu was introduced by Dancer to Ogi, “whom Patron calls our Innocent Youth,” she said, who was working in the office at the front of the house.

  “While you’re observing me using your professional skills,” Patron went on, “I’ve been doing the same. I sense you’re undergoing a major change in your life right now, on a scale you’ve seldom experienced before.”

  Kizu found it comical that Patron would adopt the strategies of a fortuneteller on a crowded street, yet confronted with this man’s dark eyes—steady, surprised-looking beady eyes, the whites showing above and below almond-shaped lids—the thought occurred to him that he might very well end up kneeling before him to confess his innermost thoughts. Considering his cancer relapse and his emotional and physical relationship with Ikuo, Patron’s fortune-telling was right on target.

  At any rate, to distance himself and give a neutral reply, Kizu relied on the skills he’d acquired teaching in an American university and brought up a poet he was familiar with.

  “When you reach my age,” he said, “the sort of change you’ve mentioned is inevitably linked with death, though I try not to think about it. In this regard I’ve grown fond of a certain Welsh poet. I hope I can face death with the attitude found in his poetry.”

  Kizu went on spontaneously to translate a verse he’d memorized in the original:

  “‘As virtuous men pass mildly away/ and whisper to their souls to go,’ the poet writes, showing dying humans calling out to their souls as they are left with just the physical body. I think this fits me to a T.”

  “Usually it’s the opposite, isn’t it?” Patron said. “If one could make such a clean break with the soul, imagine how soundly the body would sleep. I’ve read John Donne myself. One of his other poems goes like this, doesn’t it? ‘But name not Winter-faces, whose skin’s slack; / Lank, as an unthrift’s purse; but a soul’s sack.’ If an elderly person’s body is like a withered sack, it should be easy for the soul to make its exit, I imagine.”

  Kizu was embarrassed at having his superficial knowledge exposed. Instead of reproving him, though, Patron seemed to want only to show Kizu that he too was enamored of poetry.

  “I haven’t read any poetry for years, Japanese or foreign,” Patron said. “You’ve recently run across a new poet who has impressed you, have you?”

  “It seems like everything about me is coming to light, bit by bit. But you’re right,” Kizu answered honestly. “Last summer I attended a symposium on art education in a town called Swansea in Wales. The organizer of the seminar presented me with a volume of poetry by a local poet. That evening, as I leafed through it in our cliffside hotel it encouraged me so much—physically and mentally—that I couldn’t stay lying down.” (As he said this, Kizu realized that he�
�d always associated this restlessness with the relapse of his cancer; now he was pleased to interpret it as presaging his relationship with Ikuo.)

  “Despite my age, my face grew red and I paced back and forth in the small hotel room. Even if I were to meet this poet, I almost moaned, I don’t have the energy or time left to respond to him, do I? You might suppose this marked some major change in my life, but I’m afraid I’m too wishy-washy a person for that.”

  “You said it was Wales, but the poet wasn’t Dylan Thomas, I assume? Since you said you’ve just recently discovered him.” Patron asked this quickly, like some teasing child.

  “The poet’s name is R. S. Thomas.”

  “What kind of poems were they? Can you remember a verse, any at all?” Patron asked, even more impatiently.

  “I’m afraid I can’t memorize verses like I used to.… About his themes, though, maybe because his name is Thomas, he wrote several poems about Doubting Thomas. He wrote from Thomas’s viewpoint, discussing the reasons why he had to touch Jesus’ bloody wounds before he believed in the resurrection.”

  Patron’s almond-shaped eyes were unusually intense as he listened.

  “I wonder if you would read to me from his poetry collection?” he asked, making it clear this was not a passing wish. “Even if just once a week. Ikuo will be working in our office, and he’s told me you have an interest in our activities too. For the past ten years I’ve needed to do this kind of study but haven’t been able to.”

  Thus Kizu’s meeting with Patron was so successful they decided that once a week Kizu would come and give Patron lectures on R. S. Thomas—something that, considering his art background, was way outside his field of expertise. As they drove home, Kizu found it strange that things had turned out the way they did, but Ikuo seemed to have expected it all along.

  Kizu already had a paperback edition of Thomas’s poems, the one he received in Wales, but he bought a volume of his collected works at the university co-op, along with a reference work on his poetry, and had them delivered to his apartment. His own copy was filled with notes, and he wanted to present Patron with a clean and complete edition.