Somersault Read online

  Praise for Somersault:

  “[Somersault] takes on great themes and does so in a persuasive and almost completely satisfying fashion.… When I reached the final scenes of this magnificent novel of ideas, I was more ready to mourn for the extraordinary world that was coming to an end. This side of Paradise, there’s still some comfort in the fiction that masters like Oe produce.”

  —Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune

  “Powerful and timely.”

  —Wingate Packard, The Seattle Times

  “Ambitious, brilliant . . . [Somersault] is a major novel.… Oe sets up his intriguing premise beautifully.”

  —Brian Bergstrom, New City Chicago

  “Everything, it seems, is here: religion, art, sex. . . terrorism, the fate of the Earth.”

  —The Washington Post

  “A dazzling illustration of the principles of the dialectic, carried to the uttermost limits: to the erotic nimbus surrounding death, to the very nature of God.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Full of arresting ideas and indelibly beautiful images . . . [Somersault] appears at a moment when apocalypse—whether through war, destroying the environment or terror attacks—has left the realm of fantasy and religion to become perfectly feasible.”

  —The New Leader

  “The great questions of life are the golden thread running through the fabric of Oe’s opus.”

  —The San Antonio Express-News

  “An invaluable vision of postwar Japan. Gone are sake, sushi, the Shinto shrine, haiku and Mt. Fuji. Instead we find beer-and-whisky, ham-and-eggs, future shock.”

  —Bookpage

  Also by Kenzaburo Oe

  FICTION

  A Personal Matter

  A Quiet Life

  Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

  The Pinch Runner Memorandum

  The Silent Cry

  Seventeen and J

  The Catch and Other Stories

  Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness

  An Echo of Heaven

  The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the

  Atomic Aftermath (editor)

  NONFICTION

  Hiroshima Notes

  A Healing Family

  Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself

  SOMERSAULT

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Translated from the Japanese by

  Philip Gabriel

  Copyright © 1999 by Kenzaburo Oe

  Translation copyright © 2003 by Philip Gabriel

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Originally published in the Japanese language as Chćgaeri by Kōdansha (Tokyo)

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the following for permission to quote from the poetry of R. S. Thomas in “Chapter Four: Reading R. S. Thomas”:

  The Orion Publishing Group for permission to quote from R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems 1945-1990, J. M. Dent (London), 1993, for the following poems: “Correspondence” (pp. 67-68 of Somersault), “Suddenly” (p. 73), “Balance” (p. 75), and “Sea-watching” (p. 79).

  Kunjana Thomas for permission to quote from Between Here and Now, Macmillan London Limited, 1981, for the poem “Threshold” (pp. 70-71).

  The prose quotation on page 72 is from R. S. Thomas, Selected Prose, published by Poetry Wales Press, 1983. The prose quotation on page 76 is from The Page’s Drift: R. S. Thomas at Eighty, edited by M. Wynn Thomas, published by Seren Books/Poetry Wales Press, 1993.

  All biblical quotations are taken from The New International Version Study Bible, Zondervan Publishers, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1985.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Oe, Kenzaburo, 1935–

  [Chugaeri. English]

  Somersault: a novel / by Kenzaburo Oe; translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9541-8

  I. Gabriel, J. Philip. II. Title.

  PL858.E14 C48813 2003

  895.6′35—dc21 2002029746

  Design by Laura Hammond Hough

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Prologue: Beautiful Eyes in a Doglike Face

  Part I

  1: A Hundred Years

  2: Reunion

  3: Somersault

  4: Reading R. S. Thomas

  5: The Moosbrugger Committee

  6: Guide

  7: A Sacred Wound

  8: A New Guide

  9: The Book Already Written

  10: Wake Mania Without End (I)

  11: Wake Mania Without End (II)

  12: Initiation of New Believers

  13: Hallelujah

  14: Why Patron? And Why Now?

  15: Years of Exhaustion

  16: The Clinician

  Part II

  17: There’s Power in the Place

  18: Acceptance and Rejection (I)

  19: Acceptance and Rejection (II)

  20: The Quiet Women

  21: The Young Fireflies

  22: Yonah

  23: The Technicians

  24: Viewing the Sacred Wound

  25: The Play at the Hollow

  26: People Like Unedited Videos

  27: Church of the New Man

  28: A Miracle

  29: Lessons Learned

  30: Memories of Guide

  31: The Summer Conference

  32: For Patron

  Epilogue: The Everlasting Year

  Prologue Beautiful Eyes in a Doglike Face

  A small figure was making its way forward—a man, it appeared, with extraordinarily well-developed muscles yet reduced in scale. Chest thrust out, he advanced into the gloom, clutching in his outstretched arms a structure made of two boomerang-shaped wings, one on top of the other. Narrow banners hung down in front of him; beyond that was a brightly lighted stage. Just as he bent down to pass by a switchboard that jutted out into the passageway, one tip of the wing of the structure plunged under the tutu of a dancer who was hurrying past.

  The small man and the young dancer froze. The girl, bent forward, shifted her weight to her right leg, leaving her wide-open left leg defenseless, elevated in midair, yet somehow she was able to keep her balance. She glared at the small man, her anger evident at having been forced into this helpless position. Her little face turned bright red, like a sunlit plum. But what looked back at her wasn’t a small man. It was a boy—forehead, mouth, and ears protruding like those of a dog—yet with a strangely beautiful gaze.

  The boy looked at her for the briefest of moments. In order to rescue the structure he supported in his outthrust arms, the boy tried to lift it up above the framework sticking out from the wall to his left, twisting the joint connecting the two wings in an attempt to slide one half upward. For her part, the girl, through her billowed-out skirt, shifted the structure toward her abdomen to absorb some of its weight, all the while keeping her left foot raised and balancing on the right one. From in front and behind the unfortunate pair, men in black leaned forward and jostled one another. At that instant, a flash of determination swept across the boy’s doglike face and he flung his structure straight down, scattering hundreds of multicolored plastic pieces
. Now free, the girl pressed down her bell-shaped skirt and flew off in tears to join the group of dancers beside the stage.

  The young boy pushed forward with his narrow yet strong shoulders, shoving aside the taller black-suited men. Like a very small model of someone who’s just completed a grand project, he strode off into the dark of the passage behind the stage, a dignified exit undeterred by the shouts of the men. The dance troupe members halfheartedly consoled the girl, who was late, but they were concerned with their own costumes, and, besides, they’d missed their big chance that day to appear. The young boy, favored to receive the grand prize in the awards ceremony, had smashed to bits both his creation and any reason for him to make an appearance and had now disappeared.

  Did destroying the model city he’d taken a year to create afford him a precocious, lawless sense of confidence—this boy who often fled from the center of Tokyo? Did seeing his creation as something whose sole purpose was to be broken to pieces make him wonder if even this huge metropolis could be razed if one wanted it to? But to what end? He had no idea, but there was plenty of time in life to try to answer that, or at least to formulate the question. This dog-faced boy, with his combination of breathtaking ugliness and beauty, must have been convinced of this, deep inside his still-forming body.

  This episode took place at a public exhibition of imaginary landscapes of the future created from small plastic blocks, an event sponsored jointly by an American educational materials company and a Japanese firm that imported stationery supplies. In later years, Kizu, who had been on the screening committee, often recalled the boy who had arrogantly removed himself from the competition. Kizu could never forget how, when he first saw the boy at the exhibition, the word child didn’t come to mind, but rather the term small man. He recalled the boy’s moment-to-moment movements and expressions—at once so ugly you could barely bring yourself to watch, yet so lovely you felt your chest constrict—and the extraordinary vitality evident behind them. Because he was a painter, it was second nature to Kizu to want to scrutinize, over time, the details of the object of his gaze, so he was struck by a desire to watch each stage of development of this strangely compelling little lump of a child: childhood, adolescence, and youth. He felt sure that someday he’d be able to do this yet equally certain it would never happen, for even when the boy was right in front of his eyes, it had all felt like a dream.…

  The autumn when the exhibition was held had marked a new start in Kizu’s life. Already in his late thirties, his major accomplishment was to be short-listed for the Yasui Prize, but he had actually won several awards, which had led to talk of a “Kizu style” being mentioned in the same breath as that of the work of an artist who specialized in reproductions of classic paintings, the kind found hanging in European galleries. Even so, some people still continued to compare Kizu’s painting with the American Urban School, which led to his receiving a Fulbright to study at an American university on the East Coast well known in the field of art education. As with the majority of Japanese artists, this should have been nothing more than a simple rite of passage, but Kizu was genuinely interested in art education methods, and, in his typically intense and focused way he decided to go back to graduate school. This took five years, during which he divorced the wife he’d left behind in Japan. Now, several years later and PhD in hand, Kizu decided to say goodbye to life in the States and return to Japan.

  Kizu had been asked to join the selection committee by its head, who’d been delegated the job by the corporate headquarters of the American company; the man had helped Kizu both during his Fulbright stay and after he extended it, and Kizu naturally felt obligated to him.

  The creation the dog-faced boy came up with at the contest was amazingly inventive, yet what affected Kizu most was what radiated not from the work but from the boy’s looks and attitude—his entire being. It pained Kizu to realize that he himself lacked the archetypal aura the boy possessed. Even when he was living in America he’d felt his style of painting had reached a dead end, a feeling that surfaced in the conviction that he had no ground to stand on as an artist.

  After an assistant professor in Kizu’s department at the American university failed to receive tenure and moved on to another institution, Kizu’s mentor invited him to take the departed man’s position. Kizu had spiritedly given up on having a career as an artist in his own country—a move spurred on by the deeds of that small man—so he accepted the mentor’s invitation and returned to live more or less permanently in the United States. Kizu went on to spend the next fifteen years in the states on the East Coast, receiving tenure along the way. As part of academic life, Kizu had taken sabbaticals, and now for the first time he chose Japan for his sabbatical leave. An urgent reason lay behind this choice. Four years before, he had been operated on for colon cancer. The examinations and surgery he’d undergone after the first symptoms appeared were almost unbearable. What’s more, his elder brother had undergone surgery for the same condition before Kizu; two years ago the disease had spread to his liver, and after one awful operation followed another, he passed away. Even though he felt unwell himself, Kizu refused to be examined further.

  The previous autumn at a dinner party at his university’s research institute, an oncologist of note commented that Kizu didn’t look at all well and recommended he get a thorough checkup; he gave in to the sense of resignation he’d long held inside and had the doctor write a letter of introduction for him to a former student who ran his own clinic in Tokyo. Sick as he knew he was with cancer, though, the last thing Kizu wanted was any more painful poking and probing or operations.

  Before Kizu left for Tokyo, a visiting scholar of Japanese literature in the East Asian studies department (with a doctorate from Tokyo University, according to his business card) said to Kizu, “Ah, so you’ll be the mendicant pilgrim returning to his ancestral shores?” It was just an offhand comment and Kizu took it as a playful remark. Nevertheless, it hit home—things were much more serious than that.

  Still, out of these negative prospects surrounding his impending stay in Tokyo, Kizu was able to discover one positive goal—the desire to find the boy he’d run across at the exhibition some fifteen years before, the boy so ugly you couldn’t bear to look at his face, yet who’d shown a flash of aching beauty. Kizu wanted to meet him and see how the boy’s life had taken shape in the intervening years. He grasped at a prescient feeling, akin to the dialectic of dreams, that this reunion could never come to pass, yet somehow—it most definitely would.

  Soon after settling into the apartment house in Akasaka owned by his U.S. university, Kizu asked an arts reporter who had come to interview him on the state of art education in America to dig up the newspaper article on the events of that day fifteen years before. Even though the reporter’s newspaper had been one of the sponsors of the contest, Kizu discovered, when the reporter sent him the article on the awards ceremony—for models constructed out of the kind of plastic blocks so popular both in America and this side of the Pacific—that it was surprisingly short and matter-of-fact. It didn’t even mention the name of the boy who’d destroyed his creation just before taking it onstage for the final judging. A small sidebar on the same page, though, reported on the self-sacrificing actions of the boy and the courageous stance of the young girl, who suffered while trying to keep the model from being destroyed.

  Kizu called up his contact again and was able to get in touch with the reporter who’d written the sidebar. This man himself, now an executive of the newspaper company, had been curious about the boy, who of course by now was a grown man, and had tried without success to do a follow-up interview four or five years ago.

  At the time of the contest the boy was ten years old, in fifth grade in a private elementary school; he went on to graduate from the affiliated junior and senior high schools and entered Tokyo University. Until the time he enrolled in the department of architecture there, his name was still in his high school’s annual alumni directory. He hadn’t responded to the
questionnaire the following year, however, and the high school listed his address as unknown. Inquiries at his university revealed that the boy had voluntarily withdrawn. He hadn’t been in touch with his parents for quite some time, and even though they assumed he was all right, he might very well have been living a vagrant sort of life.

  On the plus side, the reporter told him he knew how to get in touch with the young girl, now also an adult. When he’d written the original sidebar, his first inclination had been to focus on the young boy, but requests for an interview were turned down—whether by the boy or his parents was unclear. So the reporter based his article on what the girl told him. He’d even gotten a New Year’s card from the girl’s mother in Hokkaido. The card was sent a few years ago, when the girl had gone to Tokyo in hopes of becoming a dancer; if Kizu wanted to get in touch with her he could start with the residence listed on the card.

  Kizu wasn’t surprised to hear that the boy, with his amazing sense of the three dimensional, had studied architecture, even if only for a short time. Kizu remembered thinking when he saw the model the boy had been carrying, just before one wing of it got caught up under the girl’s skirt, that its whole structure—the two boomerang-shaped wings, one on top of the other—must be an architectural design for a futuristic space station.

  Kizu could understand, too, how when he got older, the boy dropped out of college. What sort of youth could be more appropriate for this boy, with his frightening canine face and beautiful, expressive eyes? This was the kind of person, after all, who could smash his own creation, something so big he could barely carry it—a creation that he must have constructed over what would have seemed like an endless year.

  Since his current whereabouts were unknown even to his own family, it was probably impossible to track down the young man. Still, Kizu couldn’t shake the optimistic feeling that during his special year in Tokyo he would somehow run across the boy.

  One other person couldn’t forget that day’s meeting with the boy: the young dancer who’d been impaled by the boomerang model. She had a compelling reason for never forgetting that day, for the plastic tip of the model had robbed her of her virginity. She made this discovery during the long winter of her junior year in high school in Asahikawa, where her father had been transferred. She was having sex with the PE teacher who’d been teaching her dance, and the whole operation went so smoothly the teacher got upset, thinking she must be more sexually experienced than she’d made out, though truthfully it also put him at ease. She didn’t say anything to him, but she recalled that abortive awards ceremony. When she had returned home the day of the ceremony, she’d extracted a yellow thumb-size plastic piece from the crotch of her panties, a piece covered with rust-colored blood.