Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  Ikuo still didn’t give up trying to speak directly to Patron. “I was still basically a child,” he said, “when I saw the whole Somersault affair on TV. Your announcement seemed like one more in a long string of jokes. This was right after Chernobyl, and I remember being upset, thinking it was absolutely insane to intentionally try to cause an accident like that. But I was also agitated by the thought that God had told the radical faction to Do it.”

  “If it was really God telling the radical faction to act, they wouldn’t have collapsed so easily,” Dancer said, not giving Patron a chance to respond. “With the information that Patron and Guide gave the authorities at the time of their Somersault, the radical faction’s shock troops were arrested on their way to the nuclear power facility at Mount Fuji and their intentions for the plant came to light; the authorities, though, downplayed the scale of what they were planning. Once power was brought to bear on the situation, in other words, the whole thing was treated as a farce. Guide told me that since it would have been too much for the government to admit the existence of a sophisticated plan to blow up nuclear power plants, they treated it as a crude, childish idea as a way of defusing any concerns the public might have. And what was particularly effective in this effort to downplay and mock the plans—as you are well aware, Ikuo—was Patron and Guide’s Somersault, that comical TV performance.”

  As Ogi saw it, Ikuo’s question to Patron was at the heart of what really concerned the young man. He didn’t think Patron, having undertaken this short trip to the cottage, could very well refuse to answer, nor could he understand why Dancer insisted so strongly on blocking Patron’s reply. Ogi was just about to summon up his courage and tell Dancer to let them hear what Patron had to say when the phone rang.

  The phone was in the dining room, next to the spacious living room with its fireplace; to keep the heat in during the winter the glass door between the two rooms was kept closed. The ringing startled them. It was not yet 9 P.M., but all the surrounding houses were shut up and the silence of the high plain was more like the middle of the night. Ogi stood up to answer the phone and noticed that Patron looked particularly tense.

  The caller wasn’t unexpected—Ms. Tachibana, who was taking care of things back at the office—but what she had to say was. Several former members of the church were scheduled to visit Guide that evening, and he’d told Ms. Tachibana not to prepare any meal for them but to just serve tea; if they showed up after she went home she should lay out the tea things before leaving. He also told her that if Dancer called on their way to Nasu Plateau, Ms. Tachibana wasn’t to say anything about Guide’s having visitors.

  The visitors didn’t come while Ms. Tachibana was at the office, so she went ahead and followed the recipes Dancer left her and made dinner for Guide, whose diet had been restricted ever since he fell ill. After arranging the dinner on the dining table, Ms. Tachibana left to return to the college town where her brother was waiting in their apartment. Around eight o’clock she began to worry about the visitors and phoned the annex to tell Guide to leave the dirty cups and dishes for her to wash later, but there was no response. She called the office in the main building, but still no answer. She was so worried she thought she would go back to Seijo, despite the late hour.

  Ogi hesitated to report what Ms. Tachibana had told him where Patron could overhear it. Patron—pressed to respond to Ikuo—was still excited in a cold, melancholy way. He didn’t ask Ogi about the call but was obviously preoccupied with some unfortunate things that could happen, or might have already happened, to Guide. Patron watched silently as Ikuo rearranged the remaining logs in the fireplace.

  It was impossible now to continue their discussion, so Ogi just waited for another phone call as Dancer gave Patron some sleeping pills and tranquilizers and went with him to his bedroom. Ikuo was dissatisfied, of course, at having to cut their conversation short, but since Patron had not fully recovered from his physical and emotional exhaustion, there was nothing they could do.

  Dancer had her hands full taking care of Patron, so it was left to Ogi to get Ikuo’s bedding ready in the second-floor bedroom. The heat of the fireplace didn’t reach this room, and it was as cold as Tokyo in the middle of the winter. “You’ll be fine if you use an electric blanket,” Ogi told him, but Ikuo still seemed preoccupied after his discussion with Patron had fallen apart, and a bit suspicious of Ogi’s practical advice.

  Ogi went downstairs, banked the fire with ashes, and was getting his own futon ready on the floor when Dancer appeared and asked him to wake up Ikuo. Patron insisted on continuing his earlier talk with Ikuo in his bedroom, and wouldn’t hear otherwise.

  Dancer obviously wasn’t too happy about it but did as Patron asked. While they waited for Ikuo to dress and join them downstairs in front of the fireplace, she whispered to Ogi, “Patron was trying to get to sleep, but he seems upset, not just about Guide but about painful memories that our earlier talk brought to mind. He said tonight he wanted to finish talking about all the things he was going to say to Ikuo.

  “I told him the medicine was going to take effect and tried to persuade him to wait until tomorrow morning. If Ikuo looks like he’s going to start debating him, please caution him not to, okay? I’ll be right beside you.”

  “Are you planning to censor his questions and give answers in Patron’s place?” Ikuo asked, entering the room in time to hear Dancer’s last words.

  The fire had burned down to embers and the only light was that filtering in from the dining room; Ikuo’s face was darkly flushed and his rough reaction was enough to make Dancer wince.

  “Well, then, would you go with him instead of me, Ogi?” Dancer asked, in an edgy, teary voice. “If he doesn’t find Patron’s answers to his liking and starts to get violent, there’s nothing I’d be able to do. I’ll wait by the phone.”

  Ogi led Ikuo into the master bedroom. The room was large, Western style, with a high bed that Ogi’s mother had said was just like one she’d seen in a photo of an American farmhouse in an interior design magazine. Both the overhead lights and the nightstand lamp were turned off. In the glow of an electric space heater set up at the foot of the bed, the two young men could make out an old chest of drawers but no chairs for them to sit on. They had to stand looking down at Patron, whose head was resting on the high pillows, and couldn’t even tell if his eyes were open. Ogi thought optimistically that he was asleep, but he wasn’t. Soon, eyes closed, he began to speak, his words to Ikuo quite thoughtful.

  “Professor Kizu told me in his letter that he was surprised when he heard you say that you heard the voice of God when you were a teenager, that ever since then you’ve been waiting to hear God’s voice again, and that right now you want me to act as intermediary so the voice of God will speak to you again.”

  Patron’s voice was different from his earlier eloquent sermonizing tone; his tone was unclear, his tongue slurred, the words seemingly pushed up from deep inside his throat. Ogi was favorably impressed, though, that despite his poor physical and emotional state and his worries over Guide, Patron was bent on fulfilling his promise to Ikuo. On the same wavelength, Ikuo responded in an entirely natural tone of voice.

  “I was convinced, as a child, that I had heard the voice of God, though I never told Professor Kizu the details surrounding this event. At any rate, I believed God spoke to me, and I’ve been waiting expectantly ever since for that voice to speak to me again. I quit college, never had a steady job, didn’t make any friends, and never lived long in any one place, always waiting and waiting. But God was silent.

  “This year, however, after I met Professor Kizu—or had a reunion with him, I should say—I felt that things were changing. And then I was able to meet you, Patron. And I knew that you of all people would understand what it means to a person to hear the voice of God. I know I’m just dreaming, but I hope that you can help me hear the rest of what God wants to tell me. I’ve also started to get interested in the radical faction that Guide created, since they’re the ver
y people who, through you, heard the voice of God telling them to get on with it! And just when that voice was about to be heard, you and Guide snuffed it out.”

  Ikuo finished speaking, as if this was what he’d been thinking of earlier when he asked about the Somersault, and Patron was silent for a time. To Ogi the silence seemed too long, but finally Patron did speak. His speech was slower than before, and more disjointed. Ogi tried to put it in some kind of order so he could remember it. Since there was sufficient power in what Patron said to frighten an innocent youth like Ogi, he listened very carefully, trying to pick out what Patron mumbled, so his memory of it was reliable.

  “Though Guide and I had begun a movement to show people a model of what the end of the world would be like and bring them to repentance, with the Somersault we abandoned it all. You asked me why Guide and I, particularly, denied our teachings then. You also said I served as an intermediary and made them wait in a place where they could hear God’s voice to get on with it! Well, not only did I make them wait in vain, I announced to the world how stupid they were to be waiting at all.

  “For ten years afterward we were the laughingstock of Japan, but in our inner being we felt even more driven into a corner—like the living dead, as I’ve put it. And now I’ve been raised up out of the pit of hell to where I must proclaim the words of God: Do it! I’ve resigned myself to living out this fate. If I’m the intermediary again for God’s voice, this time I won’t take back what he tells us to do. I promise you that, Ikuo.

  “The reason we denied our teachings at the time of the Somersault is precisely because that’s what a Somersault’s all about. Whatever I do in this new direction I’m embarking on, I’ll do as a person who has Somersaulted. Someone who Somersaults also has to participate, in a personal way, in the call for repentance. If you think about it, it’s all too clear how the end of the world will come about in a hundred years. Is a hundred years so far off?

  “Ikuo, you said you want me to act as intermediary so you can hear God’s voice. But the relevant question is, Is it possible for someone who’s done a Somersault to confront God again? I’ve only just returned to the point of preparing for a deep trance, but I think the answer is yes, it is possible. Would God abandon a person who’s gone so far as to do a Somersault? God wouldn’t allow himself to be left a fool, would he? You have the conviction that you’ll hear again the voice of God, and that’s what’s brought you to me. I’m sure for someone as young as you it must have been hard to maintain that conviction. You—or I should say you too—have received a wound that never heals. But Ikuo, that is a sign.…”

  Patron’s voice grew lower and ever more slow. Finally he fell silent, his quiet breathing no longer a voice, and then he began to snore peacefully. The two young men stood there, straining their ears. Soon, from behind them, they sensed something only slightly louder than Patron’s snores. Backlit by the light from the dining room, Dancer stood in the doorway motioning to them. They went out into the hallway. As she shut the heavy door behind them Dancer leaned her small slim body against Ikuo and whispered, “Patron told you something very important, didn’t he?”

  Before Ikuo could respond, she relayed a message from Ms. Tachibana, who had finally telephoned again. Guide was missing. When she called the police, they came to the residence and found Patron’s beloved Saint Bernard poisoned. First thing tomorrow morning, Ms. Tachibana told her, they had to return to Tokyo with Patron to deal with this emergency.

  They had dug up the glowing coals from underneath the ashes and rekindled the blackened firewood when Ms. Tachibana called a third time. He had had another stroke, she reported. Guide had been held prisoner in a secret hiding place, subjected to a rough interrogation, and then abandoned; the perpetrators had phoned in his whereabouts, and the ambulance crew had discovered Guide lying there alone.

  8: A New Guide

  1

  After Ikuo returned to Tokyo from their trip to the Nasu Plateau, he slept over in the office, phoning Kizu to tell him how freezing cold it had been in the mountains. Tokyo was in the midst of Indian summer, but by the next day it suddenly began to feel more like winter. The cold continued for a week. One day, when it felt like it might snow, Ms. Tachibana called Kizu. She had quit her job at the library earlier than she’d planned and was now working in Patron’s office. She told Kizu that Patron was going to be visiting Guide in the hospital and wondered if Kizu would accompany him.

  Kizu had already heard that Guide was expected to survive but that the chances he would regain consciousness were slim. Nor had Kizu seen Patron in quite some time. Ikuo, who was now diligently handling most phone calls, had told him that Patron was in a blue funk and had holed up in his bedroom study. Since it was members of the former radical faction who had interrogated Guide to the point where he had a stroke, the incident obviously stemmed from the Somersault, so it was natural enough that Patron felt responsible. Once more the media’s attention was focused on Patron, Guide, and the events of a decade before.

  Kizu headed off for the hospital in Ogikubo that Ms. Tachibana directed him to, and when he arrived at the nurses’ station of the cerebral surgery department he found Patron waiting there in his high collar, looking for all the world like a servant in some Chekhov play. Patron set off without even giving Kizu a chance to say hello. Kizu watched him from behind, his fleshy shoulders and chubby body walking briskly as he led Kizu to the ICU. Patron told him he was a bit concerned at how much simpler all the preliminaries were here at this hospital, compared to the hospital in Shinjuku; security here was, as Kizu could see, minimal. Patron and Kizu went into the five-person intensive care unit. Kizu had vaguely imagined what his own hospital room would look like later on, when he himself was on the verge of death, but this room was very different—much noisier than he’d expected.

  Guide was lying in the bed on the far right, his head swathed in bandages, two nurses bustling about him. Apparently they were having trouble getting the phlegm to drain correctly from the hole that had been opened in his throat. The head nurse spoke to the unresponsive Guide while she fixed the connection between the plastic tube and the machine it was attached to. The inhalation sounds were now louder, the patient’s breathing more pronounced, and Patron leaned his head back to look out the window. Kizu, too, gazed at the heavy clouds in the sky. The nurses finally unclogged the phlegm and, speaking words of encouragement to Guide, who of course couldn’t respond, began putting away the machine.

  Patron and Kizu were left alone with Guide, but before Kizu could walk over to stand at Guide’s left side, Patron went over, leaned close to Guide’s right cheek, and spoke to him.

  “Guide! Guide! Professor Kizu’s here. There’s so much more you wanted to discuss with him, didn’t you? Try to remember. Even if you can’t speak, try to remember! It’ll be good practice for when you can speak and can talk with him once more!”

  This struck Kizu as a bit theatrical. Still, he felt a power flowing out of Patron as he moved Guide’s hand closer to him, a power that might very well help in his recovery. The elbows of the two men were sticking out at angles, half their palms resting diagonally on the other’s, and when Kizu saw Guide’s large, dark, sinewy fingers wrap themselves around Patron’s fleshy pale ones, he knew that—at least in part—Patron’s message was getting across.

  Guide’s salt-and-pepper hair and skin gleamed cleanly from under the bandages that had been wrapped around him after his second operation. The wound from before was visible, his complexion flushed, his right eye engulfed in wrinkles. His left eye, in contrast, was wide open, but the pupil was unfocused. Guide’s usual darkly sharp dignity was gone; he looked like some clownish old man from the countryside.

  “Guide! Guide! Though your consciousness is asleep, the words are waiting to find a voice. If only you could interpret for me now! You put the visions I saw into words, but I can’t do a thing for you! You do realize Professor Kizu’s come to see you, don’t you? Guide?”

  Kizu could pictu
re words stacked up like out-of-focus, blood-smeared playing cards inside Guide’s head. Before long a large teardrop ran down Guide’s right cheek.

  At the same moment as Kizu, Patron noticed these tears. And the physical vitality that Kizu had found disconcerting in Patron disappeared, like thin ice melting away. Now his large face revealed a deep exhaustion, his unblinking eyes fixed on Guide’s tears. Again he spoke. “Guide, Guide,” he said, in a low, soothing voice, too preoccupied to worry about Kizu anymore.

  Patron’s complexion darkened suddenly, like the sun disappearing behind clouds. His previous vitality and ceaseless speech were now hidden, a transformation that struck Kizu as odd.

  Guide’s reddened, comical face twitched sporadically, and he slowly licked his chapped lips. Soon he fell asleep and began to snore lightly, the white of his left eye showing. Patron’s large head hung heavily; Kizu could see the thinning hair on top.

  Dancer, who’d come in unnoticed and was standing behind Kizu, reached out the ball of her thumb, wet with saliva, and closed Guide’s one open eyelid. Drawn by Patron’s pitiful look, Kizu turned around and watched as, still gazing down at Guide, she stuck her wet thumb in her mouth again and sucked it.

  Soon Dancer wiped her wet thumb on the paper apron each visitor was given, and straightened the clothes around Guide’s bare chest and legs. A steel ball the size of a tennis ball dropped down from the hem of his yukata, startling Patron and Kizu, but without a word, Dancer picked it up and showed them how it was used to strengthen one’s grip.

  She then spoke to Patron, whose back was hunched up.

  “Let’s all go back to the office now,” she whispered, and then explained things to Kizu in a composed voice. “Yesterday he was much better, and when the nurses called to him he made a V-for-victory sign, something he never does. Patron was ecstatic. But even today the doctors are amazed how strong his grip is. Try gripping his hand.”