Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “Patron looks well, don’t you think?” Dancer said to Ogi, as they divided up the work. “It’s hard to believe, after how hopeless he said he felt once Guide looked like he wouldn’t recover. Now, ten days later, with you working as a secretary, here he is already set on starting a new movement. He’s an amazing personality, don’t you think? Though that’s nothing new to me.”

  Sautéing a thinly sliced onion in butter, Ogi wanted to say, If that’s nothing new to you, why don’t you keep quiet? But Dancer, ever sensitive, ended her thoughts with a meaningful remark. “I think it was good for both of you that Patron opened up so honestly.” She was slicing a chunk of beef into thin strips in preparation for making a quick gourmet curry, her mouth half open as usual, revealing a tongue glistening with saliva that brought a painful twinge of nostalgia to Ogi.

  Patron had told them as he outlined the task he wanted them to begin, “I only rely on a very few of my followers, which isn’t surprising, seeing as how I couldn’t even rely on myself!”

  This struck Ogi as a bit of a non sequitur, but Dancer gave a cute, nonchalant laugh.

  “Ogi’s working for us now as kind of an extension of his earlier job,” Patron added, “but I don’t think he’s made the leap over to our side yet. Well, just so that we all agree on that, starting tomorrow I’d like you do this for me. It’s the reason I called you both in here. I have a number of handwritten cards making up a name list. First I’d like Dancer to make two complete copies and return the originals to me.”

  Patron gathered up the papers on his desk that were too small for stationery and handed them over to Dancer, who promptly disappeared into the living room and was back in the blink of an eye.

  “What I’d like the two of you to do,” Patron continued, “is to get in touch with my supporters on this list, mainly those in Tokyo and surrounding areas, but also some in outlying regions.”

  Patron was at the age when he should be wearing reading glasses, but he took the originals of the cards Dancer had returned to him, holding them at arm’s length from his large face as he studied them. Dancer had been standing next to Ogi, but now she moved closer to Patron; knitting her brow in a line of fine wrinkles, she attentively examined the copies, for all the world like a schoolgirl reading a handout of her lines for the school play. For Ogi, the handwriting of this man who’d been schooled in the precomputer age was surprisingly unimpressive, even childish. He felt compelled to question Patron about this rather audacious list.

  “About Guide and your Somersault—I’m using the term the media used at the time—weren’t you criticized by some of the followers in your church? I heard that the radical faction was arrested and prosecuted, though not every member was caught, and while they didn’t have a chance to make any public declaration against you, some terrible things were said during the trial. Even more moderate members who made up the core of your church denounced you, didn’t they?

  “What’s the connection between the new supporters on this list and those earlier members of the church? Are these supporters sympathizers who still remained within the church? If so, then you didn’t completely renounce the church but only cut off connections at a superficial level, maintaining a relationship with certain key members. Putting aside your statements on television directed at society at large, doesn’t this mean that you lied to the Chairman of the foundation? I told him your Somersault meant you completely cut all ties with the church, and in fact had become its enemy.”

  For the first time that day Patron turned to face Ogi. He straightened up, his head held high, no longer a vulnerable old man but now like a large, combative animal asserting its dignity.

  “I did not lie,” Patron said, in a strong voice. “All the names on the list are people who’ve sent us letters in the ten years since we apostatized. I’ve omitted anyone who had a connection with our earlier activities.

  “Through our Somersault, Guide and I renounced the church and our doctrine. Now we’re about to step into a new stage. Some people view our renunciation as our fall into hell. According to Guide, after we left the church this was how a group of women followers who also left the church and now live an independent communal life interpreted it. Before a savior can accomplish the things he has prophesied—before he can free this fallen world and lead the people into a transcendent realm—he first has to experience hell. That sort of notion. Before the Somersault, those same people called us Savior and Prophet, you’ll recall.

  “Be that as it may, through our Somersault, Guide and I seceded from the church. Since then the church has continued its activities, with Kansai headquarters leading the way, but the two of us have nothing to do with them. Now that Guide has collapsed we’re faced with the worst crisis—the biggest trial we’ve gone through since our secession.

  “So I thought of contacting those who have nothing to do with the church who’ve sent us letters of support. As far as I remember, I’ve never met any of these people on the list. They became interested in us after Guide and I left the church and were spurned by society and became public laughing-stocks. I’ve started considering these new supporters just recently, and I’d like you to work at getting in touch with them, Ogi, together with Dancer, of course. This will be your first job here.”

  “I think we need to start off by checking your list against the letters people sent,” Dancer said. “Some of them might be trying to deceive us. We’ll have you check our letters before we send them out, of course. Ogi, we can discuss this in the other room. Patron needs to rest.”

  Dancer helped Patron, clad in his dressing gown, get up from the small chair. Heavy head sunk between his soft shoulders, he shuffled back to his bed on weak, sickly legs.

  That evening Ogi waited while, in the already darkened garden, Dancer went out to feed the Saint Bernard, who made sounds that were at once generous and bighearted, unmistakably those of a large beast. Patron had gone to bed without eating. Ogi and Dancer finally had a late supper, and as they ate they reviewed their instructions.

  “As I was listening to Patron,” she said, “I couldn’t help but wonder why—when you aren’t a devotee of Patron’s teachings—you’re supporting him and working to help him. I know I asked you to, but I feel a little bad about it.”

  “I don’t know... he has a sort of strange appeal,” Ogi replied. “I’ve never met another man of his age quite like him.”

  2: Reunion

  1

  The story now shifts to the reunion of the artist Kizu and the dog-faced boy with the beautiful eyes fifteen years after their first meeting. In the interim one can safely assume that innocent young Ogi spared no pains as he worked with Dancer to carry out the task Patron assigned them. The account that unfolds now will shortly wind up at Ogi’s place of work, and the two stories will merge into one.

  By coincidence, Kizu was able to meet the young man whose growth he had been so obsessed by, though it took some time after the two of them grew close before he realized that the young man and the boy he’d seen so many years before were one and the same.

  Back in his homeland on sabbatical, Kizu was living in an apartment in Akasaka; a former student introduced him to an athletic club in Nakano, where he became a member and began going twice a week to swim. One might not expect a person who’s had a relapse of cancer to be so active, yet it was this very relapse that spurred him on. Soon after joining, Kizu began to take notice of a young man at the club, someone he caught sight of every once in a while but had never spoken to, let alone heard anyone else talk about. Kizu was drawn to this twenty-four or -five-year-old young man’s beautiful body and his unique sense of style, all of which connected up, in Kizu’s mind, with his plan to take up oil painting once again during his year in Tokyo. In the United States he’d been so involved in running the research institute, giving lectures and seminars, and taking care of a thousand and one other related tasks that he’d drifted away from creative art. Deciding to return to painting was one thing, settling on the subject matter
was another, and Kizu was still without a clue, though he did find the idea of painting a young man more attractive than that of a female nude.

  Kizu watched the young man leading grade-school children in warmup exercises by the poolside and correcting their form once they were in the water. Another scene stayed with him too, one that took place when the young man was doing his own personal training. One weekday, early in the afternoon, the pool on the first floor of the athletic club was relatively uncrowded, with just two children’s classes and one adult group, the last made up mostly of women with a couple of elderly men thrown into the mix. In the lanes set aside for full members to swim laps there were only two or three swimmers, Kizu among them, as he paddled back and forth in the unusually cool transparent water.

  Soon it was time for classes to change, and in the wide space between the main pool and the one used for synchronized swimming practice, a large class of children were going through their warm-up routine. Kizu had finished his exercise for the day and was just leaving when he ran across a strange sight. At the bottom of the stairs, in a corner where there were showers and sinks for rinsing your eyes, there was a six-foot-square pool. Kizu had always thought it was just some special water tank, but now he understood it was for training people to hold their breath underwater. Three young girls stood there, leaning against the brass railing and looking down at the little pool; their high-cut swimsuits exposed the smooth skin of their muscular thighs.

  A head wearing a white rubber swim cap bobbed straight up, breaking the surface, the shoulders following next in a quiet yet grandiloquent movement. In a moment the person turned to face the opposite direction, rested one hand on a depression in the wall just above the surface of the water, and took a deep breath. The body rising high above the water was that of a young man without an ounce of fat, his body stretched taut, but what caught Kizu’s interest was how the body looked naturally strong, not the result of training. The rubber swim cap he had on was one worn by swimming instructors, and just after the young man broke the surface from deep underwater Kizu had recognized him, for not many of the instructors had such a muscular build. The tall girls gazing down into the pool were quite muscular, too, the base of their necks swelling up in an arc, interrupting the line of their shoulders. Once more the young man sank straight down beneath the water. Effortlessly, he let go of the inner wall of the pool, looked down, put his arms by his sides, and sank, leaving behind barely a ripple. And after a while, longer than one might expect, he forcefully yet quietly resurfaced, bobbing up past his shoulders, and took a huge gulping breath.

  Soon the young man, gripping the trough that ran around the pool, lifted his face to look at Kizu; the young man didn’t have goggles on, and his face showed nothing of the heightened vitality one might expect after such exertion. He completely ignored the young girls. His forehead was like a turtle’s, the eyes sunken, the nose wide, lips full; the flesh down to his chin was like taut leather, the chin itself quite manly. Kizu thought he had never seen a Japanese with a face like this before, though it was most definitely of Mongolian stock: a fierce face yet one that looked, overall, refined. And from this very masculine face large eyes gazed out, a gaze that made Kizu feel he was being stared at by an obstinate woman.

  Walking away, Kizu felt agitated. The wisdom gained with age allowed him to avoid trying to pin down this nameless unease; Kizu realized that diverting his attention was a better course of action. After this, whenever he saw the young man leading an adult swimming class, a disquiet jolted him, and he averted his eyes.

  The first time Kizu spoke to the young man was in the athletic club’s so-called drying room. Things changed quickly at this club, with a third of the training equipment, for instance, being replaced within the first six months after Kizu joined. Still, there was one place that was clearly a holdover from the past, a dim room about fifteen by eighteen feet that had just one small door and, in the middle, an elliptical wooden enclosure, in complete contrast to the ultramodern facilities on the other floors of the club. Inside the enclosure, dark stones were piled up and heated, like a sauna. In fact it was a kind of sauna room, though kept at a lower temperature than the modern saunas next door to the public baths.

  Members sat on wide two-tiered wooden levels, leaning back against the unpainted wooden wall, drying their chilled bodies after swimming. Children in the swimming school, of course, used the drying room, but veteran members plopped themselves down on oversized yellow towels and sweated in the room before they went swimming, loosening up their muscles this way instead of doing warm-up exercises.

  The first time the young man spoke to Kizu, the two of them, as longtime members were wont to do, were already stretched out for some time in the darkened drying room. In the dull light, Kizu didn’t realize that the person lying down in the far corner was this young man because—no doubt to increase the amount he sweated—he was completely wrapped in a towel from his head on down, with just his knees and the lower half of his legs sticking out.

  Kizu had been in the drying room for quite some time when seven or eight young girls in their late teens took over the upper and lower tiers on the right side, directly opposite the entrance. The girls chattered away boisterously; Kizu was already aware that they were members of the swim team at a Catholic girls high school. They were discussing the program they were preparing for their school’s festival, based on the book of Jonah. They were already in a lively mood as they voiced their opinions and complaints in loud voices. One small girl, apparently an underclassman, spoke out in an especially conspicuous way.

  “We’re the swim team,” she complained, “so we should have been allowed to do the scenes where Jonah’s thrown into the water, or where he’s spit up from the whale’s belly and swims to shore. But Sister’s script has us doing the part in the storm where Jonah’s grilled by all the sailors, and where he builds that hut on the outskirts of Nineveh and complains to God. What’s a castor oil plant, anyway? Sounds pretty weird to me! We have to construct the set without even knowing what it looks like!”

  Kizu finally spoke up. It had been through the auspices of the girls’ swim coach, also an instructor of art and design, that Kizu had been introduced to the athletic club and joined for a year, and the girls had surely heard from their coach about his work in the United States.

  Kizu told them how he had done the illustrations for a children’s version of Bible stories. As part of his research for the book, he traveled to the Middle East, where he saw actual castor oil plants growing. “Come here this time next week,” Kizu told them, “and I’ll bring a colored sketch for you to look at. In the book of Jonah,” he went on, “the castor oil plant is an important minor prop—no, maybe a major prop—expressing God’s love.” The students welcomed his proposal.

  This decided, the occupying force of girls, their clumsy attempts at working up a good sweat over, left the drying room with hearty farewells more befitting an athletic meet. A jostle of muscular legs was visible just outside the cloudy heat-resistant glass of the door’s window.

  At this point the young man, oversized towel heavy with sweat wrapped around his waist, spoke up, his voice different from the times Kizu had overheard it in the club.

  “Professor, you seem to be quite well versed in the Bible.”

  Kizu was seated on the lower tier, in the back left-hand corner, the young man on the upper tier directly facing him. Perhaps not wanting to look down on Kizu, the young man clambered down to the lower tier and turned his face, the same color as a boiled crab’s shell, toward Kizu, who replied, “Not at all—it’s just as I told the girls. It’s not like I attend church.”

  “I was about to tell the girls, but in the bookshelf in the third-floor members’ lounge there’s a copy of your children’s book,” the young man said. “The club’s Culture Society collects and displays books written by the club’s members. When I was a child—and until much later, in fact—I was amazed at how realistically people and objects are depicted in Renai
ssance paintings, and I find your illustrations in the children’s book very similar. Children find this especially appealing, I imagine. When I read your book, I could get a clear picture of how big Nineveh was and what the boat that went to Tarshish looked like.”

  The artist found the young man’s observations interesting—since Kizu was young at the time he did these illustrations he’d been very conscious of his painting style, insisting on its anachronistic character—but what most impressed him was the young man’s way of talking. Kizu recalled a certain Mexican stage actor with unusual looks. You would normally expect anyone aware that they had such extraordinary features to be a bit more reticent.

  Kizu was silent and the young man went on. “I’m not a Christian either. But ever since I was a child, the book of Jonah has bothered me.”

  “Since you’ve read my children’s book it’s obvious to you,” Kizu said, “that I made the book of Jonah the centerpiece of the project.”

  “If I went to a church,” the young man went on, “I’m sure I could hear a detailed explanation, but I don’t get on well with clergy, so I’ve never found an answer to my concerns.”

  “Maybe it’s not my place to ask, but what exactly are these concerns?”

  Kizu didn’t ask this expecting any specific answer to issue from the youth’s somewhat cruel-looking mouth, but the young man responded eagerly, as if he’d been waiting for the chance.

  “I don’t know, I just feel anxious, wondering if the book of Jonah really ends where it does. I know it’s a childish question, but I can’t help wondering if the Jonah we have now is complete, or whether it might originally have had a different ending.”

  “That’s an interesting point,” Kizu remarked. “Now that you mention it, I’ve felt somewhat the same, as if it’s vague and doesn’t go anywhere.”