Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  Returning to his university in New Jersey, Kizu was confronted with something else unexpected: The female head of his research institute announced he’d been accused of sexual harassment.

  A year before his sabbatical, one of the students in Kizu’s fall seminar was a woman exchange student from Japan who had an unusually confrontational attitude. Kizu became really aware of her when, as they were approaching the end of the fall term without her having said anything of substance in the seminar, he asked her if she might make a presentation at their next class. He asked this in front of the mailboxes at the institute’s office where he ran across her; one of his colleagues was right beside them, using the copy machine. She replied in English in a loud voice, as Kizu noticed a moment too late, so that the American professor wouldn’t misunderstand their discussion.

  “I’m an auditor in your class, Professor, so I’m not obliged to write reports or make presentations. Please don’t mistake me for one of your lazy students!”

  The young woman was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, of medium height but well built, someone who—at least from the perspective of Kizu’s generation—represented a completely new type of Japanese. Her face, though, with its dark hair, pouty little lips, and Fuji-shaped brow, was definitely old school. Kizu had published a paper once in the university bulletin on women’s faces in ukiyoe prints, classifying them as unassuming plain types and demoness types, and he was once again drawn to this woman and her classic features.

  The next semester she didn’t sign up for Kizu’s seminar, but one day when there was still snow on the campus she showed up at his office during lunch break; she explained that one of the male students was bothering her, which is why she couldn’t attend his seminar, but she had some of her own artwork in her apartment that she’d like to show him, she said, inviting him with a modesty quite unlike her previous outburst. Kizu happened to be free that afternoon, so he went with her in her Citroën to her place, where she lived with a roommate; Kizu was surprised to find it was an apartment in the center of town, outfitted with a concierge. The living room and kitchen weren’t so big, but on the ceiling of her bedroom was a tempera painting in arabesque style of flowers and birds she’d done herself, which meant that even if she hadn’t purchased the apartment she was living there under a long-term lease. Her roommate was out on a date until late, so Kizu enjoyed the chirashizushi she prepared for him and looked over several tableaus. These also depicted birds and flowers. Kizu sat on the cloth-covered sofa while the young woman sat in front of him on the floor, holding the paintings she wanted to show him, dressed in a black wool outfit with a short skirt that revealed her fleshy thighs, though he pretended not to notice.

  That was all that happened. Soon after, Kizu happened to be in New York City, and since the university had been unable to procure a model for him, he stopped by an adult store to buy a video so he could get an eyeful of young black and Hispanic men. He spied a three-pack of condoms for sale in a box near the register, mixed in with aphrodisiacs and sex toys, and bought it. But the woman never invited him back to view her artwork.

  The particulars in the sexual harassment charge were these: First, that he came over to her apartment on a night her roommate was out, saying he’d take a look at her paintings; second, having carelessly mentioned the painting on her bedroom ceiling, she was forced to show it to him; third, he made a suggestive joke about the uncensored book of ukiyoe prints she had on a bookshelf; fourth, as Kizu sat on the sofa, he looked at her inner thighs as she crouched on the floor in front of him; and fifth, during this time, he intended her to see that something was coming alive in his trousers.

  As Kizu sat opposite the head of his research institute, he not only had to read the e-mails the young woman had submitted, he had to listen to the tape recording she’d secretly made of their conversation that night.

  Kizu was so deflated that the institute head, who at first had had a fretful look on her face, burst out laughing; listening to Kizu’s constrained way of talking on the tape, she said, and the woman’s relaxed voice, he hardly came across as overly macho.

  In fact, what really gave Kizu a shock was how pitifully immature he sounded. He was seeing himself as a precocious child talking with adults about grown-up topics, the tape mercilessly revealing how, deep down, he hadn’t matured at all since those early postwar days back in his home village.

  If that fidgety middle-aged character on the tape had had an ounce of courage and propositioned the woman, Kizu knew he would have been turned down flat. Suddenly, sitting there in front of the institute head, Kizu found a new self springing up, a new Kizu who acted as he never would have before. He admitted that everything the young woman had listed had probably taken place, agreed he was in the wrong as far as what she’d interpreted as sexual harassment, and announced his decision to resign his teaching position.

  The head of the institute, originally sympathetic, now turned indignant. As Kizu left her office, the feeling struck him that he had come back to the university from Tokyo for the sole purpose of receiving this punishment, and he said to himself, silently, I’ve done an act of repentance!

  A second event awaited Kizu in America, one that took place in the hotel he was staying at in New York the night before his flight back to Tokyo. That morning Kizu woke with his usual uncomfortable feeling in his gut, exhausted from having forced himself to get back to sleep any number of times. In order to suppress what this exhaustion had triggered—the headlong rush of his mind into darkness—one of the pieces of wisdom he’d picked up in his advancing old age was that it was best to get up and get his body moving.

  So Kizu got up out of bed, as if hurrying off somewhere, and went into the sitting room of his hotel suite, a room partitioned off simply from the bedroom by a white-framed door with a square mirror set on it—the Japanese owner had come up with double-door construction, which had proved quite popular, according to what Kizu had heard from a woman in a painting class for expatriate Japanese he used to teach. Beyond the curtain, which he’d left open the night before, a seventy-story high-rise building with a green-and-white crown structure on top blocked his view. Below a broad layer of clouds that covered the sky, darker clouds moved, and a fine rain was falling. The raindrops fell a long, long way down. What would it look like if it snowed? Kizu wondered. And just then he discovered that it was snowing, fine flakes swirling in the air. This wasn’t a particularly remarkable scene. The snow lacked force, as if it might peter out at any moment. But Kizu saw in the movements of his heart and the appearance of the snow a synchronicity he took as a sign. Inside his chest he felt something, like a bulb sprouting.

  Two men—one given the suspicious name Savior, the other called Prophet, abandoned their followers, did a Somersault, and for ten years languished in what they termed hell. And now one of them was restarting a movement calling on people to repent: to make them deeply aware of, and prepared for, the end of the world.

  He and Ikuo had joined the movement. And now Kizu had even settled his estate and given up his job. But hadn’t this duo of Patron and Guide misunderstood their roles? The real Patron was actually Guide, who’d been taunted by his former followers and tortured until he died an agonizing death. The surviving Patron had been nothing but a puppet, a springboard for Guide’s mystical philosophy. Didn’t this account for the awful shock that Guide’s misfortune and death brought on?

  If that were true, it meant the new movement they were starting was without a leader, only this person called Patron and himself, a makeshift new Guide without the least hint of mysticism about him. Bereft of their true leader, they weren’t even able to comprehend the meaning of Guide’s sacrifice and could only stagger about pointlessly.

  The snow had stopped. The flakes had fallen past the fortieth floor, where Kizu stood, but by street level had changed to rain. With the blanket of clouds lightening and the darker clouds gone, the rain, too, seemed about to clear up. To the left of the narrow building directly across from him there w
as a smaller building, clouds of steam rising from it, beyond which he could see the trees in Central Park, with their fresh spring foliage. Moving his eyes as if following along with a soft-tipped watercolor brush, Kizu continued to gaze at the clumps of leaves propped up by the young, uncertain trunks of the trees.

  12: Initiation of New Believers

  1

  The reporter who covered the memorial service press conference had sent Kizu a fax telling him where to find a group of women believers who had left the church after the Somersault and were now living a communal life in the southwest part of Kanagawa Prefecture. So on a Saturday afternoon near the end of April, Kizu set off for this suburban bedroom community, one that still had a scattering of rice fields, about an hour from Shinjuku on the Odakyu express train.

  The believers occupied a closed elementary school they’d converted into a residence. They numbered some forty people, mothers and children as well as single women, all living a quiet, bucolic life. Thinking he’d just check out the environment these women lived in, Kizu set off with Ikuo at the wheel of his Ford Mustang. The wooden schoolhouse was at the base of a line of low gentle hills, but three-quarters of the school grounds had been dug up and was enclosed as a large-scale plastic-covered greenhouse. Kizu and Ikuo parked their car on the road that ran along the former school grounds and set off on foot.

  In the narrow space left in front of the school building, some children were playing in a sandbox outfitted with a horizontal exercise bar, a scene that brought on a nostalgia that pierced Kizu to the quick. There were seven or eight children, upper elementary school or junior-high kids by the look of them, all of them dressed in simple plain clothes—very different from the aggressive, gaudy colors Kizu was used to seeing each time he returned to Japan—as if a half century had been ignored and he was swept back into the colors he remembered from his childhood.

  “It’s like a black-and-white movie,” Ikuo said.

  The children played without saying a word. Ikuo strode from the path beside the greenhouse over to the sandbox, and Kizu, hesitating, followed suit. As he got closer he noticed that the children were gazing at a line of ants in the corner of the box. Very different from the usual overbearing attitude of kids who haven’t quite decided whether or not to squash a bug, tormenting it until they did, these children showed an unexpected reverence for small living creatures.

  The children didn’t seem on their guard at the approach of these two strangers, nor did they show any friendly interest. The older children especially seemed to be purposely ignoring them. After a while Ikuo rested his hands on the horizontal bar, too low for him, and pulled himself upright on it. He tucked in his legs, pushed his elbows tight against his chest, and slowly rotated around the bar five or six times. The younger children looked at him with open admiration. Kizu, too, found himself looking with appreciative eyes at Ikuo, from his thighs to the tips of his feet, as he held his body stationary, stretched out vertically upside down. Beyond Ikuo’s upside-down body, Kizu caught sight of flower petals fluttering down from the tops of hills; looking more carefully, he saw they were wet snowflakes.

  Kizu remembered the scene from his hotel window high above the New York streets, snow vanishing in the air. Sometimes he wondered what he’d been thinking about that morning. Now that he considered it again, he felt that maybe he’d made this journey here to the countryside to grope for some meaningful clue. If the snow across the ocean had been a sign, this out-of-season snow here in Japan must be one too. The children were now looking up at the snowy sky. The older children stood off to one side in a clump, but even the younger kids standing close by were calm and well mannered. All of them looked entirely relaxed as they gazed up at the swirling snow.

  Ikuo silently lowered himself from the bar—his controlled landing as casual as the attitude of the children—and he and Kizu walked back toward the car, leaving the children behind, all gazing up at the snowy sky, some of the older children whispering among themselves.

  “Boy, oh, boy,” Ikuo murmured.

  Kizu knew he didn’t mean the unexpected snow. Ikuo felt oppressed by the children’s natural dignity. Kizu was about to express his agreement when they found, standing next to their car and waiting for them, oblivious to the snow, a short, solidly built middle-aged woman. Continuing their own conversation was out of the question.

  Kizu surmised that it was one of the children’s mothers, a representative of this commune that, while he’d only caught a glimpse of it, was obviously quite tidy and organized, who’d come out to challenge these suspicious-looking intruders.

  Kizu didn’t catch sight of anyone looking out the line of first- or second-story windows of the schoolhouse, glass windows whose gleaming well-polished look contrasted with the old window frames, but apparently the report of their presence had spread among the residents. As Kizu and Ikuo walked on against the blustery wind and snow, the woman stood there at a corner they had to turn. She’d been looking down until they approached, but now, quite suddenly, she spoke out in a charged, emotional voice.

  “This is a private road. The land was originally donated to the town by my husband’s grandfather, and after the school closed it was sold. I’m paying taxes on it. And I can’t have you parking your car here.”

  “I’m very sorry,” Kizu said. “I thought it was a public road.”

  “If it were a public road there’d be even more reason not to park!” the woman said vehemently. With stubby fingers she brushed away the snow-flakes that clung to her curly reddish-brown hair and her flushed face. “I saw you watching the children. If you try to take any photographs, my husband says he’s going to come over; he’s been watching you from the farm. Rubberneckers and the media have stopped coming here, and the mothers and children don’t want to be bothered. But now you TV people come trying to stir things up! Why can’t you leave us alone? We’ve never bothered the people in this neighborhood. The constitution guarantees freedom of religion, you know!”

  Kizu was finally able to get a word in edgewise. “So you share the same beliefs?”

  With a look that was neither surprise nor fear, the woman stared directly at him for the first time. “What? Don’t come around making false accusations! I’ve lived here most of my life—why would I adopt the religion of people who’re just temporary residents?”

  The woman sputtered to a halt, and Kizu himself was so flustered Ikuo intervened.

  “The Professor and I are working for the gentleman who used to be the leader of this little community. We’re not connected with any TV station or weekly magazine. Their former leader is concerned about what kind of life the group has been living after they became independent of the church. We just came to observe, not to bother anyone.”

  “By former leader, you mean the one who did the Somersault? These women aren’t angry about that anymore. There are some profound reasons for this, apparently, though I have no idea what. … So he’s worried about them, is he?”

  Her words were somewhat feeble now. Apparently a basically kindhearted person, she seemed to regret having scolded these people who had come from so far away, and shook her lightly snow-covered head to get her pluck back.

  “Well, if that’s the case, with this unexpected snow and all, why don’t you just rest here for a while? This is a private road, so your car will be fine! They’re packing lilies in boxes inside the greenhouse. Maybe you’d like to take a look?”

  She seemed so apologetic it would have been rude to turn down her suggestion. Kizu hadn’t planned to stay, but he looked at the woman, her skin roughened by gooseflesh, and nodded, so she hurried ahead. By the time they arrived at the greenhouse closest to the road, the children in the sandbox who’d been gazing up at the snow had formed a line and were quietly filing toward the building.

  The old woman went in a step ahead of them, past what looked like the door of a warehouse, and Kizu and Ikuo followed, brushing the already melting snowflakes from their heads, chests, and shoulders. The children s
tood at one corner of the greenhouse in swirling snow that was coming down harder than ever. If they’d been seeking shelter from the snow, the only place to find it around the greenhouse, a structure made of thick metal piping covered with tough tentlike plastic sheeting, was under the eaves at the entrance. The children, though, didn’t seem to have come over in order to get out of the snow. As he watched them standing there through the steadily falling snow, their expressions and even the outlines of their faces now blurred, a slight sense of the unearthly was added to Kizu’s earlier impression. Ikuo, too, had to look away.

  2

  They went inside the greenhouse, only slightly warmer than outside, and found that they had to walk quite some distance to where the packing operation was under way, watching their step as they moved through a maze of obstacles. All sorts of objects, large and small, were arbitrarily piled up on the path. They stumbled over what at first appeared to be small empty boxes but turned out to be as heavy as bricks. On both sides of the path the equipment required to grow the plants wasn’t just laid out flat; they bumped their heads and shoulders on various pipes. For outsiders it was a veritable labyrinth. Kizu found himself concerned, too, about the strange little line of children who followed their movements through the three-tiered window in the plastic covering the greenhouse.

  People were working in the greenhouse in a clearing cut out of the long line of cultivated plants. Hemmed in on both sides by equipment, some twenty women were seated, busy at work, on top of a platform covered with mats. This particular greenhouse seemed to be in an in-between stage between cultivation and harvesting; all that could be seen in back were several lines of dark green leaves forming a frame in the cultivating apparatus used to grow flowers. On this side were the women, seated in a large circle with mounds of lilies in front of them that they were packing into long cardboard boxes.