Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “Are all the children here raised on these stories?” Ogi asked. “It’s strange for me, because I’m from a place where we don’t have those sorts of legends.”

  The young men ignored his question.

  “In order to perform the Spirit Festival,” Ikuo answered in their stead, “the Young Fireflies compared all their personal memories of the festival. There were several places where Gii’s memory was different.”

  “That’s right.” Isamu nodded.

  “I saw your house over in the outskirts, and it seemed like an old home with a long history,” Ogi ventured, but Isamu didn’t reply.

  “Gii’s case is a bit special,” Mayumi said. “Satchan was taken in as an orphan at the Mansion and was raised by Granny, who was something of a kataribe, a storyteller, though Satchan says she didn’t hear all that many legends growing up. Granny taught Brother Gii all the legends. Satchan was his successor and passed them on to Gii. That’s the line of descent here.”

  “We can just go ahead and use the dolls, clothes, and props of the spirits that are stored in the shrines and temples,” Gii said. “Those’ll do fine. Though I imagine Mayumi will think that’s boring. Talking to people who were alive when the new spirits lived and trying to put all that together and create spirits isn’t easy. If you oversimplify them, they’ll turn into caricatures.”

  “You don’t want to be the Spirit of Brother Gii?” Ikuo asked Gii.

  “I just told you, didn’t I? It might turn out as a caricature.”

  “Would you rather be the Spirit of the Hermit Gii, who refused military service and hid in the forest?”

  “Yes, everybody thinks he should be He Who Destroys,” Isamu said, but Gii ignored him.

  Ikuo explained all this to Ogi. “He means the pioneer who came in when this region was a wilderness surrounded by forest and opened it up for settlers. The cliffs and rock-hard soil had dammed up stagnant water, and gas had collected. He blew it all up with explosives, so he was both a creator and a destroyer.”

  “If I do play He Who Destroys, one of my friends asked if I’ll do it dressed up as a giant who opened up the land here,” Gii said, in a calm voice surprising in someone so young. “I was born at the Farm after my father died an unnatural death, and for a long time they wouldn’t let me play with the other kids. All I heard was stories about my father that my mother told me, so when I started going to school I was so far behind I had a tough time keeping up.

  “People at school treated me like I was a freak, and neighbors used to taunt me as I walked home to the Farm along the river. Must have been tough to squeeze out of your mom’s cock when you were born, huh? Things like that. Anyway, having heard all the stories from my mother, ever since I was little I’ve viewed the local people as doubled. I got this vision of a world where the living and the dead coexist from a poem by the pianist Afanassiev. And I believed that as a child I’d actually experienced it.

  “I’d pass by people along the river, adults and children, and realize that some of them—people who looked just like everybody else—were people who had come back. The souls of the dead would go up to the forest, rest for a long time at the roots of trees, and be reborn in the bodies of newborn babies. Those are the people who’ve come back. My mother said that, in principle, all the people in the valley have come back, but some people stood out more than others.

  “I found it terribly exciting to see the people who’d come back living together with ordinary people. That doesn’t happen to me anymore, so what I hope is that the Spirit Festival can re-create that feeling: the people who’ve come back descending into the midst of a group of ordinary people.”

  “So as a child you felt the mythic heroes of this land being reborn?” Ikuo asked. “That’s pretty amazing. Growing up like that must have given you a more objective view of special figures like He Who Destroys—and your father too. I can understand now why the character covered with branches and leaves has so much appeal.”

  “The way you put it, Ikuo-san, does sort of capture the way I felt,” Gii said. “But even though I had those fantasies as a child, to look at me you wouldn’t have thought I was anything out of the ordinary. I was just a little neighborhood brat with a blank look on his face.”

  “But that blank-looking little urchin was something special,” Mayumi insisted. “And the fact that you have such a clear recollection of the way you felt then makes you pretty special even now, Gii.”

  For Ogi, this unabashed admiration from an older woman once again called up disjointed memories of Mrs. Tsugane.

  28: A Miracle

  1

  In the Red Cross Hospital, Kizu asked Dr. Koga about something that had been bothering him for quite some time.

  “When I was taken from the reception desk at the outpatient part of the hospital and up in the elevator I was fully conscious, though it felt like everything was taking place in a dream. It was like I was a shallow bay in which the tide was receding. It had a strange physicality. The thought struck me that soon I would be empty—in other words, I was going to die—and I was scared and confused. I couldn’t move, and I’m sure I looked quite ugly.”

  “Not from the outside you didn’t,” Dr. Koga replied. “Though Ikuo told me that when you started looking around so nervously he wanted to do something for you but had no idea what to do.”

  “I was struck by the feeling,” Kizu went on, “that my body was about to rise up horizontally, and I was flustered, thinking I was headed straight for the coffin. There was only one thing I could cling to—the thought that before long the pain would hit me with a thud. And then I would crash and die and life would come to an end. Besides the fear and confusion, I had a cynical premonition that if someone told me now I was under the wrong impression and things weren’t as they seemed, I wouldn’t have had any objections.

  “Yesterday, when Ikuo came to visit me, he told me what young Gii told him about having often seen people who’ve returned living together with normal people. Right now I really feel, talking to you like this, that I am one of those people.”

  “I think that if the next thud, as you put it, had come, you really would have died,” Dr. Koga said. “As your doctor I was trying to forestall this, but it was risky to take you all the way to Matsuyama. I took the risk partly because Ikuo insisted but also because I believed you were going to pass away from cancer anyway before much longer. I was anxious, thinking we had to take you to Matsuyama, otherwise you’d die the way you were, though I know this isn’t exactly logical.… If you had died on the way—well, I figured that would be unfortunate but not the worst sort of death. I did still feel responsible, though, even if you’d passed away after we took you out of the ambulance and turned you over to the intensive care unit.”

  The sense of fear and confusion Kizu felt at that time was no longer near, though it was bound to overwhelm him again. He didn’t feel like complaining to Dr. Koga, though, and confined himself to a sigh.

  “It was all pretty strange the way it worked out,” Kizu said.

  “It was a miracle!” Dr. Koga exclaimed. “As your attending physician I’ve made one mistake after another. When you had your first bout of pain and bloody stool, I just went on the assumption that you had terminal cancer and should be given medication to alleviate the pain. But you recovered quickly, so I designed a program both to control your pain with medication and to allow you to recuperate at home. People your age are wary of being overly dependent on drugs, not to mention being pretty stoic, so you were a model patient.

  “The thought didn’t occur to me of trying to locate the origin of your pain. A complete cure was out of the question. That’s the situation when you had this recurrence and all the terrible pain involved. I imagine Ikuo’s told you all about this, but on the day you went into the hospital Patron used that as the impetus for launching this notion of the Church of the New Man. It had a tremendous impact on everybody—from those in the Hollow to those out at the farm.

  “Patron says tha
t the concept of the Church of the New Man is expressed in the painting you were doing at the time of your collapse, so I went over to your studio to check it out. If only I’d seen it beforehand I would have definitely taken another look at the source of your pain. There’s a power in that painting. I don’t care how much technique and experience an artist might have, there’s no way a person taking drugs to suppress the pain of terminal cancer could draw something with the kind of power I saw in that painting.

  “In actual fact, it turns out you don’t have terminal cancer at all. So where was the pain coming from? Well, now we know. Eight years ago you had the viscous matter they discovered in an X-ray cleaned out. The material that collected once again in your gallbladder was rather tenacious, and the gallbladder was just about ready to burst. The young doctor at the Red Cross Hospital opened you up, removed it, and that was that.

  “‘The pain he had before was accompanied by jaundice, right?’ the doctor asked me, ‘so why didn’t you suspect gallstones?’ He treated me like some ignorant intern. I’d heard it was untreatable intestinal cancer. I asked the young doctor what he thought of the bloody stool. He said it’s no longer a concern. And he was exactly right. The fiberscope showed no bleeding in your intestines and of course no sign of cancer. As far as we could see during the gallbladder operation, no cancer had spread to any other organs. ‘Which isn’t strange because there wasn’t any cancer to begin with!’ the young doctor said, in high spirits.”

  “So there really wasn’t any cancer?” Kizu asked.

  “The doctor who examined you in Tokyo is an outstanding physician with a great deal of experience. Terminal intestinal cancer isn’t that hard to diagnose. It is a bit strange, though, that he didn’t do a biopsy.”

  “Maybe that’s because the physician who introduced me to him is a renowned diagnostician,” Kizu said. “Patron once said he’d do something for my cancer. Do you think he really did what he said he would?”

  “All my belief rests on him,” Dr. Koga said. “Which doesn’t hold true for you, Professor. I can’t deny what you say, but it makes me wonder. Naturally, I’m happy that things have turned out as they have. Something bothers me, though, about that high-spirited young doctor. ‘The cancer identified by the former attending physician has completely disappeared—yet the patient didn’t follow up with any standard anticancer treatment. And he’s living with the leader of a religious life. Can we ignore these facts?’ That’s what he said.

  “Ambition might get the best of him and make him talk to the media, and then Patron will be drawn into the spotlight all over again. It’s an unpleasant thought, especially when we’re in such a critical time for the church.”

  2

  Over and over Kizu kept thinking about what it meant that the cancer he’d been aware of having invaded his entire body—though if asked how he was aware of this he could only give an uncertain, vague reply—had completely vanished. The conclusion he arrived at was pure nonsense.

  A fluid life force inside me, he thought, something I’ve never felt before, arose, moved through me, eradicated the focal point of the cancer deep inside, gathered it all at a spot where it could be expelled from my body, and then discharged it very painfully as that bloody stool!

  Before the first wave of pain hit, while he was sketching the feverish Patron, Kizu had felt a tremendous force poured into his body. He recalled this when he was in the hospital. And while he had been sketching Patron naked from the waist up, this came back even more forcefully, which is when he started feeling bad and this latest episode had occurred.

  When the next wave of pain hit him, the cancer had gathered in one place and came out in the bloody stool! Kizu knew this was an audacious fantasy, yet his insides retained a firm memory that this fantasy had actually happened.

  Kizu proceeded to tell his story to the “high-spirited young doctor,” as Dr. Koga called him, who was named Dr. Ino.

  “I’m not saying this is how it happened,” Kizu said. “But if you think about it, the relationship between what happened to my body and the power I received from Patron can explain it.”

  The doctor’s face was round and fat, but the skin looked dirty. A nasty-little-boy smile came to his lips and he rejected this suggestion out of hand.

  “If the doctor tells you it’s colon or rectal cancer, well, if you’re going to have cancer those are good places to have it.… At any rate, that’s a sweet fantasy for a terminal cancer patient. I suggest you confirm this with Dr. Koga.”

  Kizu felt the smile of pity was directed toward him because of his chronic immaturity, and he accepted the doctor’s designation of it as a fantasy. Still, he had to raise a mild protest at the way the young doctor treated Dr. Koga as an accomplice in the misdiagnosis.

  “I’m overjoyed, of course, that I don’t have cancer,” Kizu said, “but my doctor in Tokyo was quite sure he’d discovered cancer, and Dr. Koga based his treatment on what the doctor passed along to him. Not noticing that the cancer has disappeared, though, perhaps is a slipup on his part as my attending physician—”

  “What? Cancer doesn’t just disappear!” Dr. Ino said, his expression even more spirited. “If a sample of a person’s cells are taken to a diagnostic lab and they discover cancer, then he’s a cancer patient pure and simple. You’d resigned yourself to being killed by those cancerous cells, and now, finding out that you aren’t going to die, of course you feel great. But aren’t you forgetting how you suffered when you were told you had incurable cancer?”

  Every time Dr. Ino visited Kizu—as follow-up care after his routine gallbladder operation—he asked him when and how he’d started to suspect that his cancer was recurring. Kizu told him he’d grown aware that his physical condition was getting worse over the past three or four years but had put it down to his body’s slowing down as it aged. After he’d talked with a renowned diagnostician he no longer doubted—on an emotional level—that his cancer was back, and so he’d returned to his native land.

  As if this weren’t enough, Dr. Ino prepared a questionnaire for Kizu.

  What tests did the doctor in Tokyo run before he concluded it was cancer?

  What words did he use to explain his findings, and how did you react?

  After you were told you had cancer, didn’t you refuse not just an operation but also radiation treatment and anticancer medicine because, in the back of your mind, you had doubts about whether you really had cancer or not?

  If you did have doubts, what prompted them?

  Or, on a more positive note, did you think maybe the diagnosis of cancer was a misdiagnosis?

  If so, what did you base this on?

  Why didn’t you discuss these doubts with your present attending physician, who also happens to be a friend of yours?

  Most of the questions were irrelevant because Kizu had never had any doubts. Still, Dr. Ino read the entire list of questions aloud. Some of them were relevant, however. When asked: Thinking that you had cancer and that death was not far off, did you put your affairs in order? Kizu just answered truthfully.

  The final questions were different from the others, which made them all the more interesting: When you told your friends and colleagues that you had cancer, was there a change in their attitude toward you and in your attitude toward them? Did your attitude change toward yourself.

  Kizu had done his best to respond honestly. And afterward, as he lay alone in bed, he mentally reviewed his responses.

  What kind of examinations had the doctor in Tokyo done to arrive at the conclusion that he had terminal cancer? What Kizu remembered—it was only six months ago but the details were so fuzzy it seemed a lifetime, which only irritated Dr. Ino, and the more Kizu tried to recall the vaguer it all became—was that when the doctor in Tokyo questioned him about his condition before examining him, Kizu reported his bloody stool, but this didn’t cause the doctor’s mood to sour. They’d taken X-rays in Tokyo and done a CT scan and ultrasound. And drew blood. With the bad experience he had before
with a fiberscope, Kizu didn’t feel much like having it done again. But he couldn’t recall whether the doctor asked him if he wanted to go through that procedure. Perhaps by this time the doctor wasn’t under any illusions? Whether you’re talking about the stomach or the intestines, if the patient’s the type who doesn’t like examinations, what’s the point of making him suffer only to discover cancer in yet another part of his body?

  After he was told he had cancer, the most important person he talked to about it had to be Ikuo, and this had been the spark that led to a deepening of their sexual relationship, a private preserve he wasn’t about to get into. Instead he had told Dr. Ino how Patron had told him that as long as Kizu had life within him he would clarify his own mission as a religious leader, and how after Kizu accepted his role Dr. Koga began to show greater interest in him. Further, he talked about how everyone here in this area knew he was a terminal cancer patient, but it didn’t seem to make people any more or less interested in him and he was able to lead a happy life and get along well with others.

  After all these questions, Dr. Ino had asked him this: In weekly magazines and on TV shows you often see reports of how patients everyone has given up on were cured by such folk medicine as Chinese chi therapy or eating mushrooms from South America, right? Do you understand your own cure as the effects of Patron’s mystical powers?

  “When Patron’s longtime companion fell ill,” Kizu had replied, “not just Patron but everyone around him hoped he could save him through some mystical forces. But it didn’t happen. So I don’t believe Patron has mystical healing powers. However, while I was drawing the wound in Patron’s side, what members of the church call the Sacred Wound, I felt a tremendous life force welling up within me, so powerful I wondered whether I’d be able to get through the session all right. The second time I was drawing was when I collapsed, but the terrible pain I felt came from that tremendous life force.