Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  Cutting to the chase, the young man said, “Would it be possible, Professor, for me to come over to your home to hear more about this? The club office manager told me you have American citizenship and are living in extraterritorial, non-Japanese housing.”

  “It’s not extraterritorial; I’m not a diplomat. But if you’re interested in the book of Jonah, I do have a few reference works, and I’d be happy to show them to you. I’m here at the club on Tuesdays and Fridays, but most other afternoons I’m free. Tell the office I said it’s all right for you to get my address and phone number.”

  The young man was clearly elated by the news.

  “I’m sorry to be so forward; you must think I’m pushy. I’ll phone you later this week.”

  The sauna wasn’t especially hot, but Kizu had reached his limit and decided to leave. He made his way around the heat source in the center of the room, pushed the unpainted door open, and went outside. Through the heat-resistant glass his eyes met those of the young man, who was leaning in his direction as if bowing. A faint smile came to Kizu’s face, and he looked down and descended to the swimming pool.

  2

  The reader already knows why Kizu, teaching in the art department of an American East Coast university, decided to take a sabbatical in Tokyo. The same reason accounts for his not planning a terribly strenuous schedule during his sabbatical year. The university provided housing for him in an apartment building that had been acquired during the Occupation, changed management several times, was rebuilt, but continued to be owned by the university. The building was not solely for the use of faculty sent by Kizu’s university—Japanologists from other universities were housed there as well—but as a faculty member from the home institution, Kizu had been given priority and provided with an apartment on the top floor, a two-bedroom apartment with four rooms altogether. He made the spacious living room and dining-kitchen into one large room, setting up beyond his dining table a space that became his studio. Between these he placed a sofa and armchair, and this became the spot where he spent most of his time.

  Three days later, in the morning, the young man phoned, but Kizu was confused for a few moments, unable to recall who he was when he gave his name. At the athletic club, though the way he spoke and the topics he talked about were intelligent enough, one couldn’t separate his voice from the forceful physicality of his brawny features. On the phone, though, his voice came across as gentle and clear.

  Once the young man was in the apartment, Kizu had him sit on the sofa that formed the boundary of the studio, and he sat down on the matching armchair, next to which was a table on which he’d placed the reference materials. Ikuo—the young man’s name—was dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and a cotton shirt with rolled-up sleeves over it; dressed, he looked much younger than when he’d been nude in the drying room. From Ikuo’s unease as soon as he entered the apartment, though, Kizu had the feeling that these nondescript clothes were not his usual style and the young man felt ill at ease in this plebeian setting.

  After Ikuo began coming to Kizu’s place to model for him, he explained why, on this first day, he had gazed so intently at everything around him in the apartment. The ceilings, he said, were much higher than those in his own place in Tokyo. Not just the inside of the apartment, but the elevator area and the first-floor lobby with the residents’ mailboxes were larger and had a roughhewn no-nonsense look to them. Listening to Ikuo explain his sense of incongruity with the surroundings, Kizu understood why, in contrast, he had felt so quickly at home. The apartment was an exact replica of the faculty housing in New Jersey he’d lived in as a new instructor for seven or eight years.

  With Ikuo posing questions, Kizu showed him the research materials he’d promised and talked about what he’d learned about the book of Jonah while doing research for the children’s books on the Old Testament.

  “These are notes I copied from a translation of a book by someone named J. M. Meyers,” Kizu said. “Meyers says that Nineveh was the capital of Assyria and a very large place, though saying that ‘It took three days to go all around the city’ has to be an exaggeration. Still, it’s estimated that the population was 174,000. The Bible says, ‘There were more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well.’ I realized that apart from the livestock the focus is on the children. Experts probably don’t make much of this, however. In short, what God feels most sad about are the children and the livestock—the innocent. After all, the ones who have sinned are the adults.

  “One other point Meyers makes is that the citizens of Nineveh are Gentiles. According to the words of God that Jonah conveyed, what stopped God from destroying the people of Nineveh was that these Gentiles truly repented. Meyers says this must have been quite a shock to the Israelites, who were convinced they were the chosen people. The problem was, these chosen people were obstinate, while the people of Nineveh were obedient.

  “The town of Tarshish that Jonah set sail for from Joppa was a port in Sardinia with a huge blast furnace—probably the farthest destination for any ship from Palestine. So Jonah was on a ship carrying steel or steel products. Jonah thought that God’s power extended only as far as the borders of the land of Israel. That makes sense, right? The storm hits the ship, and only Jonah is unperturbed. ‘How can you sleep?’ the captain wonders. But it’s no wonder Jonah can sleep soundly. Gentiles might not understand it, but Jonah is convinced he’s escaped God’s wrath, which makes any storm look like the proverbial tempest in a teacup.

  “After this comes the part where he’s thrown into the sea, enters the stomach of the whale, and finally goes to Nineveh. Then God’s wrath is explained, and it all ends, with Meyers commenting that Jonah ‘wanted to restrict God and his saving love to himself and his people. Jonah thought he had failed and would be the object of ridicule.’”

  “The part about the children is interesting, isn’t it,” Ikuo replied in a dreamy voice, a voice etched in Kizu’s memory of this first day. “This might be off the subject, but what a terrible thing it must have been to destroy the whole city of Nineveh. For us now, mightn’t it be equivalent to destroying a city the size of Tokyo?”

  They didn’t take this thought any further. Kizu didn’t have any reason to empathize with the young man’s vision of the destruction of the entire population of a city like Tokyo. And from this commentary on the book of Jonah alone, he couldn’t answer the question put to him in the drying room about whether the story of Jonah in the Bible is actually the whole story.

  Ikuo quickly detected Kizu’s confusion and neatly changed the subject. Ikuo walked around the studio, looking at the sketches and oil paintings Kizu had begun now that he was painting again. He was clearly pleased to see the same distinctive style as that in the children’s book; the color of the original paintings, he commented, is so much brighter, and looks like the use of color you find in modern American paintings. Kizu found these comments right on target. It was during this time that Ikuo proposed that if Kizu needed a nude male model he’d be happy if he’d hire him; while he was painting, Ikuo could learn more from Kizu—two birds with one stone and all that.

  This decided, Kizu saw Ikuo out. This young man, he mused, might very well have already had the idea of posing in mind before he came to visit. Still, Kizu found the same sort of faint smile he had outside the drying room once again rising to his lips.

  That weekend Kizu woke up while it was still dark out. He noticed something about the way he held his body in bed. Probably because he felt the cancer had spread to his liver, these days he always slept with his left elbow as a pillow. It was a position based on a distant memory, a memory of himself at seventeen or eighteen, in the valley in the forest where he was born and raised, lying on the slope of a low hill. Sometimes this vision of himself appeared in dreams as a richly colored reality, Kizu seeing this as his own figure in the eternal present. And in the predawn darkness, in a dream just before waking, he returned to his eternal present body.

/>   Kizu was at the point where his hair, to use the American expression, was salt and pepper, yet his mental image of himself was always that of this seventeen- or eighteen-year-old. Emotionally, he knew he hadn’t changed much from his teen years. He was aware, quite graphically, of a grotesque disjuncture within him, a man with an over-fifty-year-old body attached to the emotions of a teenager. Kizu recalled the thirteenth canto of Dante’s Inferno, the scene in which a soul on the threshold of old age picks up its own body as a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old and hangs it from some brambles.

  Beginning a week later, Ikuo began posing to help Kizu with a series of tableaus he’d only vaguely conceived. As he drew, Kizu, influenced by what Ikuo had said that first day, lectured as he used to do in classrooms—though of course in American universities if a professor did all the talking he’d receive a terrible evaluation from the students at the end of the semester. Sometimes Kizu would respond promptly to the questions Ikuo asked as he posed; other times he gave himself until the following week to answer. Kizu recalled in particular one question from early in their sessions.

  “Last time,” Kizu said, “you asked me what it means for a person to be free. I think I struggled with the same question when I was young. So I gave it some thought. An anecdote I once read about a painter came to mind.

  “In order to give you an idea of how I understand it, I need to give you another example, not from some book I read but a quote I heard from a colleague of mine who teaches philosophy, which is: A circle in nature and the concept of a circle within God are the same, they just manifest themselves differently.

  “The anecdote took place during the Renaissance, when an official in charge of choosing an artist to paint a mammoth fresco requested one particular artist (an artist I was quite taken with when I was young) to submit a work that best displayed his talents. The response of the artist—which became famous—was to submit a single circle he had drawn.

  “An artist draws a circle with a pencil. And that circle fits perfectly with the concept of a circle that resides within God. The person who can accomplish this is a free man. In order to arrive at that state of freedom, he has had to polish his artistry through countless paintings. It was as if my own life work I had dreamed about was contained in this. When I was young, I mean.”

  Ikuo continued to hold his pose, gazing at the space in front of him, listening attentively, his expression unchanged, his rugged features reminding Kizu of Blake’s portrait of a youthful Los, likened to the sun—Kizu feeling he was brushing away with his crayon the shadows of Blake’s colored block prints that shaded Ikuo’s nude body.

  Ikuo was silent until their next break. “I’ve been thinking about something very similar to what you said, Professor. People say young children are free. Okay, but if you get even a little self-conscious you can’t act freely, even though you might have been able to a few years before. When I was no longer a child, I fantasized about a freedom I could attain. And not just talking about it like this, either....

  “I’ve been thinking about Jonah, too. He tried to run away from God but couldn’t. He learned this the hard way, almost dying in the process. Made me think how much the inside of a whale’s stomach must stink!” Kizu couldn’t keep from smiling faintly.

  “Finally he gave up and decided to follow God’s orders. Once he made that decision he stuck to his guns. Jonah complained to God that he’d changed his original plan. Aren’t you supposed to finish what you first decided to do? he implored. Isn’t the way Jonah acted exactly the way a free person is supposed to act? Of course it’s God who makes this freedom possible—and correct me if I’m wrong—but if God doesn’t take into account the freedom to object to what He wants, how can He know what true unlimited freedom is? That’s why I’d like to read what happens next in the book of Jonah.”

  Instead of a reply, a faint smile on Kizu’s face showed he understood what the young man meant.

  3

  It was the beginning of autumn in Tokyo. Near the faculty housing where Kizu had lived in New Jersey, there was a so-called lake, actually a long muddy creek used for rowing practice, and every year as autumn arrived he used to hear from the far shore of the lake a cicadalike call; his African roommate, an art history major, insisted it was a bird. Now in his Tokyo apartment he could see a mammoth nire tree that stood about five yards from his south-facing terrace. The soft broad rounded leaves reminded him of the stand of trees that lined the campus grounds back in New Jersey; he guessed it was a type of elm. He didn’t stop to think that elms in Japan are, indeed, classified as nire. The first time Ikuo had removed all his clothes to pose nude, he looked off at the far-off buildings through the leafy branches of the tree and remarked, “That akadamo screens us well here, though it won’t after the leaves fall.”

  “Akadamo?”

  “That’s the name I heard it called when I was wandering around Hokkaido,” Ikuo replied. “Most people call it a harunire—a wych elm—but it’s different. I imagine it’ll be blossoming soon. You can tell it from a wych elm by when it blooms, according to what my father told me.…”

  Ikuo’s face, reminding Kizu of a carnivore’s snout, was soon lost in reverie; Kizu too was lost in thought. Ikuo hadn’t had any contact with his family in a long time and had never said anything about the home he grew up in. His face was so unusual that Kizu felt sure Ikuo must have had a comical appeal when he was a boy and been a favorite in his family. After he grew up and began wandering in Hokkaido and elsewhere around the country, his family surely must have felt a profound sense of loss.

  The wych elm near his terrace began to take on erotic connotations for Kizu. One morning, his gaze was drawn to the lush foliage of the tree, for it was swaying and shaking with unusual force. Soon he saw a pair of squirrels leaping about on a bare branch, disappearing in the shadows, their power concentrated in the base of their thick tails. Kizu could sense that the squirrels were preoccupied with mating, and as their movements made the leaves shake exaggeratedly he felt familiar stirrings deep in his loins. Kizu could imagine, in the deep green shadows of the tree, Ikuo’s slim waist, the muscles of his butt underneath the tough outer layer of skin softly expanding and contracting. For the first time in quite a while, Kizu’s penis grew almost painfully erect.

  As Kizu watched, the swelling peacefully subsided. He was lying naked, sunbathing opposite the wych elm, whose foliage covered a broad expanse. It was 9 A.M., and Kizu had spent an hour in the light of the sun, now behind the wych elm’s branches. He’d spread a bed cover on the terrace floor and was lying down, his legs spread wide toward the window. This was his new habit, a sentimental yet possibly effective way to warm the insides of his cancer-ravaged body.

  Today, though, with his abdomen bare in the sunlight, his pose called to mind a baby having his diapers changed. And an even more laughable image occurred to him: a racial memory, if you can call it that, of long ago, when he existed as genetic material in a monkey, and that monkey—himself—was presenting his anus to the sun. Even within this gentle sunbathing, then, sexual yearnings brewed and bubbled....

  Before long, in the shadows of the wych elm, this time much closer to the terrace, a much more explicitly erotic movement began. On this canvas made up of the shadings of green and gentle waves, Kizu stretched out an imaginary pencil and traced the line of Ikuo’s body, thighs slightly spread, from his waist to his rump viewed diagonally from behind. Once again he felt a rush of heated blood spread from his abdomen to his waist, his penis became rigid, and he began fondling his genitals with his left hand while sketching in the air. When he ejaculated, Kizu heard a powerful sigh—his own—calling out, “Ikuo, Ikuo! Ah—Ikuo!”

  Kizu now knew what it was he’d been seeking from Ikuo ever since that day in the club’s drying room. A man in his fifties only now awakening to the fact that he was gay, he realized that what he wanted was simply to have sex with this young man with the strong beautiful body.

  After this Kizu eagerly anticipated the days w
hen Ikuo posed for him. Many a session passed, though, with nothing out of the ordinary happening. When he was alone, Kizu had no idea how to make his daydreams a reality, and Ikuo, oblivious to Kizu’s desires, said things that were painful for him to hear.

  “Sometimes this studio smells like a bachelor my own age is living here!” Ikuo said one day. “I blushed when I was modeling ‘cause I thought it was because I hadn’t bathed in a couple of days! I haven’t been to the pool either, for a while.”

  Kizu wasn’t embarrassed, but he did feel confused about his masturbation, a habit now revived after a long dormancy.

  Ikuo also said to Kizu, and not as mere flattery, “They say when artists create they get younger—and in your case it’s true!”

  4

  It was a dark day, as dark as if the sun had already set, the wind gusting out of the north. The hygiene cure, a dated term that made him wince—his sunbathing, in other words—which Kizu had continued entirely on his own since the middle of July, was out of the question on a day like this. The glass door was cold against his forehead as he gazed at the shadowy leaves of the wych elm rustling in the wind. The leaves were dry and dull, their undersides, exposed when the wind curled them up, even more dry and whitish. Until now, the only yellowish leaves he’d seen were those on branches broken by the wind or by squirrels, but now there were clumps of lemon-colored leaves on several more recessed branches. Kizu spent the morning, till past noon, in a state of agitation. Ikuo was supposed to come in the morning, but he didn’t show up. Two weeks before, on a Monday, he’d called and said he couldn’t model that day. Thursday came, and again he didn’t show up, this time not even phoning. The same thing happened both days the following week. On this particular day Kizu phoned the athletic club and was told that Ikuo wasn’t out sick, in fact was at that very moment teaching an adult class. Kizu said to tell Ikuo he’d called.