Somersault (33 page)

“Historian?” Kizu echoed.

“I haven’t hurt your feelings, I hope?” Patron asked timidly, even fearfully.

“No. I appreciate your thought.”

“Before I met the late Guide,” Patron went on, “whenever I had visions, I thought they were symptoms of an illness. As I began to awaken from trances
I couldn’t control, I blurted out delirious things—the kind of things I never imagined would be intelligible. While I still had a family, my wife took care of me while I was in my trances; she was convinced that they were attacks of mental illness. She called it—my spouting all this nonsense after I awoke—
the return of the wobbles
.

“I mentioned this before, but it was Guide who took this delirious talk and made sense of it. This enabled me to relate my experiences on the
other side
. The accumulation of all this became the teachings of the Savior and the Prophet. Alone, I never would have been able to do a thing.”

“But first you had those trances and visions, right?” Kizu said. “Guide wasn’t creating anything new, he was just telling you what you yourself had said. You said the words, delirious though they might sound, and he just rearranged them into something logical. Like Guide did, I sense in you a strange and wonderful power to inspire. I’m not good with words; it’s only when I paint that the things influencing me come out smoothly. Take that watercolor of Ikuo and me walking in the sky—it’s not so much that what I painted happened to correspond to what you envisioned but rather that the silent words inside of you took hold of me, inspiring me to paint that picture. But being your historian would involve words more than painting, wouldn’t it?”

Patron held his heavy-looking head upright, took a deep breath, and then spoke.

“I want you to paint a picture of me too. I have a hunch that it will convey something very important.”

Patron’s eyes—the pupils distinctly separate from both top and bottom lids—looked straight at Kizu. He nodded once and answered the question Kizu had posed earlier.

“I want you to do the opposite of what Guide used to do. Guide fulfilled his role of Prophet by having me relate the future. But with our Somersault we denied all that. We made the doctrine of interpreting my visions one big joke, and the two of us unhesitatingly apostatized. For Guide and me, our Somersault was the truth. And the ten years of hell that followed were not meant to erase this. Quite the opposite: The truth of our Somersault was etched into us, which is the very reason that, even though he was interrogated by the former radical faction to the point where he suffered mightily, bursting a blood vessel, Guide did not denounce our Somersault. And then he died. You understand, then, another reason why I can’t do another Somersault? This is why I said Guide’s death legitimized me.

“I’ve told you, Professor, much more about Guide than I’ve ever told anyone else. And about the Somersault and our descent into hell. I’ve done this so you can record them. The same holds true for the new movement I’m
about to launch. Put in these terms, don’t you think the term
historian
makes sense here? My hope for you as an artist is for much more than this, actually…. Anyway, that’s what I wanted to tell you.”

As Kizu was leaving the room, Patron’s solemn expression softened so unexpectedly it was almost comical. “I didn’t know you were so attached to Ikuo. He’s quite a special young man, and if his charm has led you to us, I’d say he’s already made a major contribution to our church!”

Kizu felt, anew, that he was seeing Patron’s complex nature, something he had to be on guard for. Dancer, passing him as he went out of the room, had obviously heard Patron’s words, her mouth, with its pearlescent luster, open even wider than usual as she gazed steadily at Kizu. Kizu turned around once more and saw a satisfied look on Patron’s face.

4

The next day when Kizu broached the subject of going back to the United States, Ikuo exploded. These days Kizu had found something humorous in Ikuo’s face, with its prominent cheekbones, but his words now brought out only anger and malice in the young man.

“How can you do that?” Ikuo barked out. “You’re going to abandon us and run away—
now
, when we’re on the verge of beginning something new and important? How can you just hightail it to America and put an end to
us?”

Kizu was startled, but he didn’t feel like responding emotionally. Despite how busy he’d become, he was well aware that his physical ailments and deep exhaustion had fenced him in, pushing him away from the young man.

“Of course, I’d like you to come with me if you can get away from the office,” he explained. “You don’t need to get a visa these days…. But I know you’re busy arranging for the memorial service.

“I’m planning to put all my affairs in order in the States and come back again to Japan. It’s also the time of year when they’re making the schedule for the next academic year. After that I plan to return to Tokyo and devote myself to Patron’s church. I think it’s best if I resign from the university. It could be a major problem for the university if one of their tenured professors helped lead a religious organization in Japan.

“I’m going to settle my estate, have a lawyer divide my wife and children’s portion, take care of the taxes and everything else; the balance I’ll transfer to the church. Since I’ll be a part of Patron’s new religious movement, this strikes
me as the proper way to handle my affairs. With all the things to take care of, I imagine it will take me about ten days. At my age, jet lag really hits you hard, but I feel I have to get going.”

Ikuo was dumbfounded. He couldn’t even manage an apology. The area around his eyes reddened, and he withdrew without a word to begin preparing dinner with the ingredients Kizu had purchased. Every once in a while the kitchen was utterly silent, Ikuo undoubtedly pausing in his cooking to ponder what he’d heard, and Kizu felt sorry about the young man’s depressed and troubled feelings. Meanwhile, until Ikuo called him to the dinner table he had set in the kitchen, Kizu packed for his round trip to the United States.

The meal Ikuo made consisted of a mound of french fries with steaks, a vegetable salad, and canned minestrone. That was all, but Kizu happily enjoyed the meal, knowing how carefully Ikuo had prepared it. Ikuo remained silent, sitting across from him as they ate, his puffy eyes turned downward. Kizu felt bad about how upset he looked. That night, still without a word, Ikuo performed his sexual services so completely that Kizu forgot all about his illness and exhaustion. In each and every thing Ikuo did, though, Kizu could catch a glimpse of someone who was voluntarily prostituting himself.

Returning to his university in New Jersey, Kizu was confronted with something else unexpected: The female head of his research institute announced he’d been accused of sexual harassment.

A year before his sabbatical, one of the students in Kizu’s fall seminar was a woman exchange student from Japan who had an unusually confrontational attitude. Kizu became really aware of her when, as they were approaching the end of the fall term without her having said anything of substance in the seminar, he asked her if she might make a presentation at their next class. He asked this in front of the mailboxes at the institute’s office where he ran across her; one of his colleagues was right beside them, using the copy machine. She replied in English in a loud voice, as Kizu noticed a moment too late, so that the American professor wouldn’t misunderstand their discussion.

“I’m an auditor in your class, Professor, so I’m not obliged to write reports or make presentations. Please don’t mistake me for one of your lazy students!”

The young woman was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, of medium height but well built, someone who—at least from the perspective of Kizu’s generation—represented a completely new type of Japanese. Her face, though, with its dark hair, pouty little lips, and Fuji-shaped brow, was definitely old school. Kizu had published a paper once in the university bulletin on women’s faces
in
ukiyoe
prints, classifying them as unassuming plain types and demoness types, and he was once again drawn to this woman and her classic features.

The next semester she didn’t sign up for Kizu’s seminar, but one day when there was still snow on the campus she showed up at his office during lunch break; she explained that one of the male students was bothering her, which is why she couldn’t attend his seminar, but she had some of her own artwork in her apartment that she’d like to show him, she said, inviting him with a modesty quite unlike her previous outburst. Kizu happened to be free that afternoon, so he went with her in her Citroën to her place, where she lived with a roommate; Kizu was surprised to find it was an apartment in the center of town, outfitted with a concierge. The living room and kitchen weren’t so big, but on the ceiling of her bedroom was a tempera painting in arabesque style of flowers and birds she’d done herself, which meant that even if she hadn’t purchased the apartment she was living there under a long-term lease. Her roommate was out on a date until late, so Kizu enjoyed the
chirashizushi
she prepared for him and looked over several tableaus. These also depicted birds and flowers. Kizu sat on the cloth-covered sofa while the young woman sat in front of him on the floor, holding the paintings she wanted to show him, dressed in a black wool outfit with a short skirt that revealed her fleshy thighs, though he pretended not to notice.

That was all that happened. Soon after, Kizu happened to be in New York City, and since the university had been unable to procure a model for him, he stopped by an adult store to buy a video so he could get an eyeful of young black and Hispanic men. He spied a three-pack of condoms for sale in a box near the register, mixed in with aphrodisiacs and sex toys, and bought it. But the woman never invited him back to view her artwork.

The particulars in the sexual harassment charge were these: First, that he came over to her apartment on a night her roommate was out, saying he’d take a look at her paintings; second, having carelessly mentioned the painting on her bedroom ceiling, she was forced to show it to him; third, he made a suggestive joke about the uncensored book of
ukiyoe
prints she had on a bookshelf; fourth, as Kizu sat on the sofa, he looked at her inner thighs as she crouched on the floor in front of him; and fifth, during this time, he intended her to see that something was coming alive in his trousers.

As Kizu sat opposite the head of his research institute, he not only had to read the e-mails the young woman had submitted, he had to listen to the tape recording she’d secretly made of their conversation that night.

Kizu was so deflated that the institute head, who at first had had a fretful look on her face, burst out laughing; listening to Kizu’s constrained way
of talking on the tape, she said, and the woman’s relaxed voice, he hardly came across as overly macho.

In fact, what really gave Kizu a shock was how pitifully immature he sounded. He was seeing himself as a precocious child talking with adults about grown-up topics, the tape mercilessly revealing how, deep down, he hadn’t matured at all since those early postwar days back in his home village.

If that fidgety middle-aged character on the tape had had an ounce of courage and propositioned the woman, Kizu knew he would have been turned down flat. Suddenly, sitting there in front of the institute head, Kizu found a new self springing up, a new Kizu who acted as he never would have before. He admitted that everything the young woman had listed had probably taken place, agreed he was in the wrong as far as what she’d interpreted as sexual harassment, and announced his decision to resign his teaching position.

The head of the institute, originally sympathetic, now turned indignant. As Kizu left her office, the feeling struck him that he had come back to the university from Tokyo for the sole purpose of receiving this punishment, and he said to himself, silently,
I’ve done an act of repentance!

A second event awaited Kizu in America, one that took place in the hotel he was staying at in New York the night before his flight back to Tokyo. That morning Kizu woke with his usual uncomfortable feeling in his gut, exhausted from having forced himself to get back to sleep any number of times. In order to suppress what this exhaustion had triggered—the headlong rush of his mind into darkness—one of the pieces of wisdom he’d picked up in his advancing old age was that it was best to get up and get his body moving.

So Kizu got up out of bed, as if hurrying off somewhere, and went into the sitting room of his hotel suite, a room partitioned off simply from the bedroom by a white-framed door with a square mirror set on it—the Japanese owner had come up with double-door construction, which had proved quite popular, according to what Kizu had heard from a woman in a painting class for expatriate Japanese he used to teach. Beyond the curtain, which he’d left open the night before, a seventy-story high-rise building with a green-and-white crown structure on top blocked his view. Below a broad layer of clouds that covered the sky, darker clouds moved, and a fine rain was falling. The raindrops fell a long, long way down. What would it look like if it snowed? Kizu wondered. And just then he discovered that it
was
snowing, fine flakes swirling in the air. This wasn’t a particularly remarkable scene. The snow lacked force, as if it might peter out at any moment. But Kizu saw in the movements of his heart and the appearance
of the snow a synchronicity he took as a sign. Inside his chest he felt something, like a bulb sprouting.

Two men—one given the suspicious name Savior, the other called Prophet, abandoned their followers, did a Somersault, and for ten years languished in what they termed hell. And now one of them was restarting a movement calling on people to repent: to make them deeply aware of, and prepared for, the end of the world.

He and Ikuo had joined the movement. And now Kizu had even settled his estate and given up his job. But hadn’t this duo of Patron and Guide misunderstood their roles? The real Patron was actually
Guide
, who’d been taunted by his former followers and tortured until he died an agonizing death. The surviving Patron had been nothing but a puppet, a springboard for Guide’s mystical philosophy. Didn’t this account for the awful shock that Guide’s misfortune and death brought on?