Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “So I kept going over for my lessons, though I didn’t spend the night, and two years later Mr. Schmidt was going on a business trip to Vienna and Salzburg in the musical off-season—his job then involving reissuing a series of old LPs—and asked me to go with him to push his wheelchair. I think Mr. Schmidt sort of put the screws to my father to get his consent. I could tell because when we were leaving my father looked kind of depressed. Anyway, after a busy week in Vienna, on the day after we went to Salzburg, I clubbed Mr. Schmidt to death.

  “I wasn’t taken into custody by the police but taken to a hospital in Vienna, where one of the counselors was a Japanese specialist who was a professor appointed to the staff there and the other counselor was a professor who’d taken his degree at Stanford. I spoke a lot, both in English and Japanese. I tried my hardest to give them the impression that I’d been forced into killing Mr. Schmidt because I’d been victimized. They believed me. Later on I heard that one of the counselors had been quoted in the newspapers to the effect that the real criminal in this case was the murdered man himself!

  “Police investigators dispatched to Japan unearthed another young man who’d been sexually molested by Schmidt, which was a plus for me. Naturally they asked me why I hadn’t told anyone, but one commentator also noted how Japan isn’t the kind of country where sexual victimization is part of ordinary discourse.

  “At least I was able to lead the hospital and the police investigation in a direction that was advantageous to me, convincing them that the physical and emotional wounds I’d been carrying around for so long finally exploded, and that not only was the process whereby I was injured completely overlooked, but that no one—neither my parents nor my doctors—had detected the calls for help I’d been sending out since the first incident. In other words, I put myself forward as the tragic victim in this whole affair.

  “This was the spin I put on Schmidt’s death for adult consumption, but inside I had a different understanding of it—not that I was aware of it at the time—and this has been a major issue for me ever since. When Mr. Schmidt was in Tokyo he had no compunction about walking around town accompanied by a young boy playing the role of page. This turned out to be very trying for me when we were in Europe. In front of the hotel staff he treated me as he would in Japan, but when he was in a formal situation with his social betters he treated me like some Oriental valet.

  “The day the murder took place there was to be a dinner with a famous conductor who would be presenting a limited-engagement series of concerts in Japan, and though someone was needed to push Mr. Schmidt’s wheelchair, they assigned that job to a member of the hotel owner’s family. I was ordered to stay behind in our hotel room and be content with a room-service supper.

  “Mr. Schmidt was decked out in formal wear, waiting for them to come get him, and I was watching Japanese cartoons on TV when he called me to come over to the terrace of our suite’s sitting room. It was still some time before sunset, and because the hotel was situated on a hillside, you could see a broad vista, including the dark sky threatening thunder.

  “Mr. Schmidt asked me if I recalled the sketch of the Alpine valleys in the copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Madrid notebook he’d told me to look at before we left Japan. The place where we were headed next was the area where his parents had been born and raised, from which they set off when they moved to America. He said that place resembled the drawing, which is why he’d wanted me to see it.

  “Like the view from our veranda, the drawing showed, beyond gentle hills and thickets, a sunken plain with clumps of houses and groves of trees. And beyond that a dark, rainy ravine between two mountains, with a cap of clouds like a heavy lid on top. Farther up you could see the sunlit peaks of the clouds and the Alps ranging off into the distance.

  “Recalling this, what I saw before me was something with a broader façade than the drawing, a wide-angled version, with a large castle on the mountain in the middle, light on one side, darkness on the other. To the right, farther back, range upon range of the Alps sparkled in the evening sun.

  “After making sure that I did recall Leonardo’s drawing and that I was mentally comparing it to the scenery outside the glass doors, Mr. Schmidt said, ‘My parents were born on the slopes of the mountain far back in that ravine and were raised feeling the electricity that swells up there running through their whole bodies. Every time I look at da Vinci’s notebook, that electricity my parents felt shoots right through me. For the people who crossed over to the New World from here, that’s what this land meant to them. And in the art that European geniuses have created lies the same effect.’

  “Twilight seemed to last forever that day, and as I ate my lonely hamburger and cucumber pickle, served on the same china as in the hotel restaurant but somehow tasting different, I looked at the scene outside for the longest time and thought. It wasn’t long before I came up with the idea of beating Mr. Schmidt to death. I was enraged at him for making me study that heavy book of paintings, bringing me here to see the real thing, and then implying that—with no European blood flowing in me—neither one had anything to do with me.

  “As young as I was, though, I knew getting angry like that was pointless. Instead, I was taken with the idea of feeling the electricity he’d mentioned. I couldn’t get this out of my head. Now I realize it was like I was aware that my soul was being charged with electricity. It was thrilling. I could see myself from outside my body, high-voltage current running through me, my body emitting a phosphorescent glow. When Mr. Schmidt returned late that night and saw me seated in front of the large fireplace (though I didn’t yet have the poker in my hand), he gave a start. But he didn’t say a word, just had the blond young man with him push his wheelchair into the bathroom.

  “It was my job to help Mr. Schmidt out of his clothes and bathe him. But on my way there I spied a long, solid-looking poker leaning up against the high side of the fireplace.

  “At the same instant, I remembered the voice I’d heard two years before, a voice from outside of me insisting, Do it! Why had I forgotten that up till now? At the time I heard that voice I lacked the courage to carry out to the bitter end what it badgered me to do, and I tried to escape.

  “But I knew it was okay now, I remembered it clearly. I wouldn’t forget. There was no need to hurry. Just take your time and carry it out. I left the poker in front of the fireplace where I could reach it in the dark and set off for the bathroom, passing the glum-looking young man on his way out.

  “One of the questions I was asked by those professors at the Viennese hospital was whether or not I’d soiled my pants when I hit Mr. Schmidt on the back of the head with the poker. The Austrian professor who’d lived in the United States a long time was the one who asked me this, and seeing that I hesitated to answer, the other professor, the Japanese one, translated the question into Japanese. His face was red, whether from anger or embarrassment I don’t know, but he made sure I understood that by soiling my pants I was being asked not whether I’d lost control of my bowels but whether I’d ejaculated.

  “The two adults standing there together asking me this looked to me like a pair of fools. I felt this way because I was filled with that high-voltage electricity, something I now know is connected to the spiritual, and I was cunning enough to take them by surprise with my response. I managed an answer that took the wind out of their sails and made them look silly to boot.

  “‘Since Mr. Schmidt didn’t have his hand inside my pants when I clubbed him,’ I said, ‘no—I didn’t soil my underwear.’

  “I said this directly in English, and it was the Austrian professor’s turn to blush.”

  3

  “I undressed Mr. Schmidt and carried him to the bathtub—no big deal, considering how I was built at sixteen—helped him control his limbs as he bathed, dressed him in a gown, and carried him to the bedroom. I helped him change into pajamas. Then, as I hung up his dressing gown in the closet I took the belt and tied it around my head like a Japanese hachimaki, somethin
g I’d never done before. I went back to the darkened sitting room and picked up the poker, which was three feet long, longer than the one I’d used before.

  “I shook my head to clear it of the excess electricity buzzing around inside and awaited the sound of that voice. Do it! Could I hear it? My head buzzed even more, like the echo of a far-off memory. Do it, do it! I rubbed my sweaty palm against the hachimaki, adjusted my grip on the poker, and went into the bedroom.

  “I wasn’t sure, but I thought that maybe if I started to do it the buzzing would stop, and everything would become that one voice I’d heard before. But as I swung the poker I wasn’t listening. The next time I thought about that voice was when the two professors were quizzing me. Since this time I really had done it, I felt like I’d become that voice. At the same time, though, I suppressed the thought that maybe I hadn’t actually heard anything at all.

  “Years passed, and I was in my third year in the university architecture department. In order to graduate I had to either present my own original design or write a thesis on an existing structure. I never had any problems with math or architecture theory, but when I arrived at this stage I realized I didn’t know the first thing about critiquing buildings.

  “I racked my brain, trying to understand why I was basically empty inside, when the events of Salzburg and Vienna popped into my head—not the murder itself so much as the way I lied to the doctors in the hospital and how they bought it so easily. Little by little, I felt this was canceling out the incident that had preceded it.

  “Glibly lying day after day had turned me into a poor little youth, a victim of sexual harassment who had lashed out in self-defense. Setting myself up as a passive child who normally would not have done what he did, I was let off the hook legally. But to arrive at this point I had to set aside everything I’d experienced up till then, meager as it was. Helped along by the adults, who were trying to make everything consistent, I fit myself right into the ad hoc mold they’d created. And that’s how I’ve lived ever since. Now I have to bring forth what is uniquely mine. But is it any wonder I’m stifled, unable to do anything?

  “Once I realized this, it bothered me that I wasn’t able to screw up my courage and face things head-on. And each time I felt about to do that I couldn’t help but be conscious of what it was that was holding me back.

  “When I was fourteen I’d heard it loud and clear, no mistake about it, a voice urging me to act; the same voice had me commit murder at sixteen. But this deception I’d pulled in Vienna made me lose sight of the source of that voice. When I started to think about it, I understood that it wasn’t at fourteen that I first heard that voice, but as an infant. This was a voice I knew before I was even born.

  “I used this as an opportunity to drop out of college. I gave my professors and parents some hackneyed yet honest excuse that there were things I needed to do in order to recover. What I needed to recover though, was that voice, one more time.

  “Wandering all over Japan, putting everything I had into a search for the source of that voice, I ended up getting nowhere. But during this long journey I happened to meet you, Professor. I knew right away that you were the illustrator of The Book of Jonah for children. I’d read that book before I was fourteen. I was entranced by Jonah’s features and his hair, but it wasn’t just that he was handsome. At fourteen and sixteen I convinced myself that I was like Jonah, hearing a voice telling me to act.

  “One other thing connected with my meeting you I find very significant—the fact that after I started modeling for you we began a homosexual relationship. After the affair with Mr. Schmidt I never did that sort of thing again. It’s quite extraordinary to run across a person like you, Professor, someone willing to spend the rest of his life so that eventually I can do what it is I want to do, even though I haven’t revealed to you what that is.

  “Other things sprang out of our relationship too. You helped me recall the way I’d crushed that plastic city model I’d made as a child. I was able to remember how even at that time I’d heard that voice. And I could meet up again with one other player in this incident—Dancer—and through her a path opened up that led me straight to Patron.

  “Patron is important to me because his trances put him face-to-face with God. He didn’t willfully open up this pipeline to God. This relationship appears when he falls into a trance that’s more like a horrible attack. And Patron was driven to shut off that pipeline to God himself.

  “Patron announced that the visions of the other side he’d so long transmitted were all just a prank. I think it’s true what they say of him, that he made a fool of God. But he still continued to suffer, so much that his inner spiritual wounds became physical ones. Guide was tortured to death by his former comrades, but Patron continues to suffer, with no relief in sight.

  “As long as I follow Patron, I know that someday that voice—the one I answered only vaguely, the mere memory of which made me do something totally irreversible and from which, afterward, I ran away as fast as I could—will come to me again.

  “Patron has moved to this region now in order to start a new church movement, and his followers have prepared buildings, waiting with bated breath for his next move. I was fortunate enough to come here with you, Professor. Knowing that your cancer is back, you’ve chosen this as your place to die. And something has taken place to reinforce the truth of that idea.

  “Patron’s wound has come out in the open, and all the groups of believers are excited about it. And for the first time in my life I have real friends with whom to do things. And all of a sudden this vivid memory’s hit me of when I stayed in that hotel in Austria, how it was so rainy that the manager lamented how un-Salzburg-like the weather was. I remember how the electricity built up until it had to explode. I feel the same electricity here as the power of the land, the power of the place.

  “Professor, are you still awake?”

  Kizu wasn’t asleep. He just couldn’t find the words to respond to such a confession.

  “Guess he is asleep.”

  From out of his summer covers, Ikuo reached out a soft palm and rested it on Kizu’s lower abdomen, careful to not put too much weight on it. He stayed like that for a long time. Warmth from his palm seeped into Kizu’s abdomen. Kizu could sense Ikuo’s tongue moving around inside his closed mouth. Finally Ikuo withdrew his arm, drew nearer to him in the darkness, and went out into the narrow space separating the two rooms. He left the lights off, but Kizu could sense him crawling into his boxlike bed.

  As Kizu listened to Ikuo’s monologue he’d learned one surprising thing after another. Yet somehow, as if he’d already known all this, it didn’t shock him. From the first time he’d laid eyes on the boy with the beautiful doglike eyes, hadn’t he felt both a connection with something higher and yet, unparadoxically, something mysteriously low and mean? Even after they’d started to live together, that sense that they were not really close continued, something Kizu had put down to Ikuo’s basic personality.

  After Kizu had him model for the painting of Jonah, he discovered something special in Ikuo. Kizu discovered a person who responded to God’s call at the same time that he protested to God, a person who had a brutal streak, even. Putting together all these pieces, he didn’t find it strange that Ikuo had heard a voice from heaven as a child and took a life because of it.

  Kizu knew Ikuo was his better in one area—the fact that in their sexual relationship he was the novice, not Ikuo. Soon after they started to sleep together Ikuo had mentioned he’d had some experience playing the man, but despite this Kizu had carried around with him for a long time a mixture of pride and guilt at having initiated a young man into this abnormal form of sex.

  After he finally fell asleep, Kizu once again dreamt of himself as nearly completing the triptych. Though he found it strange that he could do this, since his weakened condition should make working on the tableau too tiring, in the dream he overcame this obstacle and was overjoyed at being able to progress with his work on the th
ird panel—whose composition in reality he still hadn’t decided on.

  In his dream, the details of the first panel, too, the one showing the inside of the whale’s belly, were crystal clear. Before a backdrop of a scene from a Salzburg hillside hotel, beyond the city streets, beyond the river and a castletopped mountain, and beyond a ravine at the entrance to the Alps, Ikuo-as-Jonah was in the process of murdering a middle-aged man. Every nook and cranny of the background—which Kizu had painted merely as the dark labyrinth of the whale’s innards—was now entirely clear, and he felt a sense of artistic completion.

  In the middle of the third panel he was in reality now working on, Patron, the wound showing on his side, stood next to Ikuo/Jonah. Patron was a preliminary sketch done from memory, distinguishable by the Sacred Wound, while Ikuo/Jonah was no longer an innocent youth. Surrounding the two of them was the Hollow as an abstract opera set: the huge cypress towering darkly, with the cylindrical chapel and the fortresslike monastery bordered, top and bottom, by the moonlit surface of the lake reflecting the forest and the fog.

  The next morning Kizu woke up late, and as he went out into the corridor from the still-dark bedroom he saw, in a corner of the atelier, smaller now because of the new partition, Ikuo sitting on top of his boxlike bed, unmoving as a stone statue. Kizu thought he might be asleep, but when he returned from urinating, the stone statue looked up and greeted him in a gentle voice.

  “Good morning! Did you sleep well? Why don’t you have breakfast in bed? I’ll go get it.”

  Kizu drew back the curtains—the sun was high in a whitish sky, yet fog and dew still clung to the lake and the huge cypress—got into bed, and pulled the wooden tray toward him as Ikuo brought in canned grapefruit juice, tea, and toast. The young man stood watching him eat, his expression more cheerful than it had been in quite some time, with no traces of the previous night’s confessions.