Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  As he listened to Ogi, Kizu thought of the lounge in his apartment building where he’d read the newspapers that morning. If you removed the partition between it and the dining room, it could easily seat four or five hundred people, even allowing for a small temporary stage. The dining room was closed, and the apartment bulletin had reported that very few people used the lounge. It shouldn’t be hard, should it, to rent that room?

  “The underground lounge of my apartment building is built in American style and would seat five hundred people for a meeting,” Kizu said. “Why don’t you try there. The building manager is an American, so I doubt he’d react the way Japanese do. There’s no parking lot, but it’s close enough from the Akasaka–Mitsuke subway to walk.”

  After Ikuo parked the minivan in the garage, he and Ogi spread out a map of Tokyo and began examining it. Dancer came back in. As soon as Kizu had explained his idea to her, she nearly yelled at the young men.

  “Why are you wasting time checking out the location? Every other hall has turned us down, so that’s our last hope. Have the Professor call right away and begin negotiations!”

  The apartment manager responded that as long as it wasn’t some openly anti-American political meeting he didn’t see a problem. Thus the first hurdle regarding Guide’s memorial service was overcome.

  Ikuo was put in charge of coordinating initial arrangements for the service, as well as organizing a security team. Considering how kind the manager had been, they wanted to do their utmost to see that no acts of violence took place in the confines of this American-owned property. As far as preparations for the service, everyone, from Kizu on down, pinned their hopes on Ikuo. Ikuo’s plan of attack, however, remained secret, and he said nothing about the lineup he had in mind for the security team. Kizu recalled the three young men at Patron’s press conference, and how Ikuo had, if only for a short while, dealt with them. At any rate, Ikuo was out of the office on related matters when Kizu stuck his head in and spoke with Dancer. Ogi, too, was out helping arrange the service, so Dancer and Ms. Tachibana were left to run the office.

  “Professor, you know Ikuo best, right?” Dancer said. “He’s such a male chauvinist that if you or Patron aren’t there and I ask him how arrangements are going, I barely get a response.”

  “You have to admit he’s reliable, though,” Ms. Tachibana added.

  Dancer and Ms. Tachibana were hard at work addressing individual invitations to the memorial service, using the list of names Ogi had come up with, lumping together those who had founded their own special groups after leaving the church. Patron had hoped to invite the church’s Kansai headquarters, if there was enough space in the improvised meeting room. Dancer reread the letters they’d received from individuals, as well as the replies sent in to Ogi’s inquiries, checking to see that there wasn’t some hidden leg-pulling in the letters. For her part, Ms. Tachibana addressed the envelopes in a tranquil, beautiful script.

  “Neither Patron nor Ogi can detect simple malice in others,” Dancer explained, “but I can sniff out people who aren’t up front. Due to my bad upbringing, perhaps.”

  “Patron took great care with letters from people he didn’t know,” Ms. Tachibana added, ever serious. “I was quite moved to find he’d kept the note I sent him years ago about my younger brother, folded up all nice and neat.”

  “Such a heartfelt letter must have been a great encouragement to him,” Dancer said. “There are several letters that respond to Guide and Patron’s having fallen into hell. Patron and Guide have always been kind to me, and I’ve never properly expressed my thanks. I did and said some things to Guide I wish I could take back now, but I can’t.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true,” Ms. Tachibana said, looking straight at Dancer so intently through her oval glasses that Dancer could only look down.

  “I’d like to explain to Patron about the place we’re going to use for the memorial service,” Kizu said. “Could I see him now?”

  “I’ll go see if he’s up. He hasn’t been sleeping well lately and has been taking medicine during the day.”

  Soon after Dancer left, the sound of the hand bell ringing from Patron’s room told them he was awake.

  3

  When Kizu went in, Patron was standing beside the armchair waiting for him, wearing what looked like a brand-new light-colored gown. To Kizu he seemed quite lively.

  “I understand you negotiated with the people from the American university,” Patron said.

  Kizu proceeded to tell him about the underground lounge at his apartment. The building’s main entrance was at the basement level, with the first floor facing an expansive garden in back with a pond; the gently sloping garden had a calmness about it you wouldn’t expect to find in the heart of Tokyo. The participants would walk down from the right side of the building and enjoy the vista as they headed toward the memorial service.

  Kizu finished his explanation, but still Patron stayed beside him. He didn’t seem to have anything he wanted to talk about but just cheerfully enjoyed gazing at Kizu. Kizu broached the topic of Guide’s background and what he’d heard from the newspaper reporter, and Patron filled in even more of the details. Guide’s uncle—who’d found the infant Guide beside his dead mother at a collection spot in Nagasaki for bodies of people killed in the bombing and taken him home—was a man of strong faith. As he grew up, Guide mourned his absent mother; though he knew how she had died, he had no actual memories of her. He felt his mother’s death and his father’s disappearance after the war were part of God’s plan for him and had led to his good fortune in being taken in by his kind, naively optimistic uncle, but still he struggled with a sense of guilt toward his parents whenever he went to church.

  Guide’s father was at the front in China when Nagasaki was hit by the atomic bomb. After he was repatriated, he made one visit to his brother-in-law’s family, in the Goto Islands off the coast of Nagasaki, where they’d been evacuated. He didn’t reclaim his son, and even after Guide’s uncle had rebuilt the clinic and moved back to Nagasaki City, he didn’t get in touch. The one time he was at his brother-in-law’s in Goto, this repatriated officer was obviously greatly disturbed. He drank to excess and told them how in China, he’d witnessed unspeakable atrocities committed by Japanese troops. He had planned to resist if they tried to force him to massacre peasants and rape women, but he knew it wasn’t enough just to sit by passively while others killed and looted.

  The fact that he was an officer, a doctor, also weighed heavily on him, because of what the Chinese novelist Lu Shun had written: If you’re going to war, it’s best to go as a doctor…. It’s heroic, yet safe. You can’t avoid being tested. Was this the will of God? Ever since he was a child, Guide had thought often about God’s will, no doubt because of his father’s stories, as told to him by his adopted father.

  The Nagasaki that his father saw after he was repatriated was utterly destroyed by an atomic bomb, the second to fall on Japan. Nagasaki had the highest concentration of Catholics in Japan. He’d committed no atrocities himself, yet his own wife, a woman of strong faith, was killed and her youthful body destroyed, leaving a baby behind. This had to be God’s will, God’s plan, he concluded. A sin is committed in a certain place, and just by being in that place aren’t those who didn’t participate equally guilty? Further, when God punishes us, he doesn’t distinguish between the sinful and the blameless. We’re punished for the simple fact that we’re human.

  Guide’s father understood this through his experience. He realized that to live is to suffer and through this he could find repentance. Nagasaki must be filled with people who feel the same way. Together with them, he wanted to make Nagasaki a shining example in Japan of a place filled with the repentant, and he began to work to see this happen. This was a huge undertaking, well beyond him no matter how much time he devoted to it. I won’t be able to come see my son very often, he told his brother-in-law, but I hope you’ll forgive me, as someone who shares my faith.

  His brother
-in-law, also a doctor, was much more of a realist. He was resigned to the repatriated officer’s never regaining his mental stability and leading a steady life. Ever since he’d made his way through the still radioactive rubble of Nagasaki searching for his younger sister and his nephew, he knew that even a tragedy of this magnitude would lead only a small minority of people to repent. If someone were to stand at the ruins of Urakami Cathedral, show a charred Pietà to all the survivors milling about, and shout at them to repent, he might very well be stoned to death.

  Guide’s father disappeared after that, but his brother-in-law began to hear reports about him. They weren’t detailed, but the outlines were clear enough. He didn’t hear about any repatriated officer being stoned to death after shouting to people to repent in the nuclear wasteland of Nagasaki, but he did hear news of a young leader walking a tightrope separating the legal from the illegal in regard to concessions at the occupation force’s base in nearby Sasebo. Had his young brother-in-law done a complete about-face? Was he doing his best to commit sinful acts, testing God’s will and God’s plan in an utterly un-Catholic way? After a while these rumors of a young leader in Sasebo faded away. This wasn’t a time when the Japanese yakuza gangs were able to fight the MPs and survive.

  So Guide was raised by his stepfather, who himself drank as he related these stories. Kizu wondered how, because of Guide’s past, the Somersault reverberated differently within his inner being from within Patron himself.

  “I know even less about the Somersault than I do about Guide’s background, but I guess I’m digging into what makes me most anxious,” Kizu said, summoning up his resolve. “Guide considered you his Patron, too, and the names you used were perfect for the kind of relationship you had. Didn’t you take turns being the leader?”

  “That’s right,” Patron replied. “Actually when it comes down to church doctrine and activities, I think Guide was much more the leader than I ever was.”

  “Which is exactly why I can’t fill his shoes,” Kizu insisted. “You’re a unique person, and I know Guide must have been too. But I’m not. I want to help you out, but the one great hope of my life, my one and only desire for the future, is to be with Ikuo. Ikuo is absorbed in working for you, so here I am.

  “Although I’m aware I can never measure up to Guide, I still want to do whatever I can. I was hoping you’d teach me what role you envision this new Guide playing. Otherwise I’ll be lost. At my age it’s not easy to take on new responsibilities without understanding what you’re supposed to be doing. It’s very hard for me, a lovesick old man who wants more than anything else to hang out with a certain young person, to just slouch around the office with nothing to do.”

  After he said this, Kizu felt the blood rise to his face. And he felt Patron gazing at his hot, fleshy face—at first with a flash of surprise, then with a sense of sympathy tinged with sad resignation. Kizu knew that what he blurted out was considered beyond the pale here in Japan, but it did reveal his true feelings. And when he spoke with Patron, more than anything else Kizu wanted to show how he really felt.

  After a moment of silence, Patron said, “Professor, I’d like you to undertake something that goes in a different direction from what Guide did but that’s also absolutely essential to our movement. If I say this you might get upset, thinking it’s something I just came up with on the spur of the moment, but as someone once said, a historian is a prophet who looks backward. The late Guide was a forward-looking prophet, and I’ve been thinking of having you be a backward-looking one. I’d like you to play the role of historian concerning the entire process of my constructing a new church.”

  “Historian?” Kizu echoed.

  “I haven’t hurt your feelings, I hope?” Patron asked timidly, even fearfully.

  “No. I appreciate your thought.”

  “Before I met the late Guide,” Patron went on, “whenever I had visions, I thought they were symptoms of an illness. As I began to awaken from trances I couldn’t control, I blurted out delirious things—the kind of things I never imagined would be intelligible. While I still had a family, my wife took care of me while I was in my trances; she was convinced that they were attacks of mental illness. She called it—my spouting all this nonsense after I awoke—the return of the wobbles.

  “I mentioned this before, but it was Guide who took this delirious talk and made sense of it. This enabled me to relate my experiences on the other side. The accumulation of all this became the teachings of the Savior and the Prophet. Alone, I never would have been able to do a thing.”

  “But first you had those trances and visions, right?” Kizu said. “Guide wasn’t creating anything new, he was just telling you what you yourself had said. You said the words, delirious though they might sound, and he just rearranged them into something logical. Like Guide did, I sense in you a strange and wonderful power to inspire. I’m not good with words; it’s only when I paint that the things influencing me come out smoothly. Take that watercolor of Ikuo and me walking in the sky—it’s not so much that what I painted happened to correspond to what you envisioned but rather that the silent words inside of you took hold of me, inspiring me to paint that picture. But being your historian would involve words more than painting, wouldn’t it?”

  Patron held his heavy-looking head upright, took a deep breath, and then spoke.

  “I want you to paint a picture of me too. I have a hunch that it will convey something very important.”

  Patron’s eyes—the pupils distinctly separate from both top and bottom lids—looked straight at Kizu. He nodded once and answered the question Kizu had posed earlier.

  “I want you to do the opposite of what Guide used to do. Guide fulfilled his role of Prophet by having me relate the future. But with our Somersault we denied all that. We made the doctrine of interpreting my visions one big joke, and the two of us unhesitatingly apostatized. For Guide and me, our Somersault was the truth. And the ten years of hell that followed were not meant to erase this. Quite the opposite: The truth of our Somersault was etched into us, which is the very reason that, even though he was interrogated by the former radical faction to the point where he suffered mightily, bursting a blood vessel, Guide did not denounce our Somersault. And then he died. You understand, then, another reason why I can’t do another Somersault? This is why I said Guide’s death legitimized me.

  “I’ve told you, Professor, much more about Guide than I’ve ever told anyone else. And about the Somersault and our descent into hell. I’ve done this so you can record them. The same holds true for the new movement I’m about to launch. Put in these terms, don’t you think the term historian makes sense here? My hope for you as an artist is for much more than this, actually…. Anyway, that’s what I wanted to tell you.”

  As Kizu was leaving the room, Patron’s solemn expression softened so unexpectedly it was almost comical. “I didn’t know you were so attached to Ikuo. He’s quite a special young man, and if his charm has led you to us, I’d say he’s already made a major contribution to our church!”

  Kizu felt, anew, that he was seeing Patron’s complex nature, something he had to be on guard for. Dancer, passing him as he went out of the room, had obviously heard Patron’s words, her mouth, with its pearlescent luster, open even wider than usual as she gazed steadily at Kizu. Kizu turned around once more and saw a satisfied look on Patron’s face.

  4

  The next day when Kizu broached the subject of going back to the United States, Ikuo exploded. These days Kizu had found something humorous in Ikuo’s face, with its prominent cheekbones, but his words now brought out only anger and malice in the young man.

  “How can you do that?” Ikuo barked out. “You’re going to abandon us and run away—now, when we’re on the verge of beginning something new and important? How can you just hightail it to America and put an end to us?”

  Kizu was startled, but he didn’t feel like responding emotionally. Despite how busy he’d become, he was well aware that his physical ail
ments and deep exhaustion had fenced him in, pushing him away from the young man.

  “Of course, I’d like you to come with me if you can get away from the office,” he explained. “You don’t need to get a visa these days…. But I know you’re busy arranging for the memorial service.

  “I’m planning to put all my affairs in order in the States and come back again to Japan. It’s also the time of year when they’re making the schedule for the next academic year. After that I plan to return to Tokyo and devote myself to Patron’s church. I think it’s best if I resign from the university. It could be a major problem for the university if one of their tenured professors helped lead a religious organization in Japan.

  “I’m going to settle my estate, have a lawyer divide my wife and children’s portion, take care of the taxes and everything else; the balance I’ll transfer to the church. Since I’ll be a part of Patron’s new religious movement, this strikes me as the proper way to handle my affairs. With all the things to take care of, I imagine it will take me about ten days. At my age, jet lag really hits you hard, but I feel I have to get going.”

  Ikuo was dumbfounded. He couldn’t even manage an apology. The area around his eyes reddened, and he withdrew without a word to begin preparing dinner with the ingredients Kizu had purchased. Every once in a while the kitchen was utterly silent, Ikuo undoubtedly pausing in his cooking to ponder what he’d heard, and Kizu felt sorry about the young man’s depressed and troubled feelings. Meanwhile, until Ikuo called him to the dinner table he had set in the kitchen, Kizu packed for his round trip to the United States.

  The meal Ikuo made consisted of a mound of french fries with steaks, a vegetable salad, and canned minestrone. That was all, but Kizu happily enjoyed the meal, knowing how carefully Ikuo had prepared it. Ikuo remained silent, sitting across from him as they ate, his puffy eyes turned downward. Kizu felt bad about how upset he looked. That night, still without a word, Ikuo performed his sexual services so completely that Kizu forgot all about his illness and exhaustion. In each and every thing Ikuo did, though, Kizu could catch a glimpse of someone who was voluntarily prostituting himself.