Somersault (2 page)

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.

The young girl knew that the way the newspaper article had portrayed events—the boy sacrificing his work in order to rescue the hapless girl from her predicament—was not what really happened. According to the article, as he was about to mount the stage with his already well-received model for the final judging, the boy had boldly taken action to save the girl from pain and embarrassment. But the girl knew that, with her stage costume on, it was a simple matter for someone to lift up her skirt, roll down her underwear, and remove the plastic wing that had inconveniently wormed its way underneath; even with all the people around, she wouldn’t have been embarrassed. The wing tip intruding on her groin had indeed been painful, but she knew that the way she held her body, uncomfortable as it had been, kept the edge of the wing from causing even more pain.

For an instant there had been an entirely different, violent kind of pain, brought on by the boy’s movement in powerfully flinging down the model. The whole thing was a kind of attack—an intentional attack, the girl sensed, that this boy directed against
himself.
Frightened by its cold-blooded barbarity, the girl had burst into tears.

These three people, whose lives crossed briefly some fifteen years before, were to meet again. The story about to unfold begins with their reunion. As the alert reader will already have noticed, up to this point the viewpoint has been that of Kizu. The eyes that saw the young boy as a small person with the musculature and symmetry of a grown man could only have been those of an artist.

Part I

1: A Hundred Years

1

Young Ogi’s new acquaintances had recently dubbed him the Innocent Youth, an appellation he didn’t really mind, seeing that these people, except for the young girl, were nearly his father’s age. The girl, he knew at a glance, was far less innocent than himself. Ogi recalled reading about the two elderly men—Patron and Guide, as they were called—in the newspaper some ten years before; they were central characters in a scandalous religious incident they called a Somersault. From Ogi’s perspective, then, they were not only participants in an episode from the past but also men still in the prime of life—though reports of the incident a decade before had portrayed them as getting on in years.

The two men’s unusual names came about in the following way. At the time of the incident, when the two severed their ties with the religious organization they led,
The New York Times
had substituted these playful names, and the two men decided to adopt them. Later on, they created a similarly playful name for the young girl who assisted them in their life together, christening her
Dancer
.

When Ogi first found out that the two men had maintained a strict silence in the years following the incident, he was deeply impressed. Other than the minimum connections needed to survive, they’d lived in total isolation from the outside world. Ogi was further amazed at Patron’s enormous energy, despite the fact that he was the older of the two and wasn’t so physically robust. Patron spent his days tucked away from society yet in high spirits, as if surrounded by matters of the utmost urgency. But Ogi had also caught a glimpse of the deep depression to which he was prone.

For his part, Guide was always calm and self-possessed and was clearly, even to an outsider, Patron’s valued companion. When the two of them conversed they reminded Ogi, straining to come up with an appropriate metaphor from his limited reading, of Kanzan and Jittoku, the legendary Tang dynasty monks. Peeking in on their amiable chats, Ogi inevitably found Dancer already with them, and after dealing with the two men became part of his regular job, he saw something unnatural, even irritating, in the way the girl related to these two elderly men. All these emotions vanished, however, when Dancer revealed to Ogi her mother’s dream that her daughter study education at the university in Asahikawa where her father taught science and become a middle school or high school teacher in Hokkaido. If I’d listened to her, Dancer told him, my life would have been very different. I never would have experienced the fulfilling days I’ve spent with these two men, who are, in every sense of the words, my true Patron—in the sense of teacher—and Guide. Ogi had to agree with her assessment. There was indeed something special in the relationship between this young woman and the two older men.

Employing another youthful metaphor gleaned from his scanty reading experience, Ogi saw these two men in their fifties as a pair of grizzled sailors pulling into port after a grand ocean voyage. The image was prosaic, yet it had a sense of reality, despite the fact that placid, chubby little Patron and tall, muscular, hawk-profiled Guide wouldn’t strike anyone as fellow sailors on a ship. Once this metaphor came to mind, though, Ogi tried it out on Dancer. Her reply left him flustered.

“Patron and Guide haven’t yet made landfall but are still in the midst of a gigantic storm,” Dancer replied. “In the not-too-distant future, as the waves and wind build up higher, even you will begin to see the gale and the downpour. Until then, I suggest you find a safe harbor where you can take shelter.”

“What about you?” Ogi asked.

“I’ll hitch my star to the captain and the chief navigator,” the girl said, nearly whispering, her mouth slightly open, her moist pink tongue visible.

Despite what this physical description might imply, there was a simple reason why Ogi did not at first feel entirely comfortable with Dancer. Granted she had a unique personality and was young and pretty enough to attract most young men. Viewed from a different angle, her habit of antagonizing him might very well be part of her charm.

Her voice and the way she spoke, as if she were whispering secrets, were alluring, her slim, lithe body right up next to you, as if she wanted to hold you close and start dancing. That intimate voice, though, was rarely restrained from adding some sharp, critical comment.

For innocent young Ogi, the combination of Dancer’s whispery way of speaking and the way her mouth always seemed half open—which oddly enough didn’t make her come across as dull; indeed, it appeared to him merely as a punctuation mark in an otherwise intelligent and alert expression—wasn’t something he could view dispassionately.

2

As part of his present job, Ogi got in touch with Dancer, Patron and Guide’s private secretary, once every other month. Since he’d taken the job, not once had it been the other way around—Dancer phoning him. But now here she was, suddenly contacting him with the message that Patron urgently wanted to see him. The phone message was relayed to him by fax from the Tokyo head office of the International Cultural Exchange Foundation, for which Ogi worked—the post that kept him in touch with Patron as part of his job. The fax arrived in Sapporo, where Ogi was escorting a French physician and his wife to a conference of the Japan Dermatological Association:

Someone named Dancer called—she’s Japanese, I’m pretty sure—saying she had to get in touch with you immediately. She said Guide has collapsed from a hemorrhage and Patron has to see you right away. I assume these are nicknames? I asked for their real names, but she said you’d understand. Since it would cause more trouble than it’s worth for the conference to give her your hotel and phone number, I requested that she get in touch with you through us here. The woman seemed almost possessed. Dancer, Guide, Patron—what kind of people have you got yourself mixed up with?