Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “Still,” Kizu said, “even if they criticized how their colleagues let Guide die, they used to be part of the radical faction, so aren’t they still upset because of the Somersault? If Patron doesn’t apologize for the Somersault at the memorial service, and doesn’t criticize his own actions, then what…?”

  “When I heard the guards for the service were former members of the radical faction the thought occurred to me too,” Ogi said, “that if Patron plays dumb regarding the Somersault there might very well be trouble. When I mentioned that to Ikuo, he went over to discuss things with them, and apparently they came to some kind of understanding.”

  “I know bringing this up won’t get us anywhere, but what if their understanding with Ikuo is just a ruse and they’re planning to take over the memorial service and lynch Patron?” Kizu said, as he glanced around inside the side gate. “We’d be playing right into their hands. I mean, they’re the only potentially violent group at the service.”

  “Dancer asked Ikuo the same thing. He said if it came to that, he’d stand up to them and defend Patron himself, and she was satisfied. What I’m hoping is that Patron’s sermon will go over well, not just with the former radical faction but with the women’s group you and Ikuo visited. We have limits on the number of participants, so we weren’t able to invite anyone from the Kansai headquarters, the group that continued to run the religious corporation. The rest of the people coming are individual participants. Professor, did you help prepare Patron’s sermon for today?”

  “I did,” Kizu replied, “but I imagine he’ll end up mostly improvising, even though his meetings with me have been like miniature model sermons. The only thing I’ve done consciously to help him is to check some of the quotes from the Bible and elsewhere.”

  One of the men smoking by the wall took a walkie-talkie out of his pocket, spoke into it, and came back. In the broad street outside, a single large tourist bus was slowly pulling up to the curb with one of the security staff guiding it, also with a walkie-talkie in hand. He walked over to where Ogi and Kizu were and asked if they’d allow these participants, who had overestimated the amount of time they’d be stuck in traffic, to come in early. As Ogi refused their request, Kizu saw a side of him he’d never seen before. “Have them find a place near the moat to park and let them eat their lunches a bit early,” Ogi instructed the guard.

  The tourist bus started off again, the clump of children in front looking out the window at them. It was the women’s group Kizu had visited with Ikuo. The older girl who had led the line of children off after their prayers was among them, waving something that looked like a lily as it caught the faint white light. It was a hand bell. Her fingers rested on the inside to keep it from ringing.

  2

  In the meeting hall for the memorial service, a room combining the lounge and the dining room of the apartment building, there were already over three hundred and fifty participants, including the organizers. The women’s group were the only ones who had brought their children with them. Only they and the former members of the radical faction in the security detail were followers from before the Somersault; the rest were new converts from the past ten years, people Ogi had contacted after they had sent individual letters to Patron. One example of the latter was Ms. Tachibana, who’d brought along her mentally challenged younger brother. Ms. Asuka was there as well, recording the proceedings with her video camera.

  After escorting Patron to his apartment and going down to check on the meeting hall, Kizu was asked by Ogi to take still photos of the event. Ogi clearly wanted to give him a role that would allow him to walk freely about the hall, not under the restrictions imposed by the security detail. Ogi added that, if things got out of hand, he and the others would whisk Patron to safety, while Kizu was to take refuge as quickly as he could in his apartment.

  During their short exchange, the participants had lined up in the corridor beside the lawn on the south side of the building and were filing inside. Ms. Tachibana was there, along with her brother, his handsome, even solemn features set off by fixed eyes behind thin-framed glasses; a rather flamboyant woman in her mid-thirties was walking with them. When Ogi spotted her he flushed red in apparent consternation.

  Kizu and the others were in the unused laundry room, watching the line of people through the frosted glass window. Dancer quickly noticed Ogi’s reaction. It was clear she was interested.

  The time was soon approaching for the service, so Kizu and Dancer escorted Patron down to the elevator lobby. Kizu noticed that Patron was dragging his right leg ever so slightly, and as they descended to the basement, Dancer supported Patron’s back. They walked past the bicycle racks and the laundry room. When they came to the heavy door leading to the meeting room, they could sense the mass of people waiting there, even though there were no voices coming from the other side. All the participants had taken their seats, but they knew that Ogi, who was in charge of the itinerary, would want to stay on track, and it was five minutes before the scheduled start.

  Kizu turned to Patron and asked about an attack of gout that had begun a week before.

  “No, it doesn’t hurt anymore,” Patron replied, pulling himself away from some other thought that preoccupied him. “The inflammation’s gone, just the embers left…. A long time ago, when I had my first attack of gout, Guide explained—very coldly, I thought—how it starts with the base of your big toe, moves to your shin, goes to your waist, and then reaches your heart. It’s already gotten to my shin. At first it doesn’t hurt so much, but at the end it spreads quite fast. I don’t have much time.”

  Patron straightened up from the concrete wall he’d been leaning against to take the weight off his leg. Dancer, her paper-thin skin pale from excitement, took out a brush and tidied the collar of his midnight-blue jacket. Ogi opened the door to greet them, and Patron walked into the meeting hall, not dragging his leg at all.

  Looking at Patron from behind, Kizu saw a relaxed man used to public speaking but with a touch of nerves. Perhaps out of concern for Patron’s bad leg, Dancer had set up the podium on the same level as the seats. Head down, Patron proceeded past the front row of chairs that pressed up close. Dancer and Kizu went over to stand in front by Ogi and Ikuo. Patron rested both hands on the podium, apparently taking a moment in prayer. Then he raised his head. A deep sigh wafted over the packed assembly.

  Patron thrust his chest out and stood silently facing the audience. With a brusque but dignified movement he turned to gaze at the photograph of Guide and the high vase with its branches of dogwood flowers in full bloom that were behind him. Then he turned back to face the audience and spoke for the first time.

  “Thank you all for coming here to this service in memory of Guide. In the years after the Somersault, until Guide was cruelly murdered, he and I were always together. For Guide and myself this was a time when we fell into hell. The most painful aspect of our hell was that during those ten years I never once had a major trance, and as a consequence Guide was unable to interpret any visions for me. We existed in a silent darkness. The kind of scene displayed here was over. Without recovering his health, Guide was lost to me.”

  Patron fell silent again and turned back to the photograph behind him. It was a snapshot of the two of them sitting in armchairs in Patron’s study. Patron looked absentminded, as if recovering from an illness, while Guide, his hair dark and luxuriant, was leaning toward Patron.

  Kizu looked around the hall. The group of women he’d visited on the hilly district along the Odakyu Line occupied seats in the center, a few rows back from the front, their quiet children with them.

  “Why were the two of us together during those ten years of hell?” Patron went on. “Because each of us had had his own hell decided for him, I believe. We did the Somersault together and fell into hell together. One of the after-effects—or, I should say, legacies—of the Somersault was that, as one condition of our respective hells, we had to see each other day after day. Then, after ten years passed and we were c
onsidering climbing up out of the abyss—in other words, when we were starting to grope toward a new beginning—Guide was killed. This was also exactly the time when I began to find signs that my trances were about to return.

  “Once more I felt banished to the wilderness. Even if in the near future my painful deep trances were to return, without Guide’s intervention I wouldn’t be able to put these visions into words. All my suffering would be in vain. Now I believe I’ve found a new Guide, though I am not saying that I’ve discovered someone to translate my visions. The Guide who was murdered was a unique individual, which indeed was one of the reasons he was killed.

  “Without him, when I return from my trances, emotionally and physically drained, I’m unable to extract information from the other side from my dark, muddled brain. A fear seizes me each and every day that, if I am unable to unravel it, this lump of information will disappear.

  “Once I lost Guide, I started reading, desperately searching through books that might show me how to create a line of communication between this side and the other, which is what I want the new Guide to help me do. One thing I read was the description from the Bible of Jesus on the cross. As long as Jesus could complete his work on the cross, he could leave the resurrection entirely up to God.

  “I quote from the gospel according to Mark.

  “At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’—which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

  “When some of those standing near heard this, they said, ‘Listen, he’s calling Elijah.’

  “One man ran, filled a sponge with wine vinegar, put in on a stick, and offered it to Jesus to drink. ‘Leave him alone now. Let’s see if Elijah comes to take him down,’ he said.

  “With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.

  “The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.”

  “I just can’t get the face of Jesus out of my mind, crying out in a loud voice as the earth turns dark. I realize it’s a tasteless parody, but if I use the name that the old-timers among you are used to and imitate Jesus, in this dark situation I’m in right now, I imagine in my shock and anger I would raise up a loud voice and cry, My Prophet, my Prophet, why have you forsaken me?”

  Resting both arms on the podium, Patron leaned backward, his face to the surprisingly large space above the underground lounge, and vehemently shouted this out. The windows facing the lawn were bright, and with the lights on at the other side of the room it felt to the participants as if an opaque membrane was hanging over them. The children sitting right in front of Patron all tucked in their chins as if something quite scary was about to happen.

  “I would like to quote once more from the Bible. This is from the first letter of John:

  “Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.”

  “This particular passage has caused me great pain. In the last trial, you did not leave us, and though you continued to belong to us, neither Guide nor I remained with you. And I became the antichrist—both when I fell into hell, and even now that I have resurfaced. Is there so much misery and pain for mankind that this is the only alternative—that I must be seen as the antichrist?

  “Guide was the only other person who agreed that I must tread this path. Together with me he did the Somersault and accompanied me to hell. This was his choice, I think, because he insisted to the end on the necessity of the Somersault. It was a Somersault where the antichrist appears, which signals the end of the world. That is the way I understand it now.”

  3

  Dancer, her narrow profile tucked in tightly, was whispering in Ogi’s ear. As if he’d been waiting for this, Ogi nodded. Both arms thrust out, he held out a sign that said THE FIRST HALF OF THE SERMON IS FINISHED AND THERE WILL NOW BE A COFFEE BREAK. Patron let his arms fall to the sides of the podium, and Dancer held her hand out and led him out of the hall for a while. By the time the audience had risen to their feet, tables had been set up in front and on both sides, with Styrofoam cups filled with coffee and small packets of cream and sugar, all done by the security squad, which had also stood guarding both sides of the door through which Patron had entered. The communal women’s group helped pass out coffee cups to the rest of the participants. The tall doctor’s widow with the unusual walk directed this operation.

  Kizu knew it was now customary in Japan for meetings and seminars to include a coffee break, but still he found it quite a sight to see things go so smoothly at a memorial service, especially one with over three hundred and fifty attendees. He looked around for the young woman with the facial scar and spotted her still sitting with the children, who were waiting patiently as she handed out little cartons of coffee from a large cardboard box.

  “They’re very well organized, aren’t they?” said the newspaper reporter Kizu knew from the press conference as he passed Kizu a Styrofoam container of coffee; standing by the wall, Kizu had been unable to take photographs of the goings-on or squeeze into line for coffee. “It turned out to be a good idea to have former radical-faction members work the security detail,” the reporter added, “though I admit I was skeptical when I first heard about it.”

  “It’s a lovely and solemn gathering, isn’t it?” said a woman beside him, dressed in subdued clothes and also sipping coffee. She was the woman who had been beside the dark-skinned reporter at the press conference. Today she had pinned to her chest the white flower given to distinguish the twenty people from the media who were in attendance.

  “I was quite surprised by how austere Patron was when he spoke,” the reporter said, “because during the Somersault he wasn’t that way at all. Guide was the gloomy one then, and Patron the clown.”

  “For a newspaper reporter, you talk too much,” the woman said reprovingly. “It doesn’t give us a chance to hear him speak.”

  Kizu sensed that she had heard something from her colleague about himself, so before she could ask for his take on the memorial service, he headed off to the door behind which Patron was waiting, receiving a nod from the ladies collecting the coffee cups. The guards standing there recognized Kizu and let him pass.

  Kizu cut through the bicycle rack area and went over to the elevators, where he found Ikuo leaning against the door of the elevator to keep it propped open and available. Ogi stood in front of him, showing him a pile of documents, with a pair of scissors on top, and Ikuo seemed to be checking something. Patron was sitting in a round chair next to the wall opposite. Dancer stood protectively close behind him, so he could lean back against her. She was telling him some of her ideas about how the second half of the sermon should go.

  “I understand how important the past is, but haven’t you said enough about it? I’d like you to talk about the future, what your plans are. The followers are hanging on your every word. Even the children are listening intently.”

  Patron didn’t directly respond to her, his eyes wide open as if he were attempting to see underwater. As Kizu approached, Patron asked him, “Professor, what do you think the audience thinks about the Somersault?”

  Kizu was at a complete loss. Patron was looking up, waiting for his answer, when Dancer stuck her head next to his shoulder and intervened.

  “Let’s begin the second half and talk about that later. You have to talk about your future activities now. Speak with confidence.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Patron began again, “with the ideas I mentioned in the first half of my sermon, I’m planning to begin a new movement. Having lost Guide, I feel even more compelled to get started without a moment’s delay. I can only hope and pray that something will take the place of Guide’s interpretations of
my visions—an ability we’ll never see again—as things appear to me through this movement.

  “No longer will I have a partner who can arrange into words the darkness of a human being’s soul—my own. I can only reach inside my slit-open belly and yank out something—I have no idea what—and preach the most nonsensical, incoherent ideas.

  “However, Guide taught me this: The only way I’ll find a path is by sticking my hands into that: dark place. That memory itself has been lost along with everything else we accumulated, and I can hear him accusing me of being nothing but a scarecrow filled with straw, which thoroughly discourages me.

  “Speaking of the word straw, when I was quite young, about the age of the children who’ve come here to remember Guide, I thought about this word. Since all of you little ones are listening carefully to what I say, I’d like to direct this to you. When I was a child, I was told the expression like a drowning man clutching at a straw. And this expression bothered me. To tell the truth, I hated it. It made me feel awful.

  “Imagine there’s a poor child who’s drowning in the river. And for whatever reason there are some adults standing on the bank just casually looking on. The child grasps at straws floating by. The adults burst out laughing. And finally, they step into the river and save the drowning child. That’s the scene I imagined. A long time afterward, I told Guide about this and he told me that he imagined it this way: When you open a drowned child’s hand you find he was clutching straw. He said he felt as if he’d actually seen this occur when he was a child.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, that’s the kind of person Guide was. If anything, it made me feel that I was the drowned child he saw, that he saw my cold wet hand clutching the straw and took pity on me. I have decided to restart my movement and build a new church. But if Guide is now like the drowning child, then through our new church I intend to discover the straw his fingers were clutching.