Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  Kizu had been raised in the country and was used to the customs of farmers, but when he first saw farm women in the Tokyo area working in the fields with cloth head coverings, he found it a bit suspect. The women here, too, worked with their heads covered, in this case with simple knitted hats. The women were of all ages, yet they all shared the same pale faces, the same quiet look.

  More noticeable than anything else, though, was the overpowering, animal-like odor of the lilies. Kizu noticed how Ikuo’s sturdy face recoiled from the smell. The women worked so silently that Kizu and Ikuo found themselves tiptoeing, and this heavy scent wafting over from the silent women made for a grotesque sense of incongruity.

  Kizu and Ikuo had come close to the women, but they kept on working without showing the slightest bit of interest. With relaxed yet swift motions, they packed away the lilies, while Kizu and Ikuo stood there, overwhelmed. The woman who accompanied them had already gone behind the circle of working women, stuck her head in between the boxes of packed lilies and the mound of unpacked flowers, and begun speaking to the women.

  Before long a man’s head popped up above the piled boxes of lilies—a close-cropped white head with white whiskers—and stared at Kizu and Ikuo. Approaching from the side, before the woman who’d accompanied them returned, this man, the farm’s owner, dressed in a white collared shirt and wine-colored vest, walked in front of the working women, their bare arms full of lilies, distributing empty boxes. Then he lifted a box that was larger than the others and lowered it to the ground; he was making a place on the platform for Kizu and Ikuo to sit. The woman led them up onto the mats, while the man went back to his original position; whether through innate shyness or because he was the type who kept people at arm’s length, he merely nodded slightly to greet them. The women went on working, oblivious to the two men, who’d now become part of their group.

  Not that the women were rejecting these unexpected visitors. The farm woman who’d led them in, after glancing at the farm owner, sitting off to one side, began addressing the other women, who cheerfully stopped and paid attention.

  “I’ll pass around the business card I received from this gentleman, who tells me he’s working for the former leader of the church you all used to belong to. I know we’ve talked recently about the man who was with this leader at the time of the Somersault, the one we read about in the paper who was tortured to death.

  “It seems the former leader is concerned about what sort of life all of you have been living. This gentleman wasn’t really planning to meet you and talk with you today, he said, and maybe I’m butting in where I don’t belong, but I thought it would be nice for you to meet him, seeing as how he’s also a professor at an American university. I’m sure you heard my husband scold me for my rash assumptions.”

  The woman stopped speaking and bowed her head, and the company fell silent. Kizu wondered if they were waiting for him to introduce himself but realized that the woman had essentially covered what needed to be said. While Kizu was hesitating, the farm woman whispered to an old woman sitting opposite her.

  For an old lady, this second woman was unusually erect, though something was wrong with her legs, and she sat differently from the rest of the women, her feet splayed out to one side. For a woman of her generation she was quite large, with fine features, putting Kizu in mind of someone from a good family who happened to live near the sea.

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll speak first,” the old woman said. “Do you think the children watching us are all right? The snow looks like it’s letting up, so maybe there’s no need to tell them to go inside.”

  There was no response from those around her, and the old woman shook her head magnanimously at the children outside the window. She turned to glance at the buds on the oak tree growing toward the high windows and then, taking her own sweet time, went on.

  “We heard rumors that the Savior and the Prophet had emerged from their shut-in life and were beginning a new movement. We read later in the newspaper about the Prophet’s awful death, which grieves us terribly. We also talked about what this new movement will be about, didn’t we? However, he’s the one who cut his ties with the church, and we’re just a little group here, suffering in our own way. Still, knowing he’s concerned about us might possibly move our own group in a different direction.”

  The woman stopped speaking and looked up at the branches of the dark oak through the melting snow on the top of the window, and all the women in the circle turned their eyes in that direction. Kizu sensed that the other women were quite used to her style of speaking.

  “Actually I’ve been thinking for a while about the scope of our group—I should add that not everyone’s here today—and I thought it might be compared to that clump of leaves out there. Today we have this unseasonable snow, but the buds have already started to come out, haven’t they, on the oaks and zelkovas? Not long ago they were just dark trunks—even the tips of the thinnest branches looked old and withered—and it made me feel sorry, thinking that when trees get big every part of them ages.

  “Once a tree starts budding, though, it takes off with such energy that the whole tree is revitalized, not just the branches but even down to the trunk. It makes me think about whether our little group has the vigor of those buds sprouting out on the oak tree. Just to make sure, I counted them, and discovered there are about forty buds on every three feet of branch, which really brings home to me how small our group is. Even when the Savior’s church was at its peak, if you compare it to the buds, it was made up of fewer members than the number of buds on that single oak tree. And our group is just one very small branch.

  “I’m afraid I’ve strayed off the topic, as I often do, but as we’ve talked in our small group, this is how we think about what happened after the Somersault: Though the Savior and Prophet survived, they descended into hell. The Prophet either stayed in hell or was killed just as he was crawling out—either way, it’s a great tragedy. My husband was a classmate in medical school of the man who adopted him as an infant, so I’ve heard things about him from that source too. What a cruel, painful thing to have happened.…

  “The Savior and the Prophet fell into hell, and that was where they atoned. I can only imagine how incredibly painful it was for both of them to suffer such disgrace for ten years. When you look back on something once it’s over, one’s life seems to have passed by in an instant, though of course it all depends on the quality of that particular time. Having spent the last ten years living together with all of you, I feel that quite strongly.

  “What do you say? How about talking to these gentlemen about our past ten years? The weekly magazines have treated us like eccentrics abandoned by Savior and Prophet. But we have our own thoughts about life here. Why don’t we share something of them. Anybody? Ms. Takada, how about you?”

  Kizu glanced around at the women listening to the old lady and came across one whose unusual features riveted his attention. Her face had a terrible scar, as if maybe when she was a baby she’d been slashed with a hatchet from one ear down to her cheek. More than the scar, though, one of her eyes was completely covered over by a smooth layer of skin. She looked around thirty, and as she’d been listening to the old lady speak she didn’t make any attempt to hide the side of her face with the skin-covered eye. This was the Ms. Takada the old lady had named. The woman responded right away, turning unflinchingly to face Kizu and the others.

  “It’s only natural that I felt a pain in my heart when the Savior and the Prophet did their Somersault, but in my case physically I couldn’t deal with the pain; I vomited every day. Some people were concerned I was having morning sickness, though that was impossible.

  “Over and over I’d go to sleep and dream that the Somersault never took place and feel relieved, only to awaken to the awful truth. This happened day after day. At first I felt as if the Savior had betrayed me. It was like being covered with ants that were biting me, but I’d been anesthetized and couldn’t feel anything. But I could sense tha
t the anesthesia would wear off and suddenly I’d be hit by this enormous pain, which led to my vomiting all the time.

  “Never once, in all my life, have I run across a person as kind as Savior was, and that’s why I felt betrayed. After I joined the church, many people were kind to me, but Patron’s kindness—I’m sure all of you would agree—was on a whole other level.

  “This happened after my unhappy marriage broke up, soon after I renounced the world. The church had a house in Yokohama in a brand-new subdivision—remember?—on a high piece of land, from which you could see the ocean. A lot of times I’d gaze out absently at the ocean from the big window on the second floor where we had a meeting room. There was a large horse chestnut tree outside, too. One day Savior, who happened to be staying there, was sitting beside that big window when he called me over and told me to come closer and look deep into his eyes. He was sitting in his usual armchair where he liked to read, beside the window. So I knelt down in front of him and gazed into his eyes. It was the time of year when the horse chestnut’s leaves were still soft, a fine clear morning when I was left in charge of cleaning and answering the phones while everyone else was out working.

  “I was afraid he was going to make a pass at me. But he said it so casually I couldn’t resist, and though I was wary, I went ahead and knelt in front of him. He told me to look once inside his eyes, and what I saw was this: my own face, beautiful, completely unscarred. The face of a young woman, her eyes wide open in surprise.

  “Next he told me to smile, since then I’d see my own face smiling. I tried to smile, but I was so happy I burst into tears. My eyes were so full of tears I couldn’t see a thing, and the thought occurred to me that since my face was reflected in his eyes like that, unscarred, that was exactly how he saw me.

  “He’d encouraged me so much that when he did his Somersault and said everything he’d done and said was a joke, I couldn’t accept it. He looked totally insincere when he was talking in front of the TV cameras, which may have been the way the camera caught him, but the words were definitely his.

  “The way he acted ridiculed us, trampled down our desire for salvation and all the efforts we’d made to reach it. We were suffering and unhappy and needed salvation more than anything, yet he was laughing in our faces. On top of that, the whole world was laughing at this silly Savior and Prophet who were ridiculing their followers, which made me feel as if we were being doubly mocked. I think we all felt that way, angry at what had happened. We kept the faith, though, and felt we had to settle the score with those apostates. Some people even gave sermons advocating revenge.”

  3

  “I was probably angrier than anyone else, but I still couldn’t forget how the Savior had used his own eyes as a mirror to show me my real face. Every time I remembered that, new rage would well up within me. Was what he’d said just a bad joke?

  “As time passed, though, I calmed down, and began to think that the Somersault might have been a childish prank, without any malice behind it. I realized how I’d been moved by him and how happy that made me. And I became convinced that the beautiful face I saw reflected in the Savior’s eyes was my real face, the one my soul possessed before I was born, so I was able to forgive him and think of him with fondness. That’s how I was able to keep my faith during these ten years of living together with all of you.”

  When Ms. Takada finished speaking, her companions surrounded her with an empathetic silence. The wife of the owner of the greenhouses, her upper body stiff, pushed up her glasses with a small calloused palm to wipe away the tears. Her husband shot her a look of rebuke and turned away. After her tears were over, the woman—as if it was her wont to speak up despite the patriarchal authority over her—cleared her throat with a little cough and broke the circle of silence.

  “He wasn’t hypnotizing you when you saw your beautiful face with two eyes. You were seeing your real face!”

  The farm owner inclined his head, which reminded Kizu of the profile of General Nogi on playing cards he used as a child, and poked his wife’s shoulder. She twisted away to avoid his hand and continued unhesitatingly.

  “I don’t really know what kind of person the Savior was, but if as you say he’s come back from hell, you should have him show you your real face once more. This time try to keep from crying and give him a big smile!”

  “If he has returned, that’s enough for me,” the one-eyed woman said, calmly yet passionately. “But more than my own healing, everything will be healed, since he’s atoned for all our sins in hell. Actually, in the past ten years, I don’t hate this face so much anymore.”

  “That’s the way to think about it!” the farm owner shouted, his voice filled with both indignation and self-reproach. “My unthinking better half said some stupid things, but you have your real face now! Why do you have to hate it?”

  “I think that’s quite enough of your little marital spats and solutions to the problem, Mr. Sasaki. These two men have come all this way to see us. Shouldn’t we let them speak?” The speaker here was a woman around forty or so who looked like she’d been an athlete in her younger days.

  Saying this, the woman turned a somewhat sullen smile toward Kizu and Ikuo. With her lightly tanned face and strong look, she stood out among all the pale faces. The woman seemed frankly surprised that the doctor’s widow, the woman with the congenital defect in her face, and all the other women who had listened so intently to their stories had opened up so much to these two strangers who had suddenly appeared in their midst. Only this woman who had just spoken seemed to have some complicated psychological barrier.

  “The Savior—Patron, as the newspapers now call him—well, if he truly is to return to us, I expect he’ll make a direct appeal. Since the two of you just planned to take a look at how we’re living, I don’t expect you have any sort of message for us from him, do you?”

  “No, we don’t,” Kizu said, feeling a bit wretched as he said it. “We didn’t even tell Patron we were coming.”

  “You haven’t been believers very long, have you?” the woman asked. “Apart from these young people here, I know the faces of most of the believers above a certain age. My job in the church kept me in contact with them.”

  As he turned a searching look at Kizu, the farm owner had now calmed down from his earlier pronouncement, his skin color fading back to match his white hair and whiskers.

  “The Professor and I are much newer believers than all of you,” Ikuo answered in Kizu’s stead. “I know this might sound a little vague to you. Even though I say we’re followers, we haven’t done much yet to help Patron with his religious activities. We got to know Patron and Guide just before they restarted their religious activities—years after the Somersault, of course. It’s clear, though, that Patron will be relying a lot on the Professor in the days to come. I only knew the late Guide for a short time, but he was someone I respected very much. And Patron—well, I’ve never met a person like him before, a leader like that.”

  “What are your feelings about the Somersault?” the woman asked. “I ask because all of us are somewhat fixated on it.… We gathered a small group together, after we were abandoned by our leaders, and lived as if in the wilderness for ten years. And we suffered—which made Guide’s death all the more painful. They didn’t take us with them when they descended into hell, but now that they came back after atoning, and are starting this new movement, I think we’ll be waiting for a call.”

  Kizu was apprehensive about how Ikuo would reply, but he answered quite seriously. “I’m sure you’ve read this in the newspaper, and I don’t know much more than what Patron said at the press conference for Guide’s memorial service. I read about the Somersault in the papers and saw it on TV, though I was still a child at the time.

  “As I’ve been working alongside Patron, though, I’ve learned this: Since the police had figured out what the radical faction was up to, if Patron and Guide hadn’t abandoned the church the authorities would have come down hard on the entire movement.
The whole thing would have exploded—maybe to the point where politicians would be up in arms trying to enforce every word of the Anti-Subversive Activities Law.

  “But as long as the leaders discarded their church, the whole thing could be dismissed as some petty scandal. And that’s exactly what happened. It was the Somersault that the TV news shows had such great fun with. There was a pitfall in this, though, because the authorities and the police were under the impression that they’d uncovered all the activities the radical faction was involved in. But the investigation didn’t go as smoothly as they hoped. The church avoided self-destructing, and a core remained active.

  “In a sense what was emphasized was what I saw as a child and what the Professor saw reported abroad—namely, Patron’s Somersault pronouncements on TV. But after I had a chance to talk with Patron and Guide, and meet all of you here, I understand a lot more about how much you all have suffered, and especially Guide, before he was murdered.”

  “What’s the motivation behind Patron’s deciding to start a new movement?” the woman asked. “I understand he was thinking of doing this even before Guide was killed.”

  “I’m not in a position to say, really,” Ikuo replied, “but my opinion is that if this crisis hadn’t ended with a small bang as it did, Patron and Guide—and the whole church—would have taken things as far as they possibly could. The Somersault prevented this, but somewhere along the line the idea of repentance as the end of the world approaches disappeared. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but hasn’t the true mission of the church remained alive only among those people Patron abandoned? And now isn’t Patron—as someone who’s experienced hell—trying once more to take on this mission? Well, those are my thoughts. Please understand that my generation is pretty ignorant of what went on in the past. After the collapse of Aum, young people who were searching for salvation lost a forum to carry out this search. What are they supposed to do? Patron and Guide felt a sense of responsibility toward this situation, and that’s what motivated them. And, as if waiting for this chance, some people killed Guide.”