Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “If anyone’s been acting melodramatically, it’s me,” Patron said. “Once my fever came down I was back to normal, but I’ve stayed in my room because I was embarrassed to see all of you. Are you in pain?”

  “No, not right now.”

  “It must have been quite painful when you collapsed.”

  “I didn’t even have time to think about it, the pain was so bad—more than I had thought a person could endure.… Physical pain can make your whole world collapse. It made me think how extraordinary your Somersault must have been, as a shock to your whole person. I realized I’d taken advantage of our closeness in age and said some pretty stupid things. It’s made me think about a lot of things.…”

  Patron didn’t respond directly, and everyone else was silent. Just saying that much had left Kizu gasping for breath.

  “You’ve just been allowed to come home,” Dancer said, “and I’m sure the trip has worn you out, so it’s best not to talk too much.”

  “Don’t worry,” Dr. Koga countered. “Professor Kizu isn’t your run-of-the-mill invalid. He’s the kind of person who can take physical pain, shift it over to spiritual pain, and use it to bolster his creativity. I’ve never had a patient like him before.”

  “I’ve only been away a week,” Kizu said, “but I feel uplifted to be back with all my friends again. This really has become my home. I got a little carried away just now and said that after all the pain I experienced I reflected deeply on things, but I can’t get Patron’s wound out of my mind. I had just sketched it, too.… For ten years, you said, you were in hell, and I was thinking about what you endured.… To borrow Dr. Koga’s words, along with the spiritual pain, imagine such a persistent physical pain on top of it.… It’s the kind of pain that hits you all at once, but no matter how overwhelming it is you know it will pass. If the body is killed, the pain will disappear. But that’s not true of spiritual pain, is it?”

  Patron was silent. Dancer said to him, “When you were in the midst of your fever you didn’t get a chance to see Professor Kizu’s sketch. Could we all look together at it now?”

  She went to the room next door, closed off by a wide sliding door, and brought over the framed sketch. Kizu asked Ikuo to fetch the preliminary sketchbook he’d used for the final panel of the triptych. As the latter was opened onto the floor, Kizu stretched out his neck toward it like a turtle.

  “The one in the frame is the sketch I did of your wound, which I colored with watercolors. The next one, and the page in the sketchbook, are sketches I did the night: I was hit by that sharp pain, while I was thinking about the tableau. Both of them center on the Sacred Wound, and I did them to try to clarify my feelings about Patron’s injury.

  “My pain was entirely physical, but while I was racked by it, and after a week when its aftershocks continued, when I look at these earlier sketches I feel my way of thinking about the tableau has changed. Seeing as how I’ve come up with a new concept, I thought I’d ask Patron to come here to pose for me.”

  “Well, there’s no need to hide my wound anymore, so why not?” Patron replied. “Somehow your painting captures a side of me that now, even at my age, I’d never noticed before.”

  25: The Play at the Hollow

  1

  In his house on the north shore of the Hollow, Kizu still felt a quiet sense of excitement after Patron’s visit and lay awake far into the night. Even without the medicine Dr. Koga had prescribed, he was able to control the pain deep in his abdomen; he was beginning, in fact, to feel a kind of symbiotic relationship with it.

  Kizu realized again how hard it is to call up a memory of pain once it’s passed. Still, after such overwhelming agony, he was able to put the lesser pain he felt at present, and any anxiety about the future, into perspective.

  The pain that had assaulted him in the middle of that night he could certainly feel for what it was, yet it went way beyond what anything within him could actively resist. He’d felt driven, spiritually and physically, into a gigantic dark tunnel of pain, violated, with no hope of escape. During the intermittent periods when the pain receded, he was surprised that an insignificant being like himself was able to put up with so much. And then the pain would flare up again and he’d be driven back, deep into that dark tunnel. What frightened him most was the fact that there was no downtime, no letup from this abnormal power. Every time he was once again spit out, alive, from the depths, only to be handed over to a different form of pain—one that was within the realm of comprehension.

  The pain that Kizu felt deep in his gut was somehow now accompanied by a sense of nostalgia. Not a nostalgia based on some past event, but more like a sense of déjà vu.

  Ever so slowly the pain reached its peak, and Kizu suppressed a groan. The dregs of pain floated up on his expelled breath; his feverish body began to smell.

  The second or third day, when all his organs felt stiff and hard, he couldn’t understand where the pain was coming from, what the dynamics of the pain and his body movements were, and how they were related. Kizu was both afraid of this unknown opponent and roused himself to resist it, shifting positions in bed to test it. He tried this even more efficiently now and was finally able to pinpoint the pain’s exact locus. This time, in place of a groan, he exhaled deeply. The sound came back to him as a sigh, a composed expression of his inner being.

  “Can’t you sleep?” Ikuo called out to him. He had apparently been awake all the time. “Is the pain really bad?” As this familiar voice rose up like dampness from the foot of his bed, Kizu felt a childish exhilaration.

  “It does hurt, but it’s not the kind of pain I usually feel inside . . . more like an imaginary pain. Like soldiers who get their legs blown off in war and still complain that their knees hurt.”

  “Would you like me to prepare a suppository?” Ikuo asked.

  “I’d rather not.”

  “How about a sleeping pill?”

  “It’s not the pain that’s keeping me up. I’m just absorbing the fact that I’m actually back here.”

  “Shall I open the curtain?”

  “That’d be nice. But let’s keep the lights off so the people across the lake won’t start worrying.”

  A large dark object roused itself and slowly drew the curtain back. In the moonlight that filtered in, Kizu was happy to see a brusque smile on Ikuo’s deeply shadowed profile. Drawn by Ikuo’s gaze outside, Kizu slid himself up so he, too, could see out.

  The moon was in the west, hidden behind the huge cypress that filled the whole right side of the window. The shadow of the tree cut across the surface of the lake, where fog was swirling low and beginning to thicken, all the way to the forest on the east bank. The moon shone on the fog on the surface of the lake, illuminating the concrete walls of the chapel on the south shore.

  Even the needles of the cedars and the tips of the leaves of the bushes in the forest behind were shining, yet the whole was pitch black. The night sky was clear, with a purity Kizu hadn’t seen in some time, with thin clouds sweeping briskly and steadily across the sky like sheets of ice.

  Kizu had been quiet, concentrating on the moonlit scene for a while, when he noticed that Ikuo wanted to say something but had been hesitating.

  “One of my colleagues in America has traced the American sublime in Romantic landscapes of the United States,” Kizu said, in a hoarse voice. “I see there’s a sublime in the Japanese landscape too.”

  “The Young Fireflies talk of the Hollow as a special place,” Ikuo said. “During the insurrections at the end of the Tokugawa period and the beginning of the Meiji, people dragged down bamboo to use as weapons from the huge bamboo grove. Right here, which used to be a basin, was where they stripped the leaves off, the ground completely covered in green and the farmers drunk. The Base Movement started here as well, as did the Church of the Flaming Green Tree. I believe there really is what everyone calls the power of the land, what Asa-san calls the power of the place.”

  “Will Patron’s church be able to rely on
this power?” Kizu asked.

  “It’s like a stage where something’s going to take place, where something sacred will manifest itself.… I’ve felt the same thing once before, in another place.… Two days ago, when the moon was full, I came back here, to see how the Fireflies had rearranged the rooms, and spent the night. I couldn’t get to sleep either, and as I looked out at the bright moonlit scenery outside I remembered that other time and place.”

  Kizu waited for Ikuo to continue his reminiscences, but after a moment of silence the young man brought up another subject.

  “At noon the next day everyone was asking me, very concerned, about how you were. With what happened with Patron’s Sacred Wound, things change so fast. The Quiet Women have started to formulate some plans of their own in addition to their group prayers, while the inner circle of Technicians, who’ve been wavering a bit since Guide’s death, are now much more focused again—as Dancer, for whatever reason, had predicted.

  “I came here following Patron rather than his church, hoping he was going to take some action. So I’d like to consider these things going on among the church members as a kind of forewarning of things to come. If the internal pressure building up in the Quiet Women and the Technicians blows, I don’t think Patron can just sit around twiddling his thumbs. I’m like Dancer—I much prefer to see signs that something is about to happen. Two days ago I was convinced that something important is about to take place on the stage before me now, this moonlit Hollow. People say any convictions you have late at night are illusory, but tonight I’m getting the exact same feelings. I think the reason you’re back here, Professor, is so you can observe whatever it is that’s going to happen on this stage.

  “Whatever it is,” Ikuo went on, “I don’t want the Young Fireflies to fall victim to it. I bring this up because they consider these grounds in the Hollow a special place, the site where they’re planning to construct their new lives. So whatever happens, they’ll be involved.”

  Something occurred to Kizu. “Every time I talk with you about the book of Jonah, I see you standing on Jonah’s side, grumbling about what the Lord wants you to do. But your attitude right now isn’t just that of a Jonah.”

  “What do you mean?” Ikuo asked, caught off guard.

  “It’s a simple thing, really. Not long ago I put it this way: Jonah stands up to God, insisting that he destroy Nineveh the way he originally planned. But God, lamenting the loss of over 120,000 children plus countless head of cattle, doesn’t burn the city. And the people repent. And now you’re worried about children not becoming victims, right?”

  Ikuo turned his forehead, lumpy like the surface of a pumpkin, toward the moonlight, while below his deep eye sockets all was dark and hardened.

  “I’m not making fun of you,” Kizu said, “merely pointing out this contradiction. A contradiction you’ve never had before in your life, never thought about, but one that’s significant nonetheless. If you hadn’t come to this place and gotten to know the Fireflies, this contradiction never would have entered your world . . . never would have grazed you conceptually.

  “I began to think about this when you were staying with me in the clinic,” Kizu said. “In the middle of the night when I looked out at the backyard I saw a group of Fireflies huddled together, all gazing up despondently at my window. Soon after I laid my head back on my pillow, you got up from your sofa and, thinking I was asleep, crept out of the room. Pretty soon I heard an irrepressible stir. Just seeing you made the children in the backyard so happy. You’re very close to these kids, and you have a premonition that something is going to take place here. Whatever it turns out to be, you’ll be a part of it, and they can’t help but get dragged in. You can’t shut out such devoted admirers.

  “No matter what sort of amoral activity you get involved with, it’s not going to shock me into retreating. This is the stage where I’ll spend my final days, and no matter what takes place I’m ready for it. But I must say I don’t mind seeing you agonize over how to keep the Fireflies from getting hurt.”

  2

  Ikuo looked lost in thought. The fog that covered the lake rose up in eddies. At first Kizu thought the wind was making it swirl, but looking closely at the outline of the giant cypress he noticed the fog was still. Was it a change in humidity that made the fog form at night? Still feverish, Kizu was sensitive enough to smell the cold coming through the bare window.

  “Why don’t we close the curtains, Ikuo.”

  Silently, with unfaltering steps, the young man moved over to the window. After closing the curtains, he walked around the bed to straighten the curtains on the opposite side, through which vertical shafts of moonlight filtered in. His eyes were used to the dark, so he moved quickly and surely. Kizu could just make him out as he climbed back in bed and pulled up the covers. Drawing back slightly, he sat up, clasping his knees together.

  “There is something I really wanted to tell you tonight,” Ikuo said. “It’s connected with what you talked about earlier. It’s the most important experience I’ve had up till now. I was going to tell you about it once—the time that Guide urged me to appeal to Patron, when I had you write that letter for me. But I didn’t have the guts.

  “I told you about how I heard a voice from above?—the voice of God, I called it, telling me, Do it!—though I didn’t tell you what I did in response to that voice, just that I was waiting to hear the voice again. I know you’re tired, but I wonder if you would mind listening to me?”

  Ikuo spoke politely, though clearly not expecting a negative reply.

  “I feel a premonition, I guess you’d call it, that something important will occur here very soon. The Technicians are making preparations; even the Quiet Women are active. The buildings here in the Hollow belong to the Kansai headquarters, so of course they have every right to do this, but they’re planning to hold a gathering here in the Hollow with Patron and a large number of their followers. After people found out about the Sacred Wound, Patron became very upbeat about this plan and told Ogi to take charge. Most likely it’ll be held in the summer.

  “With all these things happening and me involved, I have to come up with a plan. But what kind of plan I still have to figure out. One thing I need to decide is how far I should involve the Fireflies. I’ve been thinking about this all week. For several days running, Gii’s brought the Fireflies over to stand guard over me, as it were, since seeing me just sitting silently and thinking has him worried.

  “The Fireflies are kids, after all, so they’re self-centered. They’re enthusiastic about doing whatever it takes to establish Gii’s ideology. If an emergency arises with you, Professor—or even if it’s not an emergency—and you’re put in a hospital in Tokyo or New York, I probably won’t be coming back to the Hollow. And that’s a worry for them too, from their ideological standpoint.

  “So there’s this basic egotism involved, but you should know that every one of the Fireflies participated in the silent prayer meeting the Quiet Women held for your recovery. Two hours without a break. It must have been pretty hard on them, don’t you think? That’s an incredibly long time for young kids to sit still and keep their eyes closed, but Gii made sure every single one of them took part.

  “Two hours.… Yes, that must have been hard on them,” Kizu said.

  “Their goal was to keep you here and to keep me tied to this region. They came up with other plans too, including one to threaten us. This was connected with something I told Gii about my past. I thought you might not be getting back to sleep soon, so I wanted to tell you this story now.

  “When I was fourteen years old I hit my tutor, an American named Schmidt, with a poker and hurt him quite seriously. And then when I was sixteen I hit him again with a poker and killed him. Behind both attacks was the homosexual relationship we had. If you and I decided to cut our ties with the Hollow and move to Tokyo or America, Gii planned to blackmail us by sending letters to the newspapers accusing us of creating a ring in which we sexually abused young boys. />
  “I haven’t told you before about my early life, but now I’d like to. My father was a banker who was stationed abroad for many years, and my mother was a piano teacher. Through my parents’ professions we got to be friends with the family of an American who ran a music publishing firm that operated in the United States and Japan.

  “I was the youngest child in my family and ended up becoming closest to this family—the Schmidts. My parents were particularly keen on having me remain bilingual, since we had lived in England, Canada, and the States until I was ten, and I was fluent in English. I wasn’t a particularly studious child, but I loved making models, and when I wasn’t doing that I played all day outside our house in the suburbs, where the natural surroundings were still quite beautiful, so physically at least I grew up strong.

  “Every weekend I was sent to stay over at the Schmidts’. His wife was Japanese, and they had a grown daughter, and Mr. Schmidt did his work at home, in a separate cottage, and that’s where I slept on an army cot they set up for me. It was during this period that you and I had our near miss at that plastic model competition. What you saw there was an indication of the violence I was capable of My sexual relationship with Mr. Schmidt started when I was ten and a half and continued until I was fourteen, when I took that poker in the cottage—the poker he used to show me how to build a fire and keep it going; he was my teacher in many ways—and I hit him in the back and thighs. He suffered compound fractures and was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

  “My parents and Mr. Schmidt came to an understanding, though, and I wasn’t hauled off to court. Mr. Schmidt was quite generous to me, and after he returned to working in his house he restarted our English conversation lessons. I can’t believe my parents weren’t aware of the sexual element in the background to all this. But my father was a self-centered, closed-in person, and he was relieved to let Mr. Schmidt’s generosity and good intentions settle matters.