Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “You are an American citizen, so after the pain starts I can be more free in prescribing medicine for you than I would be with a Japanese,” the doctor said. “I’ll be getting in touch with the surgeon who first operated on you in New Jersey. That’s where I met your friend the professor who introduced you to me.” After saying this, the doctor, who was much younger than Kizu, began addressing him as Professor too. “You may not have a lot of time left, Professor, but you should be able to enjoy it to the fullest. Keep your spirits up! I feel like you’ve taught me that.”

  Kizu wondered about the childish enthusiasm of this statement. If my cancer can be fought through an operation or radiation therapy or medicine, he thought, even if it just means letting the doctor get his way, shouldn’t he have challenged me to put up a good fight against my disease? Isn’t he giving in too easily to my requests, implying—after just a simple examination—that my case is hopeless and the cancer will never go into remission?

  “When you palpated my rectum your finger didn’t seem to reach to the place where the cancer is,” Kizu said, in a mischievous, sour-grapes sort of way. “Does this mean that when I have anal sex the penis won’t hit the part that hurts?”

  “Well, you can see how long my finger is,” the doctor said, his earlier openness to Kizu now vanished.

  In the taxi on the way home, though, Kizu couldn’t forget what he’d said to tease the doctor. Well, he told himself, at least the hospital didn’t grab me in its claws! But then he felt peeved: Was it really all right to announce so casually that he had terminal cancer? Not that he wanted to pin his hopes on some doctor newly returned from America and his latest high-tech machinery who might tell him that no, he didn’t have cancer. Before long his own words came back to haunt him. There was no reason for him to suppress them.

  Soon after he started teaching at the university in New Jersey, he had had an affair with a Jewish woman whom he later married. Her name was Naomi, and she’d lived with her former husband in Kobe; when he met her she had moved to New York and was writing her dissertation on the history of comparative art, and Kizu helped her decipher some of the brush writing in an illustrated Muromachi-period book. To celebrate finishing that work they had dinner together, with some wine, and when he was waiting at the bus stop under an enormous hickory tree to see her off on her bus back to New York, they kissed. Kizu took the first step, but she responded enthusiastically. Naomi was a large woman, taller than Kizu, and she held his head to steady it as they kissed intimately—not the other way around. Kizu was still young and his penis soon rose up and pressed against her belly. As they waited for the bus on the boulevard in front of the university Naomi told him, after giving it a lot of thought, that she wouldn’t mind going back to his apartment again.

  He put clean sheets on the bed—not the right size ones, it turned out—and she began to, painfully, kiss his penis; he twisted to one side and began licking her strongly fragrant genitals; then, as he tried kissing her slightly reddish, cute little anus, Naomi called out in a small voice. After intercourse she told him about how her alcoholic ex-husband, when he did want sex, which wasn’t too often, usually wanted anal sex. Taking this as a cue, Kizu tried it himself for the first time. She pulled apart her generous reddish buttocks to help him, and Kizu, although his penis wasn’t quite hard enough, was able to penetrate her. Afterward she told him, happily, that it was all so intense she wasn’t even sure if she came or not. After they got married, though, their sex turned more solemn, and never again did they stray like this into forbidden fields.

  In the taxi, Kizu remembered the way Naomi’s fingers moved and became possessed by the idea of doing the same thing for Ikuo. He fantasized about being penetrated by Ikuo’s penis in a similarly intense way, positive that if the two of them weren’t able to reach that level of feeling, until the day death came to take him he never would.

  If such thoughts were motivated by the fact that he had a clear case of cancer, couldn’t this be seen as a positive response to his illness? But Kizu couldn’t help feeling he was being silly about the whole thing and laughed at himself for acting like some doddering old geezer. Still, he couldn’t shake the notion from his mind.

  2

  Ikuo was kept busy after the memorial service, and it was a week before he was able to return to Kizu’s apartment. He came with Dancer to express their thanks to the building superintendent for allowing them to use the facilities, and the two of them went together with Kizu to the man’s office. The super was in a good mood, since the meeting place had been left so spic-and-span he didn’t have to pay an extra fee to their regular janitorial company to clean up.

  Dancer left, so Kizu and Ikuo were able to lounge on the sofa in Kizu’s atelier and talk. Perhaps concerned because they hadn’t seen each other in a week, Ikuo tried to humor Kizu.

  “Patron told me what you said to him: that you don’t know what direction his movement will take but as long I stay with it you’ll stick with him.”

  “That’s right,” Kizu responded. “I really am interested in his new movement. You’ve helped me enter a new world I never would have found alone.”

  “That seems especially true since you came back from America.”

  “After all the trouble I’d taken to make a life over there, it wasn’t easy giving up my home. I’d gotten far, I thought, but it didn’t feel as if my life had taken a completely unexpected path. After coming back to Japan I felt really excited; for the first time in my life I didn’t know what to anticipate. At my age, though, such positive emotions are always counterbalanced by a sense of unease. At any rate, I’m not going to back down.”

  “I can sense that.”

  “Those feelings, though, don’t guarantee I’ll do a good job of succeeding in Guide’s position. He was one of a kind.”

  “It’s like there are two people inside Patron,” Ikuo said, “one who has visions, the other who interprets them. Guide’s role was to make that second person inside Patron speak. As I was listening to Patron at the memorial service, it came to me how much he had suffered after Guide’s death. And I wondered whether, as he suffered, the person inside him who interprets the visions may have taken on a different form. Taking that a step further, I began to wonder whether Patron might not be able to put his visions into ordinary language now, without any outside help. If he can, maybe Guide’s death was necessary for Patron to begin his new movement.”

  Kizu felt something was wrong with this and brought up a point he’d noticed a while back. “It’s logical, what you said. Not that I mean you’ve been illogical up till now, it’s just that the logic you’re using here is different. I’m wondering whether some of the radical faction’s way of thinking has rubbed off on you as you worked with them.”

  Ikuo gazed back with a watchful, penetrating gaze, as if staking out some prey he was about to pounce on.

  “I’ve learned a lot by talking with them,” he said. “Working with them at the memorial service taught me how capable they are and how strongly they feel their convictions. Patron’s movement has been able to take shape through proposals that the Kansai headquarters has made, and there’s been discussion about including them in the new movement in order to firm up the support base—along with the group of women we visited. It would be hard to make a go of this new church relying solely on the participation of individuals. This will mean, though, that the list Ogi compiled of contributors after the Somersault won’t be of much use—”

  Ikuo stopped speaking, no doubt thinking that he’d gotten too far ahead of himself, and stood up.

  “I’ve been too busy to take a shower these days, so if you don’t mind—”

  Ikuo’s smile seem to be humoring Kizu, as he’d done before. But something welled up within Kizu, a thrill just like the day when, as a child, he’d first walked along the seashore and spotted a manateelike lump on the beach. The same rush of excitement he felt the first time he and Ikuo had sex. His throat felt parched.

  Kizu took ou
t the sheets he’d gotten back from the laundry and made up the bed. He went in to take a shower himself, passing Ikuo, who was wearing a dressing gown as he came out of the bathroom. But how should he bring it up to Ikuo? He racked his brain as he thoughtlessly scrubbed himself too hard and felt his body tighten with pain. Since the clear signs of cancer had appeared, Kizu had been careful about touching his belly, but now he’d forgotten.

  Broaching the subject turned out to be easier than he had thought. “Let’s try something a little different this time,” Kizu said in an experienced tone, half playfully, and Ikuo, as casually as a chess player making a necessary strategic move, said that he’d already had a bit of experience playing the man, if that’s what Kizu wanted.

  With an eager movement out of keeping with his age, Kizu flipped himself over on his belly and, as Naomi had done, propped himself up on his chin and shoulders as he added some spit and pulled aside the folds of his buttocks. Ikuo struggled to penetrate, and Kizu felt a sharp pain that nearly made him cry out, but all for naught. Kizu remembered how it felt when, as he stroked the milky, flushed skin of Naomi’s buttocks, he playfully had inserted first one finger and then a second as he roughly spread her sphincter. But he couldn’t tell Ikuo to do the same, and he didn’t have the nerve to do it himself.

  Finally, as if the energy level he’d strained to keep up proved too much, Ikuo collapsed. Kizu sat up and noticed tears forming in Ikuo’s large, sunken eyes. Kizu took Ikuo’s still-engorged penis in his mouth to console it for all its struggles, but Ikuo remained passive and couldn’t come.

  After Ikuo went home, Kizu thought about the tears in Ikuo’s eyes and how he’d instinctively turned away to try to hide them. What kind of tears were those? As he and Ikuo had talked that day he tried not to worry about the new situation with his cancer. With Patron’s new movement beginning, he’d have to talk with Ikuo about his illness, now that it had taken a sudden turn for the worse, but it didn’t seem fair to bring it up just as he was attempting to get their sexual relationship to enter a new phase.

  Kizu wondered whether the sexual behavior of an old man, unconcerned with appearances, might not, in the eyes of someone much younger, go beyond the ugly and comical to arouse feelings of pity and sorrow. But late that night, as he once again climbed into bed and touched a wide, wet spot on the sheets, the thought struck him that he had been so hard on the young man he had made him cry. Shocked, Kizu tried to brush the thought aside.

  3

  Kizu was the type, once he started something, to persist—his character molded by his experiences in America, where he often felt terribly isolated and found that once he gave up, things got even worse—and he wasn’t about to get discouraged by a couple of failed experiments. A motivating factor behind his persistence, Kizu was well aware, was the jealousy aroused in him when Ikuo revealed that he’d played the man before. As one failure followed another, this jealousy for some unknown past rival turned into a burning rage.

  As a far-off memory, Kizu recalled reading Plato’s words to the effect that human beings cannot hold two different emotions within them at the same time. This idea served to protect the emotions that—at the conscious level—he’d already prevented from making a comeback: the fear that his strong jealousy of Ikuo would accelerate the spread of the cancer within him, and his regret at having run from the advice he’d received in America to have himself get a thorough examination.

  Dancer phoned him, asking him, if it was possible, to come over to discuss something with Patron. Recently Kizu had caught a ride two or three times with Ikuo when he went back to the office, but each time he found everyone rushing around like mad and had left without speaking with Patron.

  Today, though, as he entered Patron’s bedroom study, he spied a plan of the buildings in Shikoku that Dancer had prepared. As was his wont, though they hadn’t seen each other since the memorial service, Patron didn’t greet Kizu; instead, he seemed to be watching him closely. Finally Patron spoke up, explaining how he wanted to move his office to the building in the woods shown in the plan and start his church there. Kizu mentioned he’d heard from the newspaper reporter that the buildings were unusual modern structures and were being taken care of very thoroughly—but Patron cut him short.

  “After they purchased these buildings, the followers apparently took turns staying in them for short periods of time,” Patron said, “and things went smoothly between the people from the Kansai headquarters and the local people. Which isn’t to say that if we move there to build our church there won’t be friction. We need to understand this before we begin, and I think as Ikuo said the first step is to have an organized vanguard group of followers move to Shikoku. I’d planned to start the new movement with people who contacted me after the Somersault, but what Ogi’s done will eventually be of use.”

  Patron went on to explain what Kizu was aware of how the Kansai headquarters had directed his attention to this woods surrounded by mountains and how things had developed since then.

  “The Kansai headquarters, which essentially means the whole church that’s been active till now, has proposed to give these buildings over to me in order for me to build a new church. While Guide and I were in hell and completely unproductive, the Kansai headquarters built up quite a sound financial base. Sometimes I even wonder whether it’s right to accept all they’ve accomplished.”

  “If the church will again be centered around you and these people will be absorbed into it,” Kizu said, “their proposal makes perfect sense. You might even say that after your Somersault the Kansai headquarters anticipated a day like this and prepared accordingly.”

  “I imagine that to them my actions in the Somersault must have seemed pretty shallow.”

  “But when you look at all the groups that have been able to maintain themselves independently,” Kizu said, “the Kansai headquarters, the women’s commune, and the former Izu radical faction, that must mean your teachings had an underlying and enduring strength.”

  “But Guide and I completely denied those teachings. And I’m not about to reverse my position.”

  “When I listen to you I get the impression you want to reach out first of all to the followers you abandoned. What with all those fights the local government had to get Aum Shinrikyo to evacuate their satyan, I imagine our job from now on won’t be easy.”

  “Indeed it won’t,” Patron said, a glint in his eye. “Can I ask you, too, Professor, to move to our new headquarters in Shikoku?”

  “Ikuo is very enthusiastic about your plan for the church and, as I’ve told you, I go where he goes.”

  Still looking Kizu straight in the eye, Patron said, “Of course, I’ll also be counting on you to be the new Guide. Anyway, the reason I asked you to come over today is that Dancer feels anxious. She thinks you’ve changed somehow. Now that I see you myself I see something’s troubling you. I haven’t asked Ikuo about this, but I feel there’s something going on with you physically that isn’t encouraging.”

  Kizu was surprised, but at the same time he found this completely natural. “At the beginning of this month I started to show some clear symptoms,” he began. “And I had a specialist confirm what I thought. It’s not at a stage where an operation would help much, and actually I left America because I didn’t feel like having one. It’s terminal cancer. My doctor was very sympathetic to my viewpoint and said he’ll help me control the pain so I can remain active on my own.

  “As time goes on it’ll be harder and harder for me to be the Guide, but as long as I’m not a burden, I want nothing more than to help Ikuo. At my checkup I wasn’t given a definite amount of time I have left, but I’m counting on a year.”

  Patron leaned forward toward Kizu, his head tilted to one side. Kizu saw his intent eyes fill with a sorrow deeper than any he’d ever seen in a living person, let alone in any painting. In the very depths of this, like another eye, Patron gazed with great curiosity at this being named Kizu before him.

  “Since you were told you ha
ve a year to live by someone with experience in these matters, I imagine that’s the way it’ll turn out. You may be going through a physical crisis, but spiritually you’re strong. While I’m still able to count on your help, I want to make very clear again the significance behind my starting this church. If the historian doesn’t have much time left, the ones creating history can’t afford to dawdle.... I expect that within this year, sooner rather than later, you will see a sign I give, or a sign I become, and then you’ll be able to write your history. I’ll say it once again—that will be your task as the new Guide.”

  Patron lowered his eyelashes—thick lashes for a man his age. Eyes closed, he remained silent, as if he’d forgotten Kizu was there. Noiselessly Kizu stood up, left the room, and reported to Dancer what had just taken place. With a look that said she realized something very important had transpired in their discussion, she disappeared down the darkened corridor.

  In the minivan on their way back to Kizu’s apartment, Kizu told Ikuo about Patron’s comments about looking for a sign—and becoming a sign—within a year. And related to this he told him all about his cancer. As always, Ikuo kept his eyes on the road as he drove. Kizu looked straight ahead too, even after he finished, but he could sense that Ikuo was deeply moved by what he’d heard. After a long stretch of silence, Ikuo finally spoke.

  “When I was at a turning point in my life, you gave me a clue as to where to go, even though it meant a personal sacrifice on your part. We still haven’t known each other that long, but you’ve done this for me any number of times. When Patron heard you had cancer and only a year left, he must have come to a decision. I don’t know what he means about giving a sign, but I do know you should take it seriously.”

  When they arrived at the apartment, as if by unspoken agreement they put off making dinner and went directly to bed. Ikuo diligently kneaded and massaged Kizu’s buttocks and gave them some light slaps. Other than a few words to make sure that he wasn’t putting too much weight on Kizu’s abdomen—that it wasn’t painful—Ikuo was silent. Soon, as if making a comfortable breakthrough in Kizu’s body, Ikuo’s penis penetrated him at a single stroke, and he stopped moving. Taking his time, Ikuo caressed Kizu’s testicles and penis, as well as the area around his own penis that was so snugly buried. With Ikuo’s penis deep within him, Kizu came. It was exactly the kind of internal intense feeling that Naomi had spoken of.