Somersault (11 page)

“Especially you members of the radical faction, he went on. I want you to understand that our church is a sand castle built as a lark. We enjoyed playing the savior of the world and the prophet at the end time, using all those high-sounding phrases and acting solemn and grave. Thanks to all of you we had a wonderful time, especially getting incorporated as a religious foundation two years ago and receiving tons of money for our playacting. But this is as far as we’ll take it. It’s all a big farce, get it?
Look
at me, here on TV. How could you possibly believe
I’m
the savior of mankind? How can this scornful-looking partner of mine sitting here really be the prophet of the end of the world ?

“Through this TV performance, the nation learned all about their Somersault, to use the term coined by the
Times
correspondent. The word became a popular expression in Japan for a time.

“To tell the truth, I don’t know the scale of this event in Japan. I know that the news shows on commercial networks followed up on the story, treating it as slapstick comedy, though I heard that NHK didn’t report on it at all. Didn’t you see this when you were a child? What interested me while I was in the United States was the correspondent’s follow-up article on the aftermath
of the incident. ‘The Japanese have a psychological aversion to recantations,’ he wrote, ‘so with this announcement that everything they preached was just a joke, this false savior and false prophet came under severe attack.’ The correspondent also reported the outrage of ordinary Japanese citizens, who heaped abuse on the two men, and he included letters from people unconnected with the church who complained about its immorality.

“The correspondent found this one-sided attack rather strange. ‘Through the Somersault of this false savior and false prophet,’ he wrote, ‘it is possible that several cities were spared a nuclear holocaust. The authorities insisted it was impossible for a nuclear power plant to be invaded and said a bunch of young amateurs would never be able to convert it into a stationary nuclear weapon. But how true was this? The people of Japan didn’t give any credit to the church’s two leaders who’d risked everything to defuse the crisis, concentrating instead on a moral critique of their recantation. This criticism became even more intense once it was known at the trial of the radical faction that, because of the deal they’d made with the authorities, the two leaders were going to avoid prosecution.’ The correspondent ended by saying that the Japanese were certainly a strange race.

“Ikuo, I’m sure you saw these reports on TV and elsewhere about public opinion in Japan at the time, right? You wanted to be there to see the end of the world, after all. What did you think about it?”

“As I said before, I had nothing but scorn for them,” Ikuo replied, “especially when those afternoon women’s talk shows kept playing the so-called savior of mankind’s recantation speech ad nauseam. Even though I was only a kid, it made me laugh. Deep down inside, though, I think I was disappointed.”

3

Having talked for so long, Kizu drove in silence for a while. From Ikuo’s continued silence, Kizu could sense something he couldn’t quite lay a finger on, something he hadn’t been conscious of recently. His liaison with Ikuo had given him back his self-confidence, though he sometimes felt their relationship was different from that of gay couples he used to see in his university community. Maybe it was the same with those couples, but Ikuo didn’t seem to accept the kind of closeness you’d expect to arise from physical intimacy and made it clear he wanted to maintain a certain distance from Kizu.

Ikuo seemed genuinely interested in the reunion with the girl he’d had such a strange encounter with fifteen years ago, an interest mixed with curiosity
about the former religious leaders she was now working for. Ikuo’s comments after listening to Kizu made him sense both how strong his interest was in Patron and Guide and also that he was hiding something.

Kizu turned to slowly look at Ikuo; the latter’s face had lost its wine-induced flush and again looked like a statue with skin covering the indentations and protruding bones. Shake it a bit, and the heavy lump of a head looked like it would tip right over.

The next day, though, after modeling for Kizu in the morning, Ikuo himself brought up the subject of the girl, as if filling in all his previous silence.

“The girl met Patron and Guide after their Somersault, yet she believes in them totally. The world’s going to end, she said, and Patron and Guide will show us the way to deal with that. What they said and did during their Somersault doesn’t seem to faze her.”

“She puts more emphasis on their suffering over the past ten years,” Kizu said. “I wonder if that’s the basic approach the two of them will take as they start over. This new beginning means a great deal to her. That’s why she got so angry when you used the word
game.”

“Was I wrong to say that?” Ikuo turned his dark, affectionate eyes to Kizu, who felt a surge of desire race through him. “Like I said yesterday, I’m serious about the end time. But she changed the subject. I wish I could have heard more about Patron.

“This morning when I woke up, I regretted not asking for more details about what these leaders’ ten years of suffering was all about. All I remember from watching TV was this frivolous old guy blabbing on and on.”

“Maybe this new beginning for them is a casual somersault in the opposite direction,” Kizu remarked.

“Gymnasts sometimes move forward by doing one somersault after another,” Ikuo said. “Unless we talk to them directly, though, we’re merely tossing metaphors around.”

“In other words,” Kizu said, “even if they’re phonies you want to meet this self-styled savior of mankind and his prophet, right? Well, you have a standing invitation from her. And I think I’d like to go with you.”

“Let me get in touch with her first.”

Kizu couldn’t read anything in Ikuo’s expression, but as he looked at Ikuo’s muscular chest and neck, exposed at the loose collar of the robe he’d thrown on over his nude body, Kizu found himself less interested in pursuing the meaning behind Ikuo’s expression than simply standing in awe at this young man’s magnificent physique. What a waste, he thought,
for such a fertile body to be given to someone who has so much still to attain spiritually.

No doubt Kizu was so involved in drawing Ikuo, preparing to create his tableau, because he wanted to capture this young man—for himself alone—before he leaped to the next stage, where that wonderful body would go hand in hand with spirituality. Kizu loved to imagine that Ikuo’s body was already lending a sense of solemnity to the privileged thoughts that lay within him. And what convinced Kizu that something special lay in Ikuo’s inner being was none other than what he had witnessed fifteen years before: beautiful eyes in the wildly ferocious face of someone who looked less a child than a small man.

After he met Ikuo again, Kizu had remembered a paper presented at a symposium his institute had sponsored that used as its text etchings based on old French prints depicting the stages through which a human face evolves out of wild animals’ muzzles. When he first heard this presentation, showing how the crudest of human faces developed from the line that began with the muzzle of a bear, Kizu had thought of the young boy carrying his plastic model. However, the bear-man’s eyes were sunken and expressionless, while the young man’s, equally sunken, had been full of suggestive feeling.

Kizu gazed steadily at his young friend. Ikuo sensed he was being looked at, stood up, threw his robe aside on the chair he’d been sitting on, and laid his naked suntanned body on the sofa. He spread his legs wide and beckoned to Kizu with a shy look. Though he was sunk back deep on the sofa, his long bountiful penis was clearly visible, already raising its head. Kizu went off to the bathroom first. Ikuo seemed ready to thank him for his help in bringing him together with the girl and Patron. Still, though, as he stood there, touching his own penis, which was already so hard he could barely get it out of his pants, Kizu allowed himself a feeling of unalloyed pleasure.

In the afternoon, after Ikuo had gone home, Kizu was cutting his nails in the sunny spot beside the wide glass sliding doors. As he clipped the fourth toe of his right foot, he thought unexpectedly that it was like some good little beetle larva dug up from a mound of fallen leaves, very different from the other toes. The toe of his left foot, he found, was exactly the same. He’d lived with these toes for over half a century. Why was it only now that he found them so funny?

Thinking it over, he paused in his clipping. It wasn’t that his powers of observation were fading, but rather—as the last vestiges of youth disappeared from every corner of his body—that his toes had really begun
to change
. These are the toes, he thought, of someone whose cancer is back, who’s going to end
up an elderly corpse. If it hadn’t been for his sexual relationship with Ikuo, though, he never would have noticed.

4

On Saturday, Kizu attended an international awards ceremony for a Japanese architect who had, during Kizu’s time in the United States, garnered a worldwide reputation. He thought about inviting Ikuo, the former architecture student, but the girl they’d met had asked him to take care of something for her and he wouldn’t be back until evening, so Kizu went alone. Arriving at the hotel in Shimbashi, he found that only those involved in the actual ceremony were dressed formally, and he felt out of place in his tuxedo. There were no other familiar faces at the party, either, and Kizu’s relationship with the architect himself was superficial. When he had given a public lecture at the architecture department at Kizu’s university, Kizu had served as discussant when the architect showed slides of the art museum he’d designed in Los Angeles.

Kizu greeted the architect and his wife and made an early retreat from the reception; next to the escalator, he ran across an American newspaper reporter he knew who wrote about the arts and architecture. The man, an old acquaintance, was also decked out in a tuxedo, and Kizu called out to him, kidding him he was going to stand out dressed like that. The reporter had been invited to a small dinner after the ceremony, but decided to bow out, instead inviting Kizu, whom he hadn’t seen in a long time, out for a chat. He led Kizu to a basement-level bar, and they settled in at the counter.

They’d just finished one glass of white wine each and were about to order another when the reporter’s long-winded commentary on architecture connected up with the religious leader the girl was working for. It all started when the reporter mentioned an extraordinary place he ran across in the forests of Shikoku.

“The area is like a solitary island,” he said, “in the hills about a two-hour drive from the airport. Makes you feel like you’re being shown around the remnants of Japanese mythology. You arrive at this dead end with a sea of trees blocking the way. And in a village of fifteen hundred souls, can you believe it, there’s an ultramodern chapel and dormitory!

“Makes you wonder how there could be such large new buildings in a depopulated mountain village. What happened was a new religion arose in the village, and they hired one of Japan’s leading architects to build a headquarters. But the new religion broke up and disappeared. The village didn’t
know what to do. They tried to find someone to take over the chapel for them. Then they came up with a plan to convert it to a village junior high school, but that would have been too expensive, so it came to nothing. I suppose they wanted to keep the headquarters building as it was, since it was designed by such a famous architect.

“Finally a different religious organization expressed interest in the building, a group with a really unusual background. The Tokyo correspondent for
The New York Times
told me that”—at this point Kizu could guess what was coming—“ten years ago the two leaders had renounced their faith. They denounced all their own teachings, which was apparently a major shock! The religious organization itself, though, kept on going, with quite a few believers still involved. Followers who left the church maintained their own divisions, ranging from a group of radical revolutionaries to a co-op of gentle Quaker-like women. Sort of an interesting case—and not very Japanese, when you think about it.

“Right now the activities of this church center around another headquarters, in the Kansai region, where they’ve kept their name and religious foundation status. Most of the followers work in Osaka or Kobe and donate their pay, minus a small amount for living expenses, so they were able to purchase this chapel. And during the last ten years they completed the dormitory, according to the architect’s original plans. Some Japanese certainly don’t give up, do they?

“The religious organization, though, hasn’t moved to this chapel and dorm. Small groups of them visit, staying in the monastery, which is what they call the dorm, and praying in the chapel. They also work for a week, taking care of the building and grounds, before they leave.

“I paid a visit to the building’s caretaker, a local woman, and asked if these poor little lost sheep, whose leaders had renounced the faith, still believe that the beloved pair will make a comeback. Her answer took me totally by surprise. (The old lady, by the way, was born in the village but spoke better English than the interpreter I brought with me.) ‘Outsiders to the church, myself included, don’t really understand this,’ she said, ‘but when believers pray in the chapel and raise their eyes upward, they say they see the souls of the two former leaders, separated from their suffering bodies so far away, hovering up in the air.’ It’s gotta be true—’cause how else can you explain their keeping the faith for ten years after their leaders denied it?”

Kizu didn’t let on that he’d just met a girl who worked for these two former leaders. The reporter, for his part, didn’t go into much detail about this place with the modern buildings. The caretaker, afraid that tourist buses might start showing up, was wary of outsiders coming to visit. Through an
introduction from an architecture journal, the reporter was able to view the inside of the chapel, but the woman never left his side and made sure he didn’t take any photos.