Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  Kizu had been holding his breath; and now he let out a ragged stream and pondered the situation. If he got Ms. Asuka up, she could call the office on her cell phone. But the office beside the chapel was dark, the monastery a pitch-black mass rising up in the lamplight.

  Kizu adjusted the shade on his lamp so the light would shine straight down and switched it on. He got up from bed, but in the small circle of light he couldn’t locate his underwear. Flustered, he pulled on his trousers right over his pajamas. If he raced over to the chapel, yelled out to wake up somebody, they’d be able to get the person down from where he was hanging by the neck. If only he was in time to revive him!

  Even if there wasn’t any emergency, they couldn’t blame him for hurrying over to the chapel simply out of fear that his newly displayed painting was about to be stolen.

  Kizu shone his flashlight before him as he cautiously walked down the hard dirt and gravel path; then, as he came to the newly paved road from the dam to the north shore, he went faster in the lamplight. He was filled with a sense of gratification that he’d regained his strength so quickly.

  He took the walkway behind to the back of the bleachers, ascended a short staircase, walked through the hushed monastery courtyard, and found the door of the chapel half open, light spilling out onto the base of the big cylindrical building. If there really were thieves inside about to make off with his painting, they’d make short work of an old man showing up out of the blue like this, but this didn’t deter Kizu.

  Still, he trembled as he leaned forward in the open space and peered inside. Two beings were there, like big and little stuffed bears, one crouched at the top of the stepladder, the other clinging to the ladder supporting it. A moment later, Patron, who was standing on the floor, turned to face Kizu, while Morio, on top of the ladder, very carefully turned to gaze down. The two of them were dressed in identical thick yellow and dark green striped pajamas.

  “It’s dangerous to turn around like that when you’re on a ladder, so face the wall again and climb down,” Patron said, his voice echoing in the chamber, and Morio, ever faithful to instructions, did exactly that. Then Patron spoke to Kizu for the first time.

  “You’re up very late, aren’t you? Were you worried about your painting?”

  Kizu waited until his heart stopped pounding before he replied. “From where I sleep I could see people moving around in here.… So you were examining the painting up close, you and Morio?”

  “Yes, both of us have bad eyesight, you see. We were discussing the painting as we were getting ready for bed and decided to take another look. So, Morio, what do you think?”

  “Ikuo in the painting looks just like the painting in the book.”

  Kizu couldn’t understand what Morio’s slow, confident words meant. As Patron held on to the ladder and Morio climbed down, he thrust out his firm jaw and pointed to a faded old book on top of the piano. Kizu walked over and picked it up. It was Wolynski’s Das Buck vom Grossen Zorn, translated by Haniya Yutaka: an edition put out during the war, apparently, with a crudely done cover.

  “Do you see the page slipped in as a frontispiece?” Patron asked, his voice gentle again. “Long after the war they came out with an edition that includes that frontispiece, and it’s important to have that frontispiece in order to understand the text. The edition you have there, though, is not bad, and ever since I first found it on my father’s bookshelf it’s been a favorite of mine, so I made a copy of the frontispiece in the revised edition and stuck it in.”

  Kizu looked at the print. The background was a sculptured group like a relief of a scene from the Bible, and in the foreground there was a dark standing figure, a man facing forward, arms stretched out. His eyes were brimming with despair and rage, his mouth like an open hole, the barely suppressed outlines of his face with its broad manly forehead and strong jaw, all of which clutched at Kizu.

  “The painting is Watts’s The Prophet Jonah. When I heard you were going to use Ikuo as your model for Jonah, I immediately remembered this drawing. Because before this, even, I’d projected Ikuo onto that drawing by Watts.

  “You were released from cancer, Professor,” Patron went on, “and completed the triptych. And when Morio saw it he said that the face in the painting was the same as in The Prophet Jonah. After dinner this evening he didn’t seem to be able to get this out of his mind, and as we talked about it we decided, finally, to go over and see the painting again tonight. I think Morio’s right. Ikuo’s features do look exactly like that, but that’s not all there is to it. Morio understands things through hearing, rather than visually, and he says he hears the same chords, the same dissonance, emanating from both paintings. You, on the other hand, Professor, are a visual person, with a painterly intuition that sees down to the core of Ikuo’s being. That’s where you and Watts have something in common.

  “Actually, I’ve wanted for some time to talk with you about this. And here you are in front of us in the middle of the night. It’s fitting, don’t you think, to say I summoned you here? If so, Professor, then I think your—”

  As if noticing that he wasn’t making much sense, Patron stopped speaking. Kizu thought, That’s right! It is right to think of him as the one who made my cancer disappear! Patron made Morio sit down on the barber chair set back near the light on the wall, and stroked back the sweaty strands of hair clinging to his forehead. Kizu found the scene of the three of them—two in matching yellow and green pajamas, one sunk back, face up in a barber chair, joined by Kizu himself in a pink and gray striped pajama top—like clowns in some old woodblock print. And, he thought, my painting of Jonah is definitely like that frontispiece of the prophet Jonah.

  Before speaking, Patron waited for Kizu, who was poring over the book, to look up.

  “When Ikuo first came to see me, just before I got to know you, Professor, I thought that the Jonah combined in Wolynski’s words and Watts’s drawing had come to life right before my eyes. When he started talking about the book of Jonah I was less surprised than struck by the feeling that it was meant to be.… Ikuo’s question was quite simple: Was it right to repudiate God’s decision to destroy a city and his order to carry that out? He asked this as if he were taking Jonah’s place. As the Fireflies say, it was Jonah-life.

  “When Guide was still alive I couldn’t understand why he didn’t handle this troublesome young man himself. But what Guide did was coax Ikuo into questioning me. And you wrote the cover letter for his petition to me, didn’t you, Professor? I’m not sure I gave him a satisfactory reply, but at least he’s still with me, trying to get his questions ultimately answered. Didn’t you paint this picture sensing all this from the sidelines?”

  This question—though not entirely unexpected—left Kizu at a loss for words. Patron didn’t pursue the point further. The topic was deep, but his manner was serene.

  “At the summer conference where we launch our new church, Ikuo isn’t the only one who’ll press me for an answer,” Patron said. “The Technicians, who wanted to reverse the Somersault so much they ended up torturing Guide to death, are now helping me, the one who played dumb about the whole Somersault. I have to steel myself to the fact that they’re now going to turn the questions they had for Guide on me. And of course, there are the even more potentially troublesome Quiet Women ready and waiting in the wings.”

  Patron said all this in a burst of speech; then he stopped and, pondering something, ran his fingers through Morio’s hair.

  “Ah, Professor—could you pass me that book? I marked some lines in it. Jonah’s finally come to Nineveh to act as a frightening prophet. Jonah curses them in the name of God, saying they will all be destroyed, so it wouldn’t be surprising if they tore him limb from limb. But what about Jonah, who dared do something like that?

  “However, here a great disillusionment lay waiting for him. When he saw the people of Nineveh repent, and God forgive them, he couldn’t grasp the complex elusive nature of the heavenly dialectic, the workings of divine wisdom, s
o filled with a mysterious dissension, and the infinite, all-encompassing divine nature—so Jonah was spurred on to resistance and anger.

  “And thus he spoke to God this way.

  “‘Now, O Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.’”

  “Aren’t Ikuo and the Technicians and Quiet Women pressing me hard with that very same cry?

  “There’s another thing I’d like to say, taking off from Wolynski’s theme, about Dostoyevsky. I find it fascinating that Ikuo is driven by these Jonahlike thoughts and takes so much time looking after the Fireflies. What I recall is a passage written by Wolynski’s translator, Haniya, about Aloysha’s love for the boys, and the boys’ ‘Hurrah!’ in response to this. I copied this down in the margins of this book.

  “Not just Aloysha, who thirteen years hence is supposed to be crucified for being an assassin of the Tsar, but the lustful Dimitri, who carries the burden of a crime he didn’t commit, as well as the Grand Inquisitor Ivan, who cries out in his thirst for life—all of them make a complete change from their positions and reach the sublime at the chorus of shouts from the boys of ‘Long live Karamazov!’

  “Into what terrible state will our country’s people have to descend in order to spark a worldwide repentance?” Patron said. “How far will Jonah have to step forward? . . . Oh no—this won’t do at all. I’ve gotten so excited, Morio’s having one of his attacks! Professor, let’s call it a night. You can borrow the book if you’d like.”

  Patron offered the book, then put his hand on the footrest of the barber chair and turned it around. He knelt down on the floor in front of Morio, who with a sweaty, stern look on his face lay slumped over, limp in the chair. Sweat trickled down from Patron’s pale neck to his back, and though he faced away from Kizu, unmoving, Kizu knew he was being urged to leave.

  4

  As Kizu cut across the courtyard’s flagstone path, he saw a slim woman standing erect under the lamplight beyond the reviewing stands. A strange sight to see, considering the hour. Taking care not to startle her or take her unawares, Kizu deliberately rattled the loose iron railing on the stairs as he descended, and as he did so he realized that the woman was Ms. Asuka, who must have awoken at the sound he made going out and come to look for him.

  Actually, when Ms. Asuka came out from behind the reviewing stands to where the lamplight reached and turned toward him, though she didn’t show a bewildered smile, her body language showed she was, indeed, flustered, and she reluctantly raised a hand in greeting.

  “Well, imagine a young woman standing all alone like this in the middle of the night, beside a mountain lake,” Kizu said, answering her gesture. “Nobody just saunters up here—aren’t you afraid of wild animals?”

  “Wolves are extinct here, and otters don’t attack people,” Ms. Asuka replied quietly, her voice mixed in with the hearty sound of cicadas. “I was worried about you.”

  “I saw a light in the chapel and went to investigate. Patron was there and we talked for a while. Ah . . . I see. You were imagining a depressed old man jumping in the lake? But I’m a lucky old man, whose terminal cancer has disappeared!”

  “These past few days, though,” Ms. Asuka said, “this lucky old man has been a bit gloomy.”

  Something black moved at Ms. Asuka’s feet. Looking carefully they saw three or four small frogs at the base of the streetlamp.

  “At any rate it doesn’t look like I’ll be drowning myself anytime soon,” Kizu said. “Once you understood this you turned your attention to observing these frogs, didn’t you? You’re quite the visual artist.”

  “Once I came down, the thought of climbing up into that shadowy grove of trees gave me the creeps. I heard voices from the chapel so I decided to wait.”

  The frogs sat there silently, heads up, the pulse in their necks visible. Bugs were descending toward them in black streaks or flashes of iridescence. One frog closest to the bugs suddenly moved, gulping down a bug from the air. Looking up at the streetlight one could see a clump of bugs like a single dark spot. Only a few of them were swooping down toward the frogs, perhaps finding the strength to fly again once they descended to the top of the light, or maybe being wafted away on a breeze rising from the lake.

  Out of the group of frogs, all neatly maintaining their positions, one frog held a small gold bug that had fallen and lay upside down on the dam and, suddenly agitated, clawed at its throat with his front legs; one of the other frogs turned to face the spit out bug, but before it could anything about it the bug spread its wings and inscribed an arc into the dark night air.

  Ms. Asuka, a smile clearly showing on her long face now, started to lead the way.

  “What did you talk about for so long?” she asked, shining a flashlight to light the way for Kizu.

  “We talked about how the Jonah in the triptych looks like the Jonah drawn by an artist named Watts. Patron showed me the book and I think he’s right. It was Morio who originally pointed it out.”

  “I’d like to hear more and don’t plan to go to bed right away,” Ms. Asuka said, “so how about joining me for a drink?” And by the time they arrived at the home on the north shore, they’d agreed to do so.

  They pulled two chairs over to one end of the study desk in the bedroom, and Ms. Asuka brought out two cans of cold beer and two double shot glasses of whiskey. They each mixed the beer and the whiskey in whatever proportion suited them.

  Ms. Asuka spread open the book Kizu had borrowed from Patron and, sipping her drink with her thin lips, gazed at the copy of the inserted frontispiece. She read a little of the text, her smile replaced by a serious, almost sullen look.

  Then she raised her face. “My, did the prophet Jonah really end up doing all these things? It’s different from the book of Jonah that Ikuo doesn’t like, the one that ends with Jonah accepting the Lord’s harmonious sermonizing.”

  She passed the book over to Kizu, who read aloud a part that Patron had underlined.

  “The theologian Gregorius recognized one more special characteristic of Jonah, saying that ‘Jonah foresaw the fall of Israel and sensed that the blessings of the prophets would pass to the heretics. He withdrew from evangelizing, questioned the state of his church, discarding the ancient high place and position of the tower of rapture, and threw himself into the sea of grief.’”

  “No matter which Jonah is the real one, persons named Jonah are born to suffer,” Ms. Asuka said, holding the copy of the frontispiece between her slim fingers. “This drawing really shows that kind of Jonah. Almost too clearly, in fact.… The part about the heretics is pretty important too, don’t you think?”

  Kizu couldn’t grasp the point of her question.

  Even before the medical researcher at the institute in the United States had pointed out the possibility that he had cancer, Kizu had felt something not quite right inside him and wasn’t able to take strong drink anymore. Now, in the feeling of relief after being liberated from the disease, he was drinking whisky cut with beer, but he knew he couldn’t hold his liquor like he once could. Ms. Asuka’s face, though, took on a nice rosy color, an uncharacteristically youthful clinging gaze in her eyes as she forcefully made her point.

  “Ever since Patron quoted from the letter to the Ephesians, everyone’s started studying it. While you were in the hospital, Mrs. Shigeno’s study group was particularly popular. I’m not a Christian, but even I joined in. According to what I heard there, what’s important about this particular letter, one of the epistles attributed to Paul, is that it’s a letter aimed at proselytizing the Gentiles—heretics, in Jewish eyes. The New Men at this time were the ones who were able to overcome the discord between Gentiles and Jews. Jonah ran counter to this trend.

  “Deep down, Ikuo may very well not agree with the direction this Church of the New Man is taking. Though as the twentieth century draws to a close, the Japanese are still all heretics.”

  “If the prophet Jonah were alive today,” Kizu said, “he’d say the whole planet’s run b
y heretics. With groups of heretics attacking each other, skirmishing over who’s more legitimate. And even among the heretics in this little outof-the-way mountain area we find groups like the Technicians, the Quiet Women, and Ikuo and the Fireflies trying to establish themselves with Patron.”

  “The summer conference promises to be stormy, doesn’t it?” Ms. Asuka said, pouring the last of her whiskey into her glass of beer. “Also while you were in the hospital, Professor, I heard a lecture by Asa-san about this person called the Former Gii and how he was stymied at every step. Which is why when I saw you go down to the lake tonight I had some troubled notions about what might happen.”

  “I heard the same thing: that Asa-san pulled up Brother Gii’s body from the surface of the lake the day after a storm.”

  “I wouldn’t have the strength to do something like that,” Ms. Asuka said pensively, “but at least I’d have wanted to video it. In the morning, as long as there was enough light.”

  Kizu poured the remaining whiskey into his beer. “The corpse, you mean? It does seem like it’s true what they say about the power of the land stimulating the creativity of newcomers!”

  The two of them were silent, drinking their whiskey-darkened beer, draining their glasses in time with each other. The area around Ms. Asuka’s eyes grew faintly pink, something Kizu found erotic.

  “I apologize for going on about my own personal fantasy,” she said.

  “That’s all right. I’d have to say I have even more intense fantasies than that,” Kizu said, feeling his face flushed with drink. “Once I found that cancer was no longer controlling my destiny, it made me feel uneasy, as if the bottom had dropped out of my life. If Patron hadn’t been in the chapel and I’d made my way back here—and with the Fireflies looking after the dam the water’s filled it all the way to the edge, well . . .”

  “Sometimes the water in the Hollow turns black, which Asa-san says is an evil omen. And the water does seem darker than when I arrived.” Saying this, Ms. Asuka gave her usual close-lipped smile, shook her head, gathered up the glasses on the tray, and withdrew.