Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “That asinine reporter mentioned Bach and Mozart,” Ikuo said. “Would you let me listen to that tape again? I want to check to see what part of the piece he means by that.”

  Morio stood up, took the tape recorder out of a paper bag beside him, placed it on the table, and switched it on. As the music filtered out, Ikuo listened intently. He was silent, but, sensing his request, Morio rewound the tape and played it again.

  Ogi was surprised at what happened next. Ikuo pulled a chair out from under the piano that was by the window, sat down, unlocked the keyboard, and played a phrase from the music. His playing was confident, not the hesitant touch of someone feeling his way through a piece. After a pause he began to play a short melody that, to Ogi’s ears, sounded similar but different. After this, adding chords as he went, he painstakingly repeated Morio’s composition.

  “It’s not Bach, and certainly not Mozart either,” Ikuo said to Morio, after carefully closing the piano lid. “It’s entirely your own music.” His quiet voice contrasted with the tone of the piano he’d just played.

  “I think so too,” Morio said in a low voice, sounding as if he meant to encourage Ikuo more than himself.

  Ikuo locked the piano—he’d borrowed the key for this very reason from the building superintendent—and turned his fierce-looking face, all angles and depressions, to gaze out the window. With smooth motions, Ms. Asuka filmed the scene with her video camera, first shooting Ms. Tachibana and Morio, then Ikuo’s profile and the large trunk of the wych elm and the expanse of lawn. Before her camera turned in his direction, Ogi hurriedly wiped away a tear.

  It was getting late, so the three young people—Ogi, Ikuo, and Dancer—returned to the office in Seijo, where Dancer put Patron, who was tired and didn’t feel like eating anything, to bed, and then they set off for a Chinese restaurant in a narrow street along the Odakyu Line.

  Inside the restaurant was a staircase on the left leading to the second floor and a kitchen that jutted out to just below the staircase going off into the back of the restaurant; on the other side of the counter, on the right-hand side, were four tables along the wall. There were no other customers, and the three of them chose the table farthest from the entrance. Ogi and Dancer sat on one side of the table, Ikuo on the other, his bulk overwhelming them.

  Dancer had asked the reporters at the memorial service to fax her copies of their reviews for the next morning’s papers. Inside a paper bag she carried faxes from those who’d conscientiously kept their promise. As she examined them, they ordered beer to celebrate the successful conclusion of the service. Ogi began to talk about the piano with Ikuo. Ogi was surprised to know that Ikuo played, since there was an Ibaha piano in the annex where Guide had lived but Ikuo had never once shown any interest in it.

  Ikuo talked about his musical background, starting with how he took piano lessons from his mother, a graduate of Tokyo Arts Institute who’d been a music teacher in high school. His mother hadn’t encouraged him to take music further, though. Ever since he was small he’d shown an aptitude for science, always making models and conducting experiments of one kind or another. One other reason was the scary look he had had ever since he was a child, a face that was bound to unsettle any panel of judges if he were to take the stage as a pianist.

  “Ikuo, I think one can say you’re certainly a pianist in your fingers, they have such strength and beauty,” Dancer said; she’d just finished looking over the faxes and had caught only the tail end of the conversation.

  She passed around three articles about the memorial service that were to appear in the morning papers. Two of them were just short pieces discussing the obvious, how this church gained notoriety ten years ago when its leaders renounced its teachings and how at a memorial service to one of the leaders who had suddenly passed away the surviving leader had declared that he was starting his religious movement again.

  On the other hand, the dark-skinned reporter’s article appeared in the second section of the general news pages as a five-column sidebar. The headline read AFTER AUM SHINRIKYO, WHY HAS PATRON RETURNED? First there was an explanation of the Somersault by the two men, named Savior and Prophet at the time, and how this nipped in the bud the terrorist plans of the church’s radical faction. However, ten years later, while the two men, now known as Patron and Guide, were formulating their program for restarting their movement, the former radicals had kidnapped Guide, held him against his will, and roughed him up to the point of death.

  Yesterday, the article went on, a memorial service was held for Guide at which two noteworthy events took place: Patron announced that he was restarting his religious movement, and two groups of followers who had continued in the faith even after being abandoned by their leaders had both expressed their desire to participate. Among these was part of the former radical faction. Patron’s explanation for starting a new religion in the climate of intense criticism after the Aum Shinrikyo affair was quoted:

  When there is a great desire on the part of young people for spiritual salvation, nothing will be solved by crisis-management measures taken to crush new religious groups just because one group that absorbed these young people committed a blunder. Our attitude is to be open to any and all young people searching for salvation. With none of the established religions, including Buddhism and Christianity, offering this, I believe there is a place for us to care for these young people.

  “At any rate,” Ogi said, “I think he’s done a good job by focusing on the question of why now, after Aum, Patron is starting again.”

  “I talked afterward with the reporter who wrote this article,” Dancer said.

  “But there’s not a single line about what Patron said about the antichrist,” Ikuo said.

  “I made very sure he didn’t add that,” Dancer retorted. “As I spoke with the reporter on my cell phone, Patron was right beside me and he didn’t admonish me at all.”

  “But that was the most interesting part of the whole sermon,” Ikuo insisted.

  “We have to make sure Patron doesn’t have the rug pulled out from under him by the media, don’t we? I want to avoid having them use a word like antichrist.”

  This said, Dancer drained her glass of beer and poured herself another. Their order of gyoza rice came just at that moment and she tucked into it with relish. Before the three of them were half finished, she got up and went over to the counter to order a late-night snack to take home for Patron. But when she returned to their table her spirits were dampened.

  “The cook asked me if only one order of noodles and vegetables was enough. Because we always got two orders, one for Patron and one for Guide. Even though it was in all the papers, he still didn’t realize that Guide was murdered. And it was for people like him that Guide died!”

  Dancer didn’t even try to keep her voice down.

  5

  It was late at night by the time they got back to the office. Dancer checked to see that Patron was still up, and while she was reheating the food she’d brought back—taking care of his stomach before giving him his sleeping pills—Ogi printed out the e-mails they’d received. Ikuo read through them too. Ms. Tachibana wanted Ikuo, more than anyone else, to read the e-mail from her. It said:

  I think my brother was hurt by what happened at the press conference. We get these comments a lot, where people casually say that something he composed is like somebody else’s—they’re meant as praise for people with mental handicaps, but he finds them hard to comprehend. For him music just wells up naturally in him, like a birdcall, the sound of the wind, or a heartbeat.

  These days he doesn’t like letting other people listen to his music. The reason I urged him to play his tape, which he had a pianist record, was because of how important that piece is to both of us.

  Ever since we went to that small gathering with Patron so long ago when he spoke with such caring words about my brother, Patron’s been one of the main topics of conversation between us. My brother’s vocabulary is poor, but his grammar is correct and i
f you listen carefully you realize what he’s saying makes a lot of sense.

  Once, actually more like a memory coming back to me, I suddenly told Morio about one of his compositions, “Morio, it’s like we’re going into heaven, with Patron leading us by the hand.” And my brother said, very emphatically, “That’s right!” This was the piece that, even though Patron couldn’t join us, Morio was so excited about letting you all hear—only to be rewarded with those snide comments by the reporter.

  Ikuo, when you asked, on my brother’s behalf, which pieces of Bach or Mozart the reporter meant exactly, you can’t imagine how tense my brother was! My own heart was beating a mile a minute. And that cowardly reporter couldn’t say a thing.

  Because of what you did, though, for the first time in our lives our honor has been redeemed. What’s more, Morio really enjoyed the style in which you play. He can’t put it into words, but he likes a powerful performance that doesn’t have room for anything vague. More than anything else he dislikes playing that pussyfoots around. After we got home my brother was gazing for the longest time at his handwritten manuscript of that piece.

  Speaking for both of us, we couldn’t be happier that you’re working to help Patron. Hallelujah, hallelujah!

  Along with the e-mail came a fax of five handwritten compositions by Morio, each of them a page or two in length. Written in light pencil, the notes looking like a series of bean sprouts that were hard to decipher in places, and written over here and there in pen, the whole thing apparently had been checked by Ms. Tachibana. My brother really enjoyed your playing, so he’s sending over some other of his compositions, she noted.

  Ikuo carefully studied the sheets of music. “All three times I couldn’t catch it and just played that section in my own way, as anyone who’s studied music might. For Morio, of course, I wasn’t getting it. He was kind enough to overlook that, but that’s why he sent me the sheet music. All the pieces take off from that one piece, and if you study them together you can see there is a clear, connecting structure to them. Ms. Tachibana may think the music just seems to well up in him naturally, but in each successive piece the theme is developed in a carefully structured way.”

  Dancer had returned to the office and read the e-mail Ikuo had received, but just stood there without a word, her mouth slightly open, gazing off into space. What concerned her most among the messages was an e-mail from the person who had run the church after Patron and Guide stopped. He was an executive at one of the largest construction firms in the Kansai region, and though the headquarters didn’t send a group delegation to the memorial service he wrote that he was quite moved by what he heard by phone from members who had attended individually.

  His e-mail soon moved on to more practical matters, saying that, though he didn’t know the direction Patron’s newly founded movement would take, he assumed it would be based on a communal lifestyle. Perhaps, he suggested, the church could make use of some buildings in the woods of Shikoku that the Kansai headquarters owned. He added that he would be in Tokyo soon on business and could discuss it with Patron or, if that was out of the question, with members of his staff. All the Kansai people—who helped obtain the buildings, participated in refurbishing them, and were even now taking care of them—were hoping that Patron and Guide would rise again and make use of the facilities. We pray that our dream will become a reality, he wrote. Once more, let me express my deepest condolences on the passing of Guide.

  Their schedule for this very long day was now over, and Dancer, whose bed was in the small room diagonally across the hall from Patron’s—Ogi slept beside the entrance, Ikuo on the second floor of the annex—suggested that, since the studio was soundproof, Ikuo might like to try playing Ms. Tachibana’s brother’s compositions on Guide’s piano. Up till now Dancer had only shown an interest in the next morning’s newspaper articles and the e-mail from the church headquarters, and Ogi was surprised by her suggestion. Ikuo, too, seemed unsure if she was serious or not.

  But Dancer, straightening up the documents on the desk, along with the PC and other devices on it, turned to Ikuo, who hadn’t said anything and was about to leave, and repeated her offer, then went on to say, “When I met you when you were a child, I already felt there was something special about you. That model you made and were so gingerly carrying when it got caught in me—you didn’t know what to do. Those eyes that glared back at me weren’t the eyes of an ordinary child. A long time later the word came to me to describe what they looked like, and I thought: This was a person who expresses dreadful things. Even so, meeting you fifteen years later, I’m disappointed to find you aren’t trying to express anything now. That’s why, now that I’ve learned you play the piano, I want to hear you.”

  After she said this, Ikuo didn’t hesitate. He took out Morio’s music, which he’d put on a bookshelf, and stood up, grasping it in his huge hand. He strode off outside along the path that, despite the streetlight in the stand of trees, was dark, with Dancer walking in his footsteps as if leaping from one stepping-stone to the next. Following at some distance, Ogi felt as if he were viewing a ballet: a sprite dancing in the shadow of some giant beast.

  Ikuo’s playing threw cold water on Ogi’s excitement. After running through the five short pieces, with brief intervals between them, he remained very still in front of the piano, while Dancer stood motionless in the center of the dance floor. Ogi felt the two of them had just shared something very special—something from which he was excluded.

  15: Years of Exhaustion

  1

  A few days after the memorial service, Kizu awoke in the morning to the sound of a feeble sigh—his own voice, he realized—and knew it wasn’t the first time this had happened. Snuggled in his blanket, he felt a balance deep within him collapse, giving rise to this voice that circumvented his consciousness. This time it had come out as a protracted ahhhh, and he knew he was shouldering an exhaustion that had hardened and would never dissipate. That sigh, then, echoed with a sense of his own body trying to comfort itself.

  After a while he got out of bed to use the bathroom. Before he sat down on the toilet, Kizu looked out the window at the wych elm; strangely enough, it had regained the vivid softness it had had a week or two before, possibly as a result of the drizzle that had fallen all through the night. As he stood up, the large American-style toilet bowl looked—to use the first words that came to him—as if it were dyed a shining vermilion that dissolved the large pile of tarlike feces. Had all the energy he’d accumulated in his anus and intestines by exposing them to sunlight last summer now made his feces shine? No. It’s come at last, Kizu thought. A thin sad smile came to his face. He avoided looking at himself in the mirror and flushed away the contents of the bowl.

  As he walked back to his bed, Kizu looked out at the wych elm again; though the rain continued, beyond the branches he could spy a patch of light blue sky. But this blue sky, over the soft leaves washed by the rain, didn’t have the usual effect on him. His cancer was back. He had long since come to terms with the fact that it was only a matter of time. And knowing this he’d come to Japan to start a new life. But up till now he’d tried to avoid facing any tangible signals his body might be sending him. Or at least, he realized, he’d postponed acknowledging them.

  But now he could no longer ignore the cancer. For quite some time he’d felt something wrong inside him; was it now going to accelerate? Would he soon be racked with unspeakable pain? What held Kizu’s attention was less the thought of pain—though of course this too was one way to avoid thinking about it—but thoughts of how much, as long as he was able to be up and about, he wanted to continue his physical relationship with Ikuo—at the same time, of course, not doing anything to dampen Ikuo’s enthusiasm for working for Patron. He wanted to be close to the track Ikuo was running along, while still accomplishing his own goals. What was necessary now was getting a sense of how many days he had left to live his new life with Ikuo and Patron, as well as the best ways to cope with the pain once it began.<
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  The director of Kizu’s research institute had written him a letter of introduction to a local doctor, so Kizu telephoned the clinic and made an appointment. What he was really hoping for, though, was less a physical checkup than for the doctor to grasp the principle he’d committed himself to—the decision to live in a symbiotic relationship with his disease. Knowing the director of the institute would be a definite advantage here.

  When he went in for his appointment, Kizu spoke to the doctor about his own past illnesses and then about his brother’s cancer, all the details from the first occurrence to his death. He also told the doctor how, from the time his own cancer was first detected, he felt swept along by an unstoppable course of treatment, something he now wanted at all costs to avoid. Could you possibly, he asked, just ascertain that it’s cancer by using traditional methods and then help me live with it at home?

  Kizu was full of apprehension as he related his somewhat self-centered desires, but to his surprise the doctor agreed. Or at least he consented to examine him as his patient wanted.

  Once the doctor had listened to his hopes, Kizu grew mellow and said, as he got dressed, “I think my dark mood of the last few years may have been a psychological expression of my cancer. It may sound like I’m exaggerating, but for the past six months I’ve felt so utterly positive it’s as if I’m a young man all over again. I want to hold on to that feeling for the time I have left. For a year, if that’s possible. Just to live a normal life for a year—without any operations, taking medicine when the pain gets to be too much, and, if I can, continuing to paint. Even if I can’t do that, I want to live on my own and watch the activities of my young friend. Do you think I have a year left?”

  The doctor was evasive, saying that it was possible, as far as today’s checkup showed. But he wasn’t at all indifferent to Kizu’s hopes.