Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  No piracy, but there is a plank

  to walk over seventy thousand fathoms,

  as Kierkegaard would say, and far out

  from the land. I have abandoned

  my theories, the easier certainties

  of belief. There are no handrails to

  grasp. I stand and on either side

  there is the haggard gallery

  of the dead, those who in their day

  walked here and fell. Above and

  beyond there is the galaxies’

  violence, the meaningless wastage

  of force, the chaos the blond

  hero’s leap over my head

  brings him nearer to.

  Is there a place

  here for the spirit? Is there time

  on this brief platform for anything

  other than the mind’s failure to explain itself?

  “After this poem of Thomas’s, the author quotes at length from Kierkegaard’s writings. Shall I translate it for you?”

  Without risk there is no faith. Faith is precisely the contradiction between the infinite passion of the individual’s inwardness and the objective uncertainty. If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. If I wish to preserve myself in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objective uncertainty, so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water, still preserving my faith.

  “So that’s what it means. Patron was quoting Kierkegaard,” Dancer said, sounding for all the world like the intelligent heroine in some drama. “Patron jokes around at the most unexpected times, so often I don’t know what he’s really getting at. But even when he’s joking, I think he’s suffering over questions of faith. I get the same feeling from those words of Kierkegaard. Thank you for helping me understand. I’m so happy I had a chance to talk with you.”

  Despite his years, Kizu felt buoyant—the same sort of happiness he felt when students had come to his office back at the university to ask pointed questions and then listen in rapt awe as he gave a detailed response.

  Kizu had Dancer stay a little longer and showed her Thomas’s collection of poems to accompany a series of paintings, from Impressionist paintings to the work of the Surrealists. This book, a birthday present sent by the head assistant back at his home office, differed from both the paperback and collected works edition, for it contained vivid full-color plates of the paintings. Kizu found it odd as he watched her, the contrast between the way she gazed, open-mouthed, at the plates, and the nimbleness and efficiency with which she had earlier bustled about wiping away Patron’s saliva. She still had a touch of the child about her, he realized.

  In the evening, uncertain about when Ikuo was to return, Kizu went ahead and began preparing a stew. As he’d learned to do in America, he’d bought various cuts of beef and frozen the unused portions. Now, to use these leftovers, he cut them up and put them in a pot with water, celery, carrots, and onions—leftover vegetables from the bottom shelf of his refrigerator. The stew was just beginning to bubble when Kizu tasted it and decided that, all things considered, it could do with a pinch more salt. His chipper feelings from talking with Dancer were still with him as he tapped the plastic salt shaker smartly against the cutting board to loosen the lumps of salt inside. The salt shaker, it turned out, wasn’t plastic but glass, and it shattered, a shard of glass cutting deeply into his right wrist.

  The only doctor Kizu could think of was the well-known cancer specialist his institute had introduced him to so, at his wits’ end, he called the apartment superintendent, who advised him to go to a hospital in Roppongi where Kizu’s university had a special arrangement. Kizu rushed off to the hospital in a taxi and, for the first time since his operation for intestinal cancer, had stitches taken in his skin. If this were your left wrist, the blunt physician remarked, hoping to be funny, you’d have some explaining to do.

  Ikuo was still out when Kizu returned to his apartment. The pain in his wrist bothered him—making him consider the deeper pain that was sure to come from his cancer—so he went about cleaning up the kitchen to take his mind off it. Inside the brass sink there was one large pinkish drop of his blood.

  Kizu couldn’t shake off thoughts of his cancer, his mind drifting to how fragile his body was. When you consider the eternal soul, though, he thought, which links humanity’s past, present, and future, the fragility of the body is of little consequence. Instead, it should be a sign pointing the way for people to overcome the individual ego. The eternal soul, connecting the far-off Stone Age with some perhaps purgatory like future Electronic Age. But did he have faith in the soul? The closest thing to faith he had, he decided, with a sinking feeling, were the thoughts that arise from these very emotions.

  In the end he gave up on the stew, making do with a can of Campbell’s tomato soup and some large crackers that he ate in the living room. The illustrated poetry collection and the research books he’d shown Dancer were still on top of the small table. He picked up the book with the essay comparing Thomas and Kierkegaard, and flipped through an essay by a woman scholar on the poetry collection.

  In a pedantic tone the woman noted that the word ingrowing was a key term for Thomas, that he was well aware that if one thought too long about something, there was the danger of one’s thoughts becoming too narrow and closed in. As Yeats puts it, she wrote, “Things thought too long can be no longer thought, for beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth.”

  Thomas, then, wrote the poems that accompany the paintings in order to rescue himself from his own narrow way of thinking as a poet. At this point the author embarked on her main theme, an analysis of Thomas’s poem on the famous René Magritte painting showing a boot changing, at the tip, into a human foot.

  Kizu returned to his own closed-in, ingrown nail-parings. In the kitchen, too, this thought had arisen in his mind—a mental image of Tokyo hit by some catastrophe, too many dead bodies for anyone to do anything about, a favor only for the crows (this area didn’t have any stray dogs)—the leftover bodies rotting, shriveling up, and himself among the dead. In the face of thoughts like these, how can one believe in the eternal soul?

  “Well, maybe that’s a kind of sign?” Kizu said aloud, as if to make certain that these thoughts were ingrowing within him.

  Starting with Dancer’s visit, the day had been a busy one for him. And it turned out to be an important day for Patron’s new movement. Dancer had dropped by Kizu’s apartment on the way back from visiting Guide in the hospital, and when she was still on the way back to the office the news came in that Guide had regained consciousness. Ogi drove Patron over to the hospital right away, with Ikuo driving the minivan, Dancer aboard, close on their heels. This time they were all able to see Guide. In the evening, Patron wanted to discuss something with Kizu, so Ikuo called the apartment several times, but there was no reply. Kizu was out getting his injured wrist treated. When Ikuo returned to the apartment late that night, Kizu was still up, so they headed off to the office once again.

  Kizu and Ikuo both knew very little about Guide’s condition, so there wasn’t much to talk about as they drove. When they arrived at Seijo, they learned that Ogi had stayed behind in the hospital waiting room on Guide’s floor in case there were any changes. Dancer led Kizu inside. Patron was crouched down, head hanging on his chest, in the low armchair beside his bed. But as soon as Kizu sat down across from him, he looked up and a torrent of words gushed forth.

  “Professor, Guide has regained consciousness! I don’t know how his rehabilitation will go, but I know he’ll be all right. He was asleep when I went into his room, but he opened his eyes right away and looked at me. He didn’t say anything, which is understandable, seeing as how he’d only been conscious for two hours. But I saw in his eyes exactly what you talked about. I saw him quietly emerge.

  “Guide closed his eyes after this, but I could tell he wasn’t asleep since he blinked over and over. I stood bes
ide his bed and couldn’t contain my excitement. And I remembered some lines of poetry you had talked with me about, not Thomas’s poetry but a Greek poem translated by E. M. Forster that Thomas apparently loved. You’ll have to remind me of the exact wording.”

  “That was Pindar’s ode:

  Man is the dream of a shadow, But when the

  god-given brightness comes

  A bright light is among men, and an age that is

  gentle comes to birth.”

  “Thank you, that’s it exactly,” Patron said, his eyelids swelling reddish, his eyes turning tearful. “In our last lecture I think I spoke a bit too openly and hurt your feelings, and I apologize. The reason I’ve asked you over tonight is for you to lecture one more time on Thomas. With Guide recovering now, our movement will regain momentum. This is all well and good, but I might get too caught up in things to have time for any more poetry lectures. So tonight I was hoping you could read one of his more deeply contemplative poems.”

  Kizu complied right away. He picked from his notes one that he had already translated.

  Grey waters, vast

  as an area of prayer

  that one enters. Daily

  over a period of years

  I have let the eye rest on them.

  Was I waiting for something?

  Nothing

  but that continuous waving

  that is without meaning

  occurred.

  Ah, but a rare bird is

  rare. It is when one is not looking,

  at times one is not there

  that it comes.

  You must wear your eyes out,

  as others their knees.

  I became the hermit

  of the rocks, habited with the wind

  and the mist. There were days,

  so beautiful the emptiness

  it might have filled,

  its absence

  was as its presence; not to be told

  any more, so single my mind

  after its long fast,

  my watching from praying.

  Kizu first read the original poem and then his translation, and afterward Patron turned his eyes—no longer the tearful eyes of a child, but soft, the edges of the eyelids red—toward Kizu and spoke in a calm voice.

  “How wonderful it would be if Guide continues to recover, his rehabilitation goes well, and we could be like the hermit of the rocks. But now that he’s awakened, I don’t imagine he’ll want to live that way. Our tranquil days are over.”

  5: The Moosbrugger Committee

  1

  Ogi began organizing the name list from Patron the day after he got it. He input all the information into the computer and then started writing each person individually, asking whether he or she would like to receive a letter of greetings from Patron now that he was on the verge of starting a new movement. (One of the reasons that Ikuo was asked to work at the office, not incidentally, was that Ogi was now spending all his time in this outreach task.) Ogi informed the recipients that their names and addresses were in Patron’s notebook and asked them to respond on an enclosed postcard. Nearly 30 percent wrote back to say they were looking forward to Patron’s message.

  Ogi crossed off the names of those who either didn’t respond or said they weren’t interested; when the names were those of celebrities he wondered whether the name list might be Patron’s own concoction. Still, those who responded were all ordinary people, people who, after the Somersault, had written to express sympathy and encouragement. Patron seemed to have cherished these expressions of goodwill in response to all his critics in the media.

  Individual names on the list were no problem, but in cases involving the name of an organization, if the person who was listed as the head of the group didn’t respond to the initial letter, Ogi, a perfectionist in such matters, called on the phone. In some cases, quite frankly, it was more curiosity that drove him than anything else.

  In a new university town constructed in the outskirts of Tokyo, at the farthest end of a private railway line, there was one such organization in a multipurpose building rising among all the new housing subdivisions, a building set aside, among other things, for various cultural and sporting activities. The name of the organization was the Moosbrugger Committee. Ogi wondered who in the world Moosbrugger might be. He’d sent the initial query to a man listed as the organization’s contact person, but when he phoned the group it was a woman who answered. The woman sounded older than himself, and her cheery, cartoony voice made Ogi suspect that this was merely a group of people who’d sent Patron a fan letter for fun. However, she turned out to be the officer in charge of overseeing the study groups who used the cultural center’s facilities.

  “I’d like to ask you about the Moosbrugger Committee,” Ogi began, unsure of how to pronounce this Germanic-sounding name.

  “Moosbrugger Committee? Aha! Yes, there was a group that went by that name here, but they’re inactive now. Are you selling something?”

  “No, I’m not a salesman, I’m working for a person we call Patron, and he received a letter from this committee.”

  “Patron? I see! They were a rather eccentric group, so I wouldn’t put it beyond them. But that must have been several years ago. Why in the world would you be calling now?”

  “I’m working for Patron, helping with his new movement. I apologize, but I don’t know anything about the committee. Patron is now formulating new plans, and after a ten-year period of inactivity he’s sending out greetings to individuals and groups who supported him ten years ago.”

  “You sound young, but you do seem to be on the ball,” the woman said, in a voice quite different now from her earlier outrageously cheery laughter. “Looking at our list of organizations, I see that the Moosbrugger Committee hasn’t been active much, but since most of the members also belong to other study groups I imagine some of them are still coming to our center. I’ll look into it, and if I run across some of them I’ll give you a call. Would you tell me your telephone number please? My name is Nobuko Tsugane, and I work here at the center. The center itself receives funding from the Tokyo metropolitan government.”

  Ogi felt sure that after this phone call he could cross one more name off his list, but the next day the woman called him back and told him two members of the Moosbrugger Committee wanted to hear more about Patron’s new plans. As they talked, Ogi decided to go visit them to discuss it, something he hadn’t done before. So on the weekend, he took the Chuo Line train from Shinjuku and, after a couple of transfers, arrived at this university town an hour away from the city.

  Ogi was born and raised in Tokyo during the Japanese economic boom and had graduated from college at the height of the Bubble Economy, but he still had no idea what scale this Culture and Sports Center—built jointly by Japanese Railway and a private railroad line—would be. As he climbed the stairs running between the two railroad stations, he was taken aback at the mammoth building rising in front of him. According to a pamphlet he picked up, the center contained a large concert hall boasting a pipe organ brought over from Germany, a medium-size theater and some smaller ones, and, in a separate building, a hotel with an international conference center with facilities for simultaneous interpreting. The two identical postmodern buildings were linked, and the connecting office, outfitted with a kitchen, was where he found the woman he’d talked with, Mrs. Tsugane.

  Ogi proffered one of his old business cards, explaining that though he was working now for Patron, he had ties to the foundation on the card. Mrs. Tsugane stared fixedly at him, a searching look on her face. Ogi felt a wave of nostalgia looking at this woman’s narrow face, which despite its finely chiseled features had a soft profile. Even more so, her dark, damp hair, falling in a gentle wave, sent a clear memory of something, he wasn’t sure what, running through him.

  Mrs. Tsugane, noticing him looking at her hair, casually explained that she’d been for a swim during her lunch hour. She seemed a bit embarrassed at her own vitality, t
he lithe way she moved her body, clearly trained in high school or college sports—all of which fit perfectly her open laughter on the phone. Overall she seemed a well-brought-up intelligent woman.

  Mrs. Tsugane said that the two women Ogi wanted to meet would be a little late, so she’d go ahead and tell him what she knew about the Moosbrugger Committee. “The committee began as a reading circle set up to discuss Musil’s A Man Without Qualities,” she began, “and took its name from the name of a character in the novel, a strange person involved in sex crimes. The members included people with backgrounds in sociology and psychology as well as housewives who loved literature.

  “When the committee was formed, they planned mainly to have talks with a retired member of the police force who had been involved in a major sex crime investigation. Soon they were able to directly hear from the criminal himself, which made the name of the committee all the more fitting.

  “However, relations with rather peculiar individuals brought about some difficult problems. At one point it became necessary to give an honorarium to one of the guests they’d invited. Because the committee itself didn’t have the funds, they made do with a contribution by one individual, but this gave rise to all sorts of complications. As these mounted, the Moosbrugger Committee found itself at a standstill. The two members who are on their way to see you now—one of whom was the woman who made that contribution—were the members who, after Patron and Guide incurred the censure of society with the Somersault, began to be interested in them and planned to invite them as guests. As I said earlier, the two women are members of other cultural groups besides the Moosbrugger Committee, so don’t worry if you don’t arrive at any definite conclusion talking with them today—it’s not like they’re going out of their way to come here.”

  Just as Mrs. Tsugane concluded her neat summary, the two women entered the office, one of them a modest yet obviously strong-willed woman in her thirties, the other, younger, a large, ashen-faced woman who, perhaps because of her makeup, Ogi found hard to characterize. Mrs. Tsugane introduced them, the first woman as Ms. Tachibana, the second as Ms. Asuka. Mrs. Tsugane drew out the older of the two women to talk about what led her to send a letter to Patron. Mrs. Tsugane handled this in a considerate yet efficient manner that increased Ogi’s admiration for this experienced career woman.