Somersault (77 page)

Footsteps sounded outside, rushing down the slope with firm sure strides. Mayumi went out to greet the teenagers, who piled in the front door, not the veranda, and could be heard cleaning up in the bathroom and sink.

Ogi looked around again. The ceiling was cheaply painted and starting to show sooty cracks, but the room’s contents—from the panel photos on the wall to the hanging calico curtain, the nostalgic colors of the binding of the books on the narrow bookshelf, and the heap of cloths of different sizes and materials—all gave the interior a special atmosphere. It was an atelier that obviously belonged to a mature woman engaged in creative, artistic work.

Now the youthful bodies of all the Young Fireflies entered the room, bringing with them a sense of unrestrained roughness. Ogi and Ikuo, both young men themselves, were part of the scene as well. Ikuo’s reserved attitude from when he was driving the minivan with the guests from Old Town vanished now as he talked freely with Gii and the others.

In Mayumi’s expression and movements, too, as she bustled around, one could detect a different kind of happiness from moments before. Ogi could see she treated Gii as a special person. For some reason, fleeting, intimate images of Mrs. Tsugane flashed through his mind.

“We’ve been going around collecting material for the Spirit Festival, and it took a long time,” Gii said, impetuously greeting them before his older colleague, Isamu, could say a word.

“It’s definitely a good idea to study how they used to perform the festival,” Ikuo replied, “but since you’ll be doing it at the church’s summer conference, if you try to stick too close to local customs the whole point of what you’re after will vanish.”

“You’re right about that,” Gii answered docilely. “We only have faint memories of seeing the festival ourselves, so we’re a bit jittery about it.”

“What’s important for you isn’t the superficial aspect of the festival but what it stands for. The adults have stopped thinking about what the festival really means, which is why you took it upon yourselves to revive it, right? I think you should just go ahead and put on a performance that’s different from the festivals of the past.”

“We think so too.”

“I’ve been looking at the photo collection that Asa-san lent me,” Mayumi said, “but instead of trying to reproduce what’s in there, I’ve done sketches of images that came to me as I listened to the legends Gii told me.”

“Are all the children here raised on these stories?” Ogi asked. “It’s strange for me, because I’m from a place where we don’t have those sorts of legends.”

The young men ignored his question.

“In order to perform the Spirit Festival,” Ikuo answered in their stead, “the Young Fireflies compared all their personal memories of the festival. There were several places where Gii’s memory was different.”

“That’s right.” Isamu nodded.

“I saw your house over in the outskirts, and it seemed like an old home with a long history,” Ogi ventured, but Isamu didn’t reply.

“Gii’s case is a bit special,” Mayumi said. “Satchan was taken in as an orphan at the Mansion and was raised by Granny, who was something of a
kataribe
, a storyteller, though Satchan says she didn’t hear all that many legends growing up. Granny taught Brother Gii all the legends. Satchan was his successor and passed them on to Gii. That’s the line of descent here.”

“We can just go ahead and use the dolls, clothes, and props of the spirits that are stored in the shrines and temples,” Gii said. “Those’ll do fine. Though I imagine Mayumi will think that’s boring. Talking to people who were alive when the new spirits lived and trying to put all that together and create spirits isn’t easy. If you oversimplify them, they’ll turn into caricatures.”

“You don’t want to be the Spirit of Brother Gii?” Ikuo asked Gii.

“I just told you, didn’t I? It might turn out as a caricature.”

“Would you rather be the Spirit of the Hermit Gii, who refused military service and hid in the forest?”

“Yes, everybody thinks he should be He Who Destroys,” Isamu said, but Gii ignored him.

Ikuo explained all this to Ogi. “He means the pioneer who came in when this region was a wilderness surrounded by forest and opened it up for settlers. The cliffs and rock-hard soil had dammed up stagnant water, and gas had collected. He blew it all up with explosives, so he was both a creator and a destroyer.”

“If I do play He Who Destroys, one of my friends asked if I’ll do it dressed up as a giant who opened up the land here,” Gii said, in a calm voice surprising in someone so young. “I was born at the Farm after my father died an unnatural death, and for a long time they wouldn’t let me play with the other kids. All I heard was stories about my father that my mother told me, so when I started going to school I was so far behind I had a tough time keeping up.

“People at school treated me like I was a freak, and neighbors used to taunt me as I walked home to the Farm along the river.
Must have been tough to squeeze out of your mom’s cock when you were born, huh?
Things like that. Anyway, having heard all the stories from my mother, ever since I was little I’ve viewed the local people as
doubled
. I got this vision of a world where the living and the dead coexist from a poem by the pianist Afanassiev. And I believed that as a child I’d actually experienced it.

“I’d pass by people along the river, adults and children, and realize that some of them—people who looked just like everybody else—were people who had
come back
. The souls of the dead would go up to the forest, rest for a long time at the roots of trees, and be reborn in the bodies of newborn babies. Those are the people who’ve
come back
. My mother said that, in principle, all the people in the valley have
come back
, but some people stood out more than others.

“I found it terribly exciting to see the people who’d
come back
living together with ordinary people. That doesn’t happen to me anymore, so what I hope is that the Spirit Festival can re-create that feeling: the people who’ve
come back
descending into the midst of a group of ordinary people.”

“So as a child you felt the mythic heroes of this land being reborn?” Ikuo asked. “That’s pretty amazing. Growing up like that must have given you a more objective view of special figures like He Who Destroys—and your father too. I can understand now why the character covered with branches and leaves has so much appeal.”

“The way you put it, Ikuo-san, does sort of capture the way I felt,” Gii said. “But even though I had those fantasies as a child, to look at me you
wouldn’t have thought I was anything out of the ordinary. I was just a little neighborhood brat with a blank look on his face.”

“But that blank-looking little urchin
was
something special,” Mayumi insisted. “And the fact that you have such a clear recollection of the way you felt then makes you pretty special even now, Gii.”

For Ogi, this unabashed admiration from an older woman once again called up disjointed memories of Mrs. Tsugane.

28: A Miracle

1

In the Red Cross Hospital, Kizu asked Dr. Koga about something that had been bothering him for quite some time.

“When I was taken from the reception desk at the outpatient part of the hospital and up in the elevator I was fully conscious, though it felt like everything was taking place in a dream. It was like I was a shallow bay in which the tide was receding. It had a strange physicality. The thought struck me that soon I would be empty—in other words, I was going to die—and I was scared and confused. I couldn’t move, and I’m sure I looked quite ugly.”

“Not from the outside you didn’t,” Dr. Koga replied. “Though Ikuo told me that when you started looking around so nervously he wanted to do something for you but had no idea what to do.”

“I was struck by the feeling,” Kizu went on, “that my body was about to rise up horizontally, and I was flustered, thinking I was headed straight for the coffin. There was only one thing I could cling to—the thought that before long the pain would hit me with a thud. And then I would crash and die and life would come to an end. Besides the fear and confusion, I had a cynical premonition that if someone told me now I was under the wrong impression and things weren’t as they seemed, I wouldn’t have had any objections.

“Yesterday, when Ikuo came to visit me, he told me what young Gii told him about having often seen
people who’ve returned
living together with normal people. Right now I really feel, talking to you like this, that I am one of those people.”

“I think that if the next
thud
, as you put it, had come, you really would have died,” Dr. Koga said. “As your doctor I was trying to forestall this, but
it was risky to take you all the way to Matsuyama. I took the risk partly because Ikuo insisted but also because I believed you were going to pass away from cancer anyway before much longer. I was anxious, thinking we had to take you to Matsuyama, otherwise you’d die the way you were, though I know this isn’t exactly logical.… If you had died on the way—well, I figured that would be unfortunate but not the worst sort of death. I did still feel responsible, though, even if you’d passed away after we took you out of the ambulance and turned you over to the intensive care unit.”

The sense of fear and confusion Kizu felt at that time was no longer near, though it was bound to overwhelm him again. He didn’t feel like complaining to Dr. Koga, though, and confined himself to a sigh.

“It was all pretty strange the way it worked out,” Kizu said.

“It was a
miracle!
” Dr. Koga exclaimed. “As your attending physician I’ve made one mistake after another. When you had your first bout of pain and bloody stool, I just went on the assumption that you had terminal cancer and should be given medication to alleviate the pain. But you recovered quickly, so I designed a program both to control your pain with medication and to allow you to recuperate at home. People your age are wary of being overly dependent on drugs, not to mention being pretty stoic, so you were a model patient.

“The thought didn’t occur to me of trying to locate the origin of your pain. A complete cure was out of the question. That’s the situation when you had this recurrence and all the terrible pain involved. I imagine Ikuo’s told you all about this, but on the day you went into the hospital Patron used that as the impetus for launching this notion of the Church of the New Man. It had a tremendous impact on everybody—from those in the Hollow to those out at the farm.

“Patron says that the concept of the Church of the New Man is expressed in the painting you were doing at the time of your collapse, so I went over to your studio to check it out. If only I’d seen it beforehand I would have definitely taken another look at the source of your pain. There’s a power in that painting. I don’t care how much technique and experience an artist might have, there’s no way a person taking drugs to suppress the pain of terminal cancer could draw something with the kind of power I saw in that painting.

“In actual fact, it turns out you don’t have terminal cancer at all. So where was the pain coming from? Well, now we know. Eight years ago you had the viscous matter they discovered in an X-ray cleaned out. The material that collected once again in your gallbladder was rather tenacious, and the gallbladder
was just about ready to burst. The young doctor at the Red Cross Hospital opened you up, removed it, and that was that.

“‘The pain he had before was accompanied by jaundice, right?’ the doctor asked me, ‘so why didn’t you suspect gallstones?’ He treated me like some ignorant intern. I’d heard it was untreatable intestinal cancer. I asked the young doctor what he thought of the bloody stool. He said it’s no longer a concern. And he was exactly right. The fiberscope showed no bleeding in your intestines and of course no sign of cancer. As far as we could see during the gallbladder operation, no cancer had spread to any other organs. ‘Which isn’t strange because there wasn’t any cancer to begin with!’ the young doctor said, in high spirits.”

“So there really wasn’t any cancer?” Kizu asked.

“The doctor who examined you in Tokyo is an outstanding physician with a great deal of experience. Terminal intestinal cancer isn’t that hard to diagnose. It is a bit strange, though, that he didn’t do a biopsy.”

“Maybe that’s because the physician who introduced me to him is a renowned diagnostician,” Kizu said. “Patron once said he’d do something for my cancer. Do you think he really did what he said he would?”

“All my belief rests on him,” Dr. Koga said. “Which doesn’t hold true for you, Professor. I can’t deny what you say, but it makes me wonder. Naturally, I’m happy that things have turned out as they have. Something bothers me, though, about that high-spirited young doctor. ‘The cancer identified by the former attending physician has completely disappeared—yet the patient didn’t follow up with any standard anticancer treatment. And he’s living with the leader of a religious life. Can we ignore these facts?’ That’s what he said.

“Ambition might get the best of him and make him talk to the media, and then Patron will be drawn into the spotlight all over again. It’s an unpleasant thought, especially when we’re in such a critical time for the church.”

2

Over and over Kizu kept thinking about what it meant that the cancer he’d been aware of having invaded his entire body—though if asked how he was aware of this he could only give an uncertain, vague reply—had completely vanished. The conclusion he arrived at was pure nonsense.

A
fluid life force
inside me, he thought, something I’ve never felt before, arose, moved through me, eradicated the focal point of the cancer deep inside,
gathered it all at a spot where it could be expelled from my body, and then discharged it very painfully as that bloody stool!

Before the first wave of pain hit, while he was sketching the feverish Patron, Kizu had felt a tremendous force poured into his body. He recalled this when he was in the hospital. And while he had been sketching Patron naked from the waist up, this came back even more forcefully, which is when he started feeling bad and this latest episode had occurred.