Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  Mr. Matsuo turned his snow-covered head toward the chapel. “Hear that? It’s Morio’s music.”

  The music’s quiet echo was one with the snowdrifts and the snow falling on the surface of the lake.

  2

  The next morning it had stopped snowing. Ogi and Mrs. Tsugane had used the oversized bed that Patron and Morio had pretty much lived in, while Fred happily made do with the Japanese futon they’d laid out for him in the living room on the south side of the house. In the dinette, filled with the lively calls of birds from the snowy woods, Mrs. Tsugane prepared a breakfast of bacon and eggs from the Farm, which had been put in the refrigerator for them. An hour after they heard the music announcing the opening of the dining hall, Fred still showed no signs of getting up, so Ogi and his wife lay in bed waiting for him.

  Getting up was all the harder since they’d stayed up late in the heated dining hall talking. The late-night Hollow, lost in snow, had been as soundless as the bottom of the ocean; the guests were startled each time they heard a piercing crack ring out in the woods. They’d been told what it was—branches of the bamboos in the large grove on the right-hand slope on the way to the Mansion cracking under the weight of the snow—but still it made them jump.

  The little banquet held by the church members to welcome Ogi and the others, held two hours after their usual dinnertime, was hosted by Ikuo, Dancer, Dr. Koga, and Gii, and, from the Quiet Women, Ms. Oyama and Ms. Takada. Mrs. Shigeno was away in Chiba visiting her daughter, who had married a physician.

  All the Quiet Women had remained in the Hollow, and now most of the children they’d left behind when they moved to Shikoku had joined them. Half of the Technicians had left, but in addition to the Fireflies, who’d been moved by Patron’s sermon and were now enthusiastic supporters of the church, there were a number of other young people who’d joined, and production at the Farm was right on schedule. After attending Kizu night and day in his final illness, Ms. Asuka was now back in Tokyo editing the video of the summer conference.

  As for Ogi, he had gone back to work at the International Culture Foundation and was planning in his spare time to write a book on the establishment of the Church of the New Man. He was preparing a first draft based on notes he’d taken from the time he first started working for Patron and Guide at the office in Seijo up to the hectic summer conference at the Hollow. Mrs. Tsugane had used a word processor to make a fair copy of everything he had written so far.

  As everyone involved pondered things anew after the events of the summer, Kizu had felt a renewed sense of the mission Patron entrusted him with—namely, to be historian for the Church of the New Man—and had begun filling sketchbooks with memos of events. After his death Dancer put it all in order. Hearing of Ogi’s plan to write a history of the church, Ikuo contacted him by phone to offer the materials for his use.

  This is why Ogi and the others had come to the Hollow. Ikuo read over the fair copy of the first draft Ogi brought with him, while Ogi read through Kizu’s memos. Afterward they discussed things, and after outlining a general plan, Ogi went ahead with reworking his first draft, laying great emphasis on Kizu’s records and incorporating Ikuo’s explanations as well. This was Ogi’s own personal project, but once complete it would serve as a good introduction to an official church history.

  Actually, the groundwork for this agreement had been laid by Mrs. Tsugane. At the time of their marriage, in place of a wedding ceremony they held a reunion dinner with Mrs. Tsugane and Ogi’s family. Ogi’s elder brother and his wife, who had introduced her to Ogi in the first place, ordered a cake decorated with a ribbon saying FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PANTIES OF PURE LOVE, in order to tease Ogi. If their trysts deep in the Shikoku woods had come to light, there’s no telling how carried away Ogi’s brother and sister-in-law would have gotten.

  After dinner at a modest Italian restaurant in the Imperial Hotel, Mrs. Tsugane made a firm resolution. She would help her young husband—the one member of the Ogi family, renowned in the medical field, for whom no one had any expectations of success—to achieve his long-held plan, at the same time sweeping away the chagrin she’d felt at being treated so lightly by his family. She’d convinced herself that it was entirely due to the promotion campaign she’d run that her former husband had achieved international recognition, but when it came to Ogi the more relevant question was not when he’d complete the project but whether he’d ever get started. So at this point Mrs. Tsugane suggested that he begin his “History of the Age” by writing a first volume tracing developments from the Somersault to the founding of the Church of the New Man.

  At the same time she urged Fred to write an article about the now yearold church, including the horrifying events of the summer conference. Fred was assigned to do this by an American news agency and then asked Mrs. Tsugane to travel with him as his interpreter to gather material, and that’s how the plan to visit the Hollow near the end of the year came about.

  After ten that morning Dancer called Ogi’s residence with an invitation for Ogi, Fred, and Mrs. Tsugane to gather at the chapel with Ikuo and Gii to continue last night’s conversation. The slope leading from Patron and Morio’s former residence down to the chapel was less than sixteen feet, but as soon as they pushed open the front door they hesitated, looking out at the mound of white glittering in the flood of light. Even if they were to plow their way through it, the snow would come up to Fred’s thighs, and he was the tallest of the group. The path had been swept clean the night before, but still it had accumulated this much.

  Just then Gii, attired in a sturdy-looking outfit of boots and windbreaker, appeared, snow shovel in hand. Wielding the shovel in the painfully bright light, he was clearly more physically developed than a year before. As he gallantly shoveled his way up to the entrance Gii greeted Ogi and his wife in Japanese and Fred in British-accented English. In between shovelfuls he advised them that it would be wise to wear overcoats when they went to the chapel since it was cold inside. He added that Ikuo—he didn’t call him Yonah as in the past—didn’t want to meet in the dining hall because other church members could eavesdrop on their conversation there.

  “Since you’re able to speak directly with Fred, he doesn’t need my poor interpreting skills,” Mrs. Tsugane said, turning on the charm as she spoke to Gii, who was flushed from his exertions clearing the snow.

  As Mrs. Tsugane repeated in English to Fred what she’d said, Gii gave a reply in English that revealed how undaunted a fellow he was.

  “If you’re investigating a native religion here in the Hollow, instead of having an English-speaking informant it would be better, wouldn’t it, to use an interpreter and have one native speak to another?”

  Mrs. Tsugane went inside to collect her overcoat, and while she wrapped herself in a scarf that her ex-husband had designed, she showed her displeasure.

  “What a charmless young man we have here. Much better to be labeled an innocent youth.”

  Ogi pretended not to hear.

  Fred, who seemed to understand Mrs. Tsugane’s Japanese quite well—in fact, Ogi suspected he had a better grasp of the spoken language than he made out—said in his characteristic grumbling way, “Pretty amazing to find such a complex intellectual environment so far out in the snowy forest! A priest who drives an expensive Nissan and quotes Dogen, and on top of that a fifteen-year-old who’s got a good grasp of the imperialist aspects of cultural anthropology!”

  Dancer had brought a kerosene heater with a built-in fan into the chapel. But when Ogi and the others came inside, what caught their attention was less this than the thirty guitars lined up neatly along the wall behind the piano. Last night they’d heard about this, that the junior high school, which had turned down Kizu’s idea for an art classroom, was now using the chapel for music classes. So not only did one of the more prominent wind instrument groups in the district use the chapel for practice, it was also being used regularly by local students for their guitar lessons.

  From the darkly shadow
ed triptych with its Renaissance-style scenes, one by one the three newcomers found themselves drawn to the sparkling long window set in the cylindrical inner concrete wall of the chapel. Surrounded by snow-covered forest, the lake in the Hollow reflected back the blue sky that looked like the bottom of a hole. In the midst of this diffusely lit scene, the square enclosure on the flat white stand that was the cypress island showed as undulations in the sparkling snow.

  “It’s too bright without sunglasses,” Fred said. “I heard that because Japanese people have dark eyes they can stand bright light, but I don’t really understand why. They say the older you get the less sensitive you are to light. Is that really true?”

  “I’m fairly old and wear bifocals, but they’re tinted, so don’t treat me like some insensitive native!” Mrs. Tsugane said.

  Fred replied, “What a grump!” and shrugged his shoulders in an exaggerated way, more put off than ever; Ogi, though, was impressed by her gallant response.

  Ikuo came into the chapel lugging an old leather briefcase Ogi remembered seeing Kizu using. Dancer brought over chairs around the heater, now blazing away, and they gathered around. Out of the leather case, which seemed to radiate cold, Ikuo took out a couple of sketchbooks and copies of other documents and laid them on an empty chair.

  Next to these he laid down the typed first draft that Ogi had given him, and said, “Maybe it’s the snow, but I felt as impatient as a child this morning and got up early and read the whole thing. Your descriptions are great; it reads like a novel. And I’m impressed by how you’ve remembered the details of conversations, even though I saw you always taking notes. But if you flesh this out, covering everything from Patron’s Somersault through Guide’s torture and up to the summer conference and the Church of the New Man, won’t the whole thing be enormously long?”

  “I told Ogi that if you don’t carefully write all the details,” Mrs. Tsugane replied, “it won’t be much of a history of the age. We experience things without really knowing what they mean and how they’ll end up, right? That being the case, all you can do is write down as much of what you saw and heard just as you experienced it. Maybe it’s a case of God being in the details.”

  As if to forestall any quick reaction from Ikuo, Mrs. Tsugane translated her remarks for Fred, who blinked his chestnut-colored eyes as if, even inside, it was too bright, and sighed. “It’s amazing the amount of intellectual information that flits back and forth here.”

  As if this was the opportune moment he’d been waiting for, Gii said, in English, “I think Ikuo and Ogi have some things they need to talk over by themselves, things that don’t need to be translated for Mr. Parks’s article. I mentioned being an informant before, but I’d be happy to answer anything I can as honestly and accurately as I can. I won’t just butter you up with things I think a foreigner might want to hear. So why don’t we find a corner that’s out of the sun, and you and I can talk?”

  Fred Parks liked the idea. He and the Gii quickly moved over to the space between the piano and the wall where the triptych hung. Ikuo placed two chairs for them, his actions showing that he was quite used to being the one in charge now.

  When it was just the four of them left, Mrs. Tsugane said, “Ogi resisted the idea of including in the record of the church such things as what he’d written down in his notebooks about the two of us doing that. Though he wrote it down at the time as if it were an important matter. I insisted that he put it into his first draft. It’s a history of the church, but you also have aspirations to write a History of the Age, right? Unless you decide to write down all the details, including the ones that are hard to reveal to others, the amateur writer tends to leave out what’s important. It’s also good practice for describing the facts.”

  Ogi, of course, but also Ikuo, who’d read the typed first draft, were both unsure how to respond. At this point Dancer spoke up, her way of speaking unusually gentle now, something Ogi had picked up on the night before.

  “I think I understand what Mrs. Tsugane is getting at,” Dancer said. “The same applies to the summer conference and my life up till then, even before I started living in Tokyo. When I try to remember things that happened when I was a young girl in ballet tights, I can’t distinguish between what was important and what’s just extraneous details. During this past year since you left the office, Ogi, almost every day I’ve been mentally reviewing everything that happened, and it feels, like you say, that the key to everything lies in the details.…

  “Ikuo, don’t you need to tell Ogi how Professor Kizu passed away? Just as Mrs. Tsugane said, try to conjure up the details of what happened. Professor Kizu’s parting words might seem like he was making fun of you, but aren’t they important too? If you include them, and Ogi writes down all the details as he does in his notebook, who knows but that you might find yourself reaching a deeper understanding of what it all meant. I’ve only read a portion of the first draft, but it’s clear Ogi is no longer just an innocent youth.

  “On the other hand, I don’t think there’s anything I can say that would be of help. I won’t be upset, though, if—to borrow Mrs. Tsugane’s term—Ikuo tells everything about that which took place at the time of Professor Kizu’s death. This might be hard to talk about in front of us women, so why don’t I take Mrs. Tsugane over to see what the children of the Quiet Women have been doing? I think it’d be worth your while to see our fish pond, too, though with all this snow it might be like looking down a well.”

  In Dancer’s now-mature voice and mannerisms there was something that made Ogi feel—in a complex way he’d never felt before—that she was truly an extraordinary woman. With Patron now gone, she’d been handling all the church members and the facilities for the last year and had, despite the events of the past, rebuilt relations with the town and local schools. As Dr. Koga had remarked the night before, there was a relaxed dignity about her now.

  When the two women left the chapel, Gii raised his head like a weasel and looked over. But since the American journalist, puffing away despite the ban on smoking, was scribbling in the small notebook spread on his lap, Gii went eagerly back to talking with him in a low voice.

  3

  For nearly five weeks after the summer conference, both the Hollow and the Farm had been in turmoil. Below the surface confusion, though, something deeper and more persistent was taking place.

  The media’s concern had been with the so-called FIERY SUICIDE AND LOYAL DEATHS of Patron and the Tachibana siblings; starting with intense TV coverage, specials appeared in the weekly magazines covering an overabundance of material in a typically unfocused way. The illustrated weeklies ran color photographs of the sprawled, naked body of Patron, like some dry-lacquered image of Buddha, with the nude, charred bodies of Ms. Tachibana and Morio reaching out to him.

  When the church made its official response, which included dealing with the police, Ogi had been in the thick of things. So there was no need for him to hear once again from Ikuo about all this. Still, Dancer had prepared a file of clippings from the local press on this period for him to peruse.

  As he was talking with Ikuo and leafing through these clippings, though, Ogi noticed that in the middle of September, just after he moved away from the Hollow, Kizu had finally opened his art school for junior high students. As one of those involved, Ogi knew that the church had tried to repair its relationship with the Old Town and Maki Town. Guessing from his experience at the time that Kizu himself wasn’t pushing the project too hard, Ogi deduced that this must have been the doing of Asa-san, the wife of the former junior high principal. And this art school in the Hollow in turn had led to the present healthy relationship with the junior high and to their using the chapel for their music classes.

  Another article discussed how Kizu’s falling ill again had led to the closing of the art school after a short time. Along with the article was a color photograph, about half the size of a postcard, of a landscape Kizu had painted of the fall foliage around the chapel and the monastery. Ikuo
explained to the tearful Ogi that since the leaves didn’t turn that well last fall, the painting must have been done in the beginning of December when Kizu took his students to the north shore for outdoor sketching instruction.

  Soon after closing the art school, Kizu went into Dr. Koga’s clinic. Ikuo speculated that the local reporter didn’t touch on the events of the summer conference, or on the “miraculous” disappearance of cancer from his body, not just out of respect for Kizu’s international standing as an art educator but because of his contributions to the town.

  The previous night Dr. Koga had described in detail how Kizu had died of a cancer that, for his age, had spread quite quickly. The cancer, which Dr. Koga deemed a new occurrence of the disease, started in the liver and spread to his lungs, and the autopsy revealed some brain tumors as well. In the year that had passed, Dr. Koga had taken on the look of quite the country doctor, his skin, including the bald spot now at the crown of his head, a sunburnt brown, his mannerisms deliberately exaggerating this role, referring to himself, in imitation of Gii’s childish way, with the rough pronoun washi instead of the normal watashi; Dancer gently ribbed him about it, and though his observations on the symptoms were quite pointed, his look was the same as always, a mix of gloom and urbane cheerfulness as he recalled what had happened.

  “Some people say the cancer that was removed in the United States came back, but since a fair amount of tests concluded that he didn’t have any cancer before this, I’d say cancer snuck up on him for a third time and this time got the better of him. Kizu was in my clinic until spring. Since he was resigned to what was going to happen, he really wanted to go back to stay in his house in the Hollow, so Ms. Asuka devoted herself to nursing him. Former Brother Gii had planted a lot of cherry trees on the east slope as part of his Beautiful Village project, and Professor Kizu passed away when they were in full bloom.