Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “I was born in Boston, where my father had been sent as a research assistant, and I lived there until I was four. So I was one of the first ‘returnee children,’ as we now call them. Back in Japan I suffered through all kinds of bullying. I liked languages and wanted to study literature, but when I told my mother this she exploded. Naturally she brought up all our ancestors who had studied at Tekijuku. ‘It doesn’t matter what language you’re talking about,’ she said, ‘Chinese, Dutch, whatever—the only reason people should study them is to use them as tools with which to make a contribution to society. But making a career out of languages is a waste. Name one of the six hundred students at school who’ve made foreign languages into a useful career!’

  “So there it was: I entered medical school. After graduating and finishing my internship I ran smack dab into a brick wall. The word doomed would be appropriate. I couldn’t touch people’s bodies anymore. Usually when you say people’s bodies you mean people other than yourself. But unless I used a cloth or paper to come between me and my own skin I couldn’t even touch myself, if you can imagine. Thin latex gloves were out because there’s no resistance and it feels even more like real skin.

  “After a while it wasn’t just touching people that disturbed me, but also talking with them, and I became painfully conscious of other people’s gazes. Being a doctor was out of the question—or even being a patient. I wrapped my hands in bandages, wore tinted goggles, and stayed shut up in a Japanese-style room. And my mother, who’d managed to have her son follow in the footsteps of his illustrious ancestors and graduate from medical school, stayed by me day and night, lamenting what I’d become. Who could stand that? Ha ha!”

  A glint in his eyes, Dr. Koga laughed heartily, his sturdy teeth shining.

  3

  Before long Kizu began to notice that Dr. Koga’s expression and forceful way of speaking was attracting other listeners. The businessman across the aisle had removed his headphones and was leaning toward them, while the napping woman, too, had woken up and was gazing in their direction. The people in front and behind them weren’t visible, but the two men in suits diagonally across from them to the right, rather than trying to ignore Dr. Koga’s penetrating voice, had turned around with evident curiosity.

  Eventually Dr. Koga realized what was going on. Coming to a convenient break in the conversation, he stopped, returned briefly to his seat, and brought back a small booklet. The booklet had a bright resin-coated cover and a title in a foreign language Kizu couldn’t read. Dr. Koga opened the book to a spot he’d marked with a colored card, and there was the heading “The Untouchable Body” and his own name.

  “Since it doesn’t seem appropriate to continue to talk about it here,” he said, “why don’t you read this? We can talk more after you grasp what an awful fix I was in. We compiled this booklet after the persecution by the authorities had calmed down and we’d rebuilt the organization. We edited this as a collection of all our testimonies of faith. The shock we got at the childish-looking pictures those young people drew spurred on all the members of the workshop to try to organize their thoughts and write them down.”

  “What does the title mean? It looks like German,” Kizu said, before letting his gaze drop again to the pages of the booklet.

  “It says Andern hat er geholfen. I’m not sure where this expression comes from,” Dr. Koga explained, “but in English it means He saved others. It expresses the feelings of some of my younger colleagues who, even after the Somersault, continued to believe in Patron.”

  “I’d always imagined it was just as the media reported,” Kizu said, “namely, that after the Somersault the former radical faction detested Patron and Guide as traitors and that Guide’s death was their act of revenge. I was sure Patron was next on their hit list, which made me worry when I saw how happily Patron accepted all of you back into the fold. But from your perspective Patron was more a tragic figure, wasn’t he?”

  Dr. Koga squinted as if smoke from a campfire had wafted up in his face. Without a word, he stood up and traded places with Ikuo.

  Feeling as though Ikuo was blocking out the other people in the train for him, Kizu eagerly read the booklet to find out what came next in Dr. Koga’s story.

  From morning to night, my mother mumbled some strange things. The words were directed at me, but in such a low voice I couldn’t catch them. Her words leaked out like a faucet that won’t stop dripping.

  When my mother could still speak clearly to me, she often quoted two poems:

  “I, who sleep without awakening from the world of dreams, which I clearly see to be insubstantial—am I really human?” And “When you realize that your state in the world and your mind are not in accord, then truly you will understand.”

  At the time I was sure my mother couldn’t be quoting from classical poetry and only later realized my mistake. For her, after all, Japanese poetry was anathema, for all her ancestors who’d studied at Tekijuku viewed scholars of the classics as their sworn enemy. So I was convinced that these two poems were something she’d conjured up herself as a kind of parody of classical learning. She muttered these words over and over, never explaining what the poems meant, but her mutterings themselves had a kind of dramatic presence, and I knew they expressed a powerful idea that had taken hold of her.

  “Even if I could see this world, filled with disappointment, in my dreams, that’s the way it is, so why should I be surprised—continuing to sleep, that’s the kind of person I’d become.” And “Once I realize that my body doesn’t do what my mind wants it to, then I will understand well this world, and people, and everything.” This is how I interpreted the poems.

  Since I was suffering because I was unable to control my own body, I found the second poem particularly unnerving. Even though I felt this deep down, though, I had my doubts about whether this would lead me to a generosity of spirit when it came to other people.

  Once, and only once, when she happened to be in a good mood, I asked my mother about this mind-body question. “Your body and your mind are alienated from each other,” she said. “The mind is powerless to control your body. I learned this from you. Something is fundamentally wrong with a world that compels someone to live with a mind and body like that. Now I know the world is evil and sinful. This is the wisdom these poets extol,” she said.

  Returning to the first poem, she went on to say that, knowing how awful and disappointing this world is, she wasn’t surprised anymore to wake up and find reality as cold as the cruel dreams she had while sleeping. In short, though she couldn’t put it into words, she was appealing to me to escape the world with her.

  Though she was putting her fate in my hands, I couldn’t murder my mother. And I couldn’t kill myself either. The reason was quite simple: my phobia about touching bodies, even my own.

  Before long this total despair made my mother desperate, and she committed suicide with some poison she’d gotten from a doctor relative before she was married. She took advantage of a short spell of time during which I slept—as I lay sleeping shut up in my room as always all day long, my days and nights like a line of white and black Go stones.

  I continued my daily routine, awakening only to fall asleep again. But I soon felt something was wrong with my mother because she was always so orderly but now just lay unmoving in the rattan chair on the porch, with the shutters closed. The smell was what first made me suspicious. I couldn’t touch other people, so I couldn’t do anything myself and had to leave things as they were until the woman who brought trays of food to the entrance to our room discovered what had happened after days went by with the food untouched.

  Writing about it this way may make me look quite unfeeling. But I wasn’t. I was frozen; a strong sense of guilt had me in its clutches. My mother suffered, afraid to live in this world. She didn’t believe in an afterlife, she believed that at the end of life everything was snapped off completely and time in all its hideousness lost any hold it might have on us. She clung to the hope that everythin
g could be reset to zero.

  That’s how she disappeared from this detestable world of suffering. In her final act of slamming into a wall—beyond which lay nothing—and disintegrating, all she hoped for was that her son, the last thing that worried her, accompany her. For her, the sole pleasure to be found in this world lay in vanishing from it, together with her suffering son. Did her old-fashioned sense of morality keep her from inviting me to join her?

  The only way she could appeal to me was by humming those two poems. But I didn’t understand what she wanted, which made her despair complete. And as this thought tormented me, I thought once more about the poems that my mother mumbled over and over again:

  “I, who sleep without awakening from the world of dreams, which I clearly see to be insubstantial—am I really human?” “When you realize that your state in the world and your mind are not in accord, then truly you will understand.”

  At this point, with a guilty conscience on top of everything else, I was at my wits’ end. Totally lost, I decided to get serious about climbing out of the abyss I’d fallen into.

  I’m writing this in the belief that all of you who have experienced similar depths of despair will acknowledge how such a seemingly meaningless transition can take place.

  This was the kind of person I was when Patron and Guide welcomed me into their midst.

  4

  After Kizu finished reading Dr. Koga’s essay, he was confused. He read some of the other essays that preceded and followed Dr. Koga’s, hoping to find a way out of his confusion, only to feel the strong arm of each writer shoving him aside. Were these the so-called radical faction, then, he wondered, these young people who had survived such unusual misery and relied so much on Patron and Guide’s church? Compared with these people, Kizu considered himself downright happy-go-lucky. Right now he had his face forcibly pushed up against the painful reality of his cancer, and he could only manage an unfocused feeling of regret.

  The people who wrote these essays had crawled on all fours across their own individual wildernesses of suffering to arrive at a faith in Patron and Guide. And on their backs they struggled to carry the heavy social burden of being a member of the ostracized radical faction. As if this weren’t bad enough, their leaders abandoned them, ridiculing the doctrines they believed in as laughable and meaningless. Yet for ten years they had borne it all and never lost their faith. And among them now were those who had to carry the additional burden of Guide’s death.

  When Kizu had seen these former radical-faction members at the memorial service—the very picture of late-thirties and forties vigor—he had already felt how soft, both physically and mentally, he was in comparison. Though he had yet to see the town in Shikoku where they’d be living together, he felt a tangible menace in the place. After they left Kyoto, the view from the train was filled with rows of houses and hills covered with thick growths of broad-leafed trees. Kizu wanted to lose himself in this familiar, nostalgic scene. He stirred and felt, deep down in his lower belly and near his back, the resistance of a hard foreign substance. So he wasn’t entirely soft, was he, with this hard intruder in his fifty-plus-year-old body? It made Kizu want to laugh as he simultaneously gave himself credit and put himself down.

  Beside him, Ikuo lay back in his seat, eyes shut, but the movement behind his lids showed he wasn’t asleep but was reacting to the slightest movements from Kizu. From Kizu’s viewpoint, Ikuo was a great emotional and physical support for a soft late-fifties man with a serious illness; at the same time it was also clear that he had a great interest in, and was helping to support, a group Kizu wouldn’t want to get on the bad side of.

  Soon after they left the New Osaka Station, Kizu stood up and Ikuo shifted his legs to let him pass, throwing him a questioning look. Kizu merely nodded and walked down the aisle to where Dr. Koga was seated. Both he and his companion were asleep. There was something about Dr. Koga’s posture and expression in particular that pierced Kizu to the quick. He passed them and sat down in a vacant seat.

  The window seat beside him was vacant as well, and Kizu tried to make his harsh breathing calm down. Standing or seated, Dr. Koga was clearly a person who’d done a lot of physical training, but now he looked like a strangely aged infant, his upper body collapsed diagonally across the seat, hands clutching his tucked-up knees. His broad eyelids were yellowish, his mouth open, teeth clenched. Beside him, Mr. Hanawa lay diagonally in the other direction, his dark face etched with tiredness. He too had had an extraordinary life and an accumulated exhaustion that in ordinary circumstances he willed into submission.

  They arrived in Osaka much earlier than scheduled. Kizu continued to sit by himself until the announcement came that they had reached Okayama. As they changed trains, Kizu followed behind Ikuo as he carried their bulky luggage, trying not to catch Dr. Koga’s eye. When the new train crossed over the Seto Bridge, Kizu pretended to be absorbed in the sea and the small islands outside.

  Once their train began to run along the Yosan Line, it was just the four of them in the Green Car in the middle of the train. Despite his short unsettled sleep, Dr. Koga looked refreshed, and when he invited him over, Kizu summoned up the courage to continue their earlier conversation. Ever since they entered Shikoku the hills had taken on a decided gentleness, the forests growing thicker, no doubt helping Kizu’s shift in mood, the scene outside the window growing closer to his mental picture of his homeland.

  The four of them unwrapped the Matsuri Sushi box lunches Ikuo had purchased in Okayama, and when the cart came around selling drinks, Dr. Koga teasingly had Ikuo buy two cans of beer for each of them. The beer made Dr. Koga even more lively than one would expect of a man his age.

  “I just want to be with Ikuo,” Kizu began, “which is what’s led me to participate in Patron’s new church, even if I don’t have much time left. I appreciate Patron’s generosity in allowing someone like me in. Though it does bother me sometimes how wishy-washy I am, a follower without faith.”

  “I’m thankful you can be with Patron,” Dr. Koga said. “I know having you with us will liven things up. But more than that, Ikuo needs you. If you hadn’t come he never would have joined us. I’ve talked with him a lot recently, and one thing I can say with certainty is this: Your participation in the church is a great thing—not just for Ikuo but for Patron, and for the former radical faction too.”

  “For better or worse,” Kizu said, “Ikuo and I are pretty tight. But truthfully I don’t know how useful I’ll be to Patron, or to you and the others.”

  Gazing at the peaceful line of hills and the gentle green slopes, and with the beer taking effect, Dr. Koga’s expression softened, though soon a deep-seated tension returned.

  “To respond to your comments in reverse order, it’s very important for us to have an outsider like yourself in our midst, to give us a fresh perspective on our faith in Patron. Ten years ago, not entirely at Guide’s instigation, the religious fervor of those of us at the Izu Institute reached a climax. This reached a peak with the Somersault, and of all Patron’s followers we’re the ones who feel the greatest gap between before and after. In terms of giving us room to maneuver, it’s much more helpful to have someone from outside the faith work with us rather than just be a monolithic church. And this should be even more true of Patron, I would think.”

  “So I wonder,” Kizu said, steeling himself to ask, “if you would tell me, an outsider to the faith, how you came to know Patron and Guide?”

  Dr. Koga bent his nicely shaped head, with its receding hairline, and gazed at his hands in his lap. When he spoke, it was more slowly and with more controlled emphasis than before.

  “It’s always hard to tell another person about how your faith began, even to someone who shares it.… I think that’s especially true for me. My mother and I lived alone, just the two of us for a long time, and I let her take care of everything. After she died and we had to handle the inheritance, I didn’t even know where she kept her official seal or which documents were necessa
ry. My aunt came to straighten everything out, but first we had to locate the seal and bankbook. My aunt scoured the house from top to bottom but came up empty-handed, so we ended up seeking the help of a psychic everyone said was quite good. This happened to be Patron, who at the time had a little church with some thirty followers.

  “Patron and Guide were still running their fortune-telling venture on the side to make the money needed to run their church. I went to see them with my aunt, the first time in a long while I’d left the house. Patron’s church was in Kita-ku, near Asukayama.

  “We’d gone out merely to have a psychic help us locate our lost items, but once we met Patron he began to ask us all sorts of detailed questions about my mother’s and my life together. I was pretty surprised but did my best to answer each question. It was not only painful for me to touch other people or to be touched, I said, but I also had trouble communicating, yet even though I’d just met Patron, surprisingly I had no problem at all talking with him.

  “After I finished speaking, Patron said there was something my mother’s great-grandfather had had when he was a student at Tekijuku, something packed away inside a large wooden trunk. Actually among our family heirlooms my mother did talk about a Dutch-Japanese dictionary, kept in a large wooden trunk. When I told him this, Patron told me that the seal, bankbook, and other important documents were all in there as well. The lost is found, he said, a cheerful look on his face. And indeed my aunt, who had gone home ahead of me, phoned to say that the psychic had been right on the money.

  “So I accomplished all I’d set out to do in visiting Patron’s church. I felt more relieved than I had in a long time, and should have left at that point. But I found the chair facing Patron’s low armchair more comfortable than any other chair I’d ever sat in, and I sank down into it. And I thought I’d like to have him hear what’s really important. Patron seemed willing, and at his insistence I removed my dark-colored swimming goggles and began speaking.”