Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  She looked alertly at the mister that was spraying disinfectant near the entrance of the ward. Kizu stuck his hands out toward it and misted his hands wet again. Guide’s right hand did squeeze Kizu’s hand back with a crude strength. Patron reached out and laid his plump palm on top of where the sharp joints of the two men’s hands touched.

  After this, they all headed back to the office. As Ikuo pulled up the minivan in front, Dancer, clearly the one in charge of their little group, straightened Patron’s muffler and coat collar.

  “You’ve been up and about since morning,” she said to Patron, “so I’d like you to rest for a while. I know you have things to talk about with Professor Kizu, but I want you to wait a little. Professor, you don’t mind waiting for a while in the living room, do you? Ikuo, you’ll give him a ride home later, right?”

  Patron acquiesced silently. If meeting Patron for the first time in so long wasn’t going to lead to any substantive discussion, Kizu felt he might as well have hailed a cab in front of the hospital and gone home alone. He didn’t mind waiting for a time, though.

  Since Guide suffered his calamity, the front gate of their residence had been bolted, so when he heard the van pull up Ogi came out to greet them and let them in. Supported on both sides by Dancer and Ogi as he walked into the house, Patron had none of the vitality he’d displayed in front of the nurses’ station; watching him leaning his entire weight on the two young people, Kizu was cut to the quick.

  2

  In the corner office, Ms. Tachibana was sorting the letters they’d received from people who’d learned of Patron’s new movement through newspaper reports of the incident involving Guide. When Kizu stopped by to ask her how the work was going, she merely said she’d taken over because Ogi was busy, her eyes remaining glued to the computer screen.

  After leading Patron to his bedroom study and letting Dancer take over from there, Ogi came back and stood beside Ms. Tachibana’s desk, but he didn’t seem to have anything new to report. Ikuo had parked the car in the garage, reset the bolt in the gate, and come to sit down beside Kizu, silent, his arms folded over his massive chest.

  Not long after, Dancer appeared in the office, leaned over, and whispered something into Ogi’s ear. Usually Ogi played the role of younger brother to Dancer, but now she seemed to rely on him more than the other way around. After listening to her, Ogi shared her confusion. Before long he spoke up.

  “If that’s what Patron wants, there’s nothing you or I can do about it. Why don’t you just tell him exactly what Patron said?”

  Dancer looked like a little girl who had been slapped in the face as she walked over to Kizu. “Patron says he wants you to be the new Guide,” she said.

  “New Guide? That’s pretty unexpected!” Rather than replying to Dancer, Kizu seemed to be muttering to no one in particular. His words were like a pebble thrown down a deep well without response, but after some time Dancer finally spoke up.

  “Whether you accept or not, you need to tell Patron yourself. I tell you, it’s been one surprise after another. I have no idea what to do.”

  Dancer’s voice was different from its usual piercing whisper, more muffled now; Kizu could catch a hint of her Hokkaido accent seeping through. Most likely this was the way she spoke when, years before, she was struggling to convince her family to let her study modern dance. At the same time, Kizu felt Ikuo’s tense gaze clinging to him.

  The person waiting for him, lying in bed, blanket and down comforter up to his chest, was neither the unusually vigorous person of the first half of their hospital visit nor the plainly exhausted person of the second half. Patron had a sort of composed strength about him now. He looked up at Kizu with distant eyes and, with a solemn movement of his head, motioned for Dancer to leave them.

  “In my new church,” he said, “I’d like you to succeed Guide in his work. To repay you, I’ll help you overcome the terrible thing that’s assailing you spiritually and physically.”

  Kizu answered at once, “If you have that kind of power, then you should fix Guide’s brain!”

  Patron didn’t react to these mean-spirited words but lamented instead, in a voice so full of grief it was comical, “Ah—if only I could!”

  Taken aback by Patron’s directness, Kizu felt deflated. Having lost his chance to continue by Kizu’s interruption, Patron looked away, a dark look on his brow. Then he pulled himself together and began to speak in a more prosaic way, quite the opposite of the enthusiasm with which he’d invited Kizu to take Guide’s place.

  “With Guide the way he is now, maybe I’m just an old man who can’t do a thing, and maybe I should just forget about this new movement and spend the rest of my days taking care of Guide. Isn’t that what you’re thinking? When we read R. S. Thomas that topic came up, as I recall. I’d like to talk with Guide about it, though I have no idea if he’d understand what I say. At the time of the Somersault we’d already imagined that sort of future for us.

  “But Professor, with Guide in the hospital, I can’t just abandon my role as Patron and spend my time pushing him around in his wheelchair as he goes through rehabilitation; Guide was injured facing up to a group that held him against his will and put him through a trumped-up trial to get him to admit that the Somersault was a mistake.

  “I don’t think he’ll ever be able to communicate with us again. But even if he were to die without regaining full consciousness or the ability to talk, he’s fulfilled his mission in life. He has suffered as a true prophet.

  “But I have to live on. Having done the Somersault and now unable, without Guide, to put my visions into words, I still have the audacity to keep on living. But if I just grow decrepit and senile and die, my life will have been in vain. And then what would being Patron amount to? Nothing—just one big joke.

  “Only after I’ve lived a life befitting Patron do I want to die. Those people held Guide prisoner, gouging out what wounded him most, a more abominable act than actually killing him. That being the case, I want to rise up again to the point where they have to choose me as their target.”

  Patron turned sharp birdlike eyes to Kizu.

  “Professor, please. You don’t need to say a thing. You can be a Guide who just paints!” Patron implored. “You can express things in a way I cannot. Your painting can clarify what my visions mean. If you turn your eyes in the direction of my beliefs, that’s enough. With Guide in the shape he’s in now, can you really refuse? I have only a handful of young people around me. Other than you, what mature person can I count on?”

  “I don’t know if I’ll be able to fill the role, but I’ll do my best until he recovers,” Kizu replied, overcoming his nervousness. “I’ve been stopping by the office every once in a while, but I’ll come more often. I can be your partner.”

  “Ikuo can drive you back and forth,” Patron said, his eyes sleepy like those of a contented bird. “Now, would you mind asking Dancer to bring me my sleeping pills?”

  Kizu returned to the living room and told Dancer, who was still standing beside the desk with Ogi, what Patron had said to him. As the young man and woman listened, he noticed for the first time a shared expression on their faces, like brother and sister. Kizu also noticed, in Ikuo’s attitude as he looked up at him, that all three of them agreed with the decision Kizu had come to. Ms. Tachibana, too, in her unobtrusive way, looked content.

  As powdery snow swirled around him, Kizu stood on the pavement waiting for Ikuo to bring the minivan around. The snow was different from the light flakes that had fallen in the United States at his East Coast university and had the soft, easy-melting quality of snow he remembered from his childhood. He felt a tinge of nostalgia. He got in beside Ikuo and looked up at the snowy sky, his heated mind reviewing his conversation with Patron.

  Patron had said that if Kizu undertook the role of Guide he would help him overcome his spiritual and physical crisis; Kizu smiled coolly at the thought. He’s not just dealing with my soul, he mused, but maybe sensed the reoccurrence of
my cancer as well. He felt his cheeks tense up, though, at the memory of his huffy, mean response.

  “There’s something different about you,” Ikuo said. “You seem—I don’t know—cold, I guess. I’ve never seen you smile like that before. Have you changed your mind?”

  “I’m smiling at myself, not at other people,” Kizu replied.

  “If you see Patron’s proposal as too painful, I can understand that,” Ikuo said, “but I was really keeping my fingers crossed you’d accept. I know you weren’t too enthusiastic about the idea when Dancer first brought it up, and I was afraid it was going to be a problem. I was afraid you’d feel forced to go back to America, and I didn’t want to end up having to choose between you. If you left Japan, Patron would lose his new Guide, but we’d be completely lost as well.”

  “But I don’t have any of the qualities to make Patron want to rely on me,” Kizu said. “I don’t know anything about his earlier teachings, even if he has renounced them. And when I think of Guide, still such a unique spirit despite his condition, I don’t think I understand him, either.”

  “You’ve only known Patron a short time, but the two of you have had some pretty deep conversations,” Ikuo said. “Knowing you, Professor, I imagine that if you take on the role of the new Guide you’ll use the opportunity to study Patron more. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, but I really want you to ask Patron why he began calling himself the savior of mankind—whether fake or otherwise. I wanted to ask him myself, but our trip to Nasu Plateau was cut short.”

  “If it’s so important to you, I’ll do it. I need to ask Patron about Guide, too, why he called himself the prophet of mankind—fake or otherwise.”

  In the faint light of the snowy sky, an unexpected smile rose, like a cheerful mask, to Ikuo’s angular, deeply chiseled features. Kizu had no idea how he was interpreting his response but didn’t pursue it further. Staring out at the thickening snow lashing the windshield, he began to feel a decided softness coming from Ikuo. Not that Ikuo’s soldierly frame or muscles softened, it was rather that something inside was seeping out. When he turned to Ikuo, the young man’s faint smile was gone, replaced by a relaxed, youthful expression.

  Ever since he had first met Ikuo at the athletic club and invited him to pose for him at his apartment, and even more so after they began a sexual relationship, Kizu sensed the tension draining from the young man from time to time. But still Ikuo’s attitude toward him, and probably toward everyone, contained, deep down, something hard and unrelenting; when Kizu had been about to write the letter to Patron for him, he had thought about how the incident he’d talked about, about God calling him as a child, had affected his life ever since.

  Not that Kizu believed everything that Ikuo revealed to him. Kizu didn’t believe that in this day and age there was a God who would let a young boy have such a mystical experience—not that, for God, such a concept as this day and age was relevant. Nevertheless, it was true that after Ikuo quit college, the conviction that he’d had this experience was the cornerstone of his life. When Kizu first saw Ikuo at the athletic club he had the look of a lone jungle fighter. In his rugged features and hard body, Ikuo’s expression was far removed from the soft, gentle look Kizu had often seen in people of the same age after he returned to Japan. This didn’t mean that Ikuo had anything in common with the dry and prosaic Vietnam vets that Kizu sometimes taught in the United States; this young man’s heart was full of a yearning that wouldn’t allow him to settle for being dull and ordinary.

  At first Kizu had sensed something of the wild animal in Ikuo. A true loner, he drew no one else to him, but his exterior, which rejected everyone and everything, hid something quite extraordinary. Even though they were lovers the hard armor that was very much a part of Ikuo was still in place. But now, with Kizu’s acceptance of the role of new Guide, came that faint smile, that unexpected softness. He remembered that Dancer had looked displeased at Patron’s proposal, but later, after Kizu had emerged from the bedroom study, both she and Ogi accepted the idea.

  Kizu considered again what it would mean to be the new Guide. And when he recalled something Patron had said, it was almost enough to revive the faint smile Ikuo said he’d never seen before: You don’t need to say a thing. You can be a Guide who just paints! But hadn’t Patron said Guide was a man of language, who fulfilled his role by speaking? How could Kizu possibly convey Patron’s visions to others through painting?

  Kizu tried to imagine serving as the new Guide, but he couldn’t imagine himself taking a proactive stance. He’d follow Patron’s lead and do what he could as a painter. But painting what? Surely Patron didn’t think he would do kamishibai illustrations for a storytelling session, did he?

  Eventually, the agitation he’d felt talking to Patron died down, though there was no doubt in his mind that he was beginning a new stage of his life, a stage that, thankfully, included Ikuo.

  3

  The next morning when Kizu awoke, it had stopped snowing. It was not yet seven, but he was too excited to stay in bed. With Ikuo busy every day in the office, housecleaning duties were once more his, and he spent time straightening up the living room. He didn’t use the powerful American-made vacuum cleaner that came with the apartment, though, for fear that it would disturb the neighboring residents. Sensing a flutter outside, he turned to look and saw that the powdery snow had begun to fall again. Kizu’s sensitivity to peripheral movement seemed to him a good indicator of his present state of mind, though he had no idea why he felt this way.

  After cleaning up his studio for a while, he looked out past the veranda to where, down the grassy slope, the surface of the pond had turned white. A thin layer of ice had covered the pond, with snow now piled on top. Snow lay, too, on the thick branches of the leafless, darkly exposed wych elm. A flock of wild birds that normally would have been chased off by even a sprinkle of rain were oblivious to the powdery snow, occasionally shaking their bodies as each protected its spot on the branch. Kizu realized that the snow had had something to do with the stirring he felt deep inside himself.

  The sun came out in the afternoon and the snow that had been clinging to one side of the wych elm’s trunk and the nearly horizontal parts of the thick branches melted away. All the snow on the pond’s surface had disappeared, but no ripples disturbed the pond, so it was still frozen. The snow was gone from the lawn, too, just some white spots here and there on the withered grass between the trees. During the morning the awareness he felt inside him was mixed with darkness, and he recalled, for the first time in a long while, the phrase tingle with excitement, but in the afternoon the clarity of the sky and the clouds seeped into his heart.

  He couldn’t help but consider the new and difficult task that confronted him, but he felt he had sufficient energy saved to face up to it, so his feelings were, to use the term his students in New Jersey used, entirely positive. The clouds spreading outside his window were not the beginnings of a storm but rather a watercolor painted across the bright sky.

  In the upper third of a Wattman F6 sketch pad he held vertically, Kizu sketched glittering white clouds and a light blue sky infused with light; in the lower fourth of the paper a totally leafless woods and a range of twiglike branches. He left the middle of the page blank. He wasn’t clear about this space at all, but his years of experience as an artist told him it was significant; this sketch, still five-twelfths empty, would only become a work of art when this blank area was filled in. He wasn’t going to use what he saw outside his window, though. The space was just the right size for his imagination to fill in with something suited to the sky above and the woods below.

  After a while Kizu began filling in the remaining areas with a soft pencil sketch of two standing figures facing away from the viewer. He switched to watercolors for the figures and added many vertical banks of clouds to the light-blue sky.

  What Kizu had drawn was himself and Ikuo standing there and, in a way somehow not unnatural for two grown men, holding each other’s
hand. In the painting Kizu was dressed as he was now, in faded black cotton trousers, a wool shirt, and a wine-colored sweater. Ikuo wore jeans and an oversized blue shirt with sleeves that were too long. On their feet were something you’d never need in this city, the kind of ankle-high lace-up winter boots you might find a U.S. artist in the Northeast wearing.

  In a much more natural way than the fanciful images conjured up by run-of-the-mill surrealists, the figures of Ikuo and Kizu in the painting were walking off into the bright sky. Kizu realized he’d been taking Patron’s trance world quite optimistically, hoping that he and Ikuo could stroll off into it in the near future. Even if you viewed this vision as his unconscious rising up to support his decision to become the new Guide, it was such a simplistic view he knew he himself, not Ogi, was the innocent one.

  Construction work outside the apartment building that afternoon prevented people from parking in front, so Ikuo called him from down the road where he had parked. Kizu walked one block, to where Ikuo was waiting outside the car, and rested his hand on the young man’s shoulder in lieu of a greeting, only to feel an inorganic coldness rising up at his touch, as if denying any affinity between them. Even if the young man’s body was only transmitting the outside temperature, Ikuo was more taciturn than the day before. Intermittently in the course of their relationship Kizu had felt that they were going backward, to the time when they first met—and today was one of those days. Ordinarily he would have taken the watercolor he’d painted that day out of its cardboard tube and shown it to Ikuo while they were waiting for a light to change. But today the timing was off.

  “When you called a while ago, you said you’d just driven Dancer to the hospital for Guide’s rehabilitation. Is he strong enough to undergo rehabilitation? Is there a chance he’ll recover his strength?”