Somersault (16 page)

Ms. Tachibana took out a small hardcover book from her oversized handbag. Ogi motioned her over to some concrete seats shaped like tree stumps.

When one thinks, it’s impossible to escape the agency of language. Even when one thinks in the medium of sound, there’s an inevitable connection with language. In my case, in order to form a framework in which my thoughts can be clearly expressed in the overall structure of my music and also in the details, I find it necessary to verify things in language. And I leave it up to a decision of the senses. I discover the themes of my music, too, through this sort of process. It has nothing to do with a poetic mood or anything like it.

“This made me think my brother’s music has limitations. It’s like there’s a bar set up very low, and the music can’t get over that hurdle. Perhaps the composer didn’t want to hurt my feelings by telling me that directly, and that’s why he sent me his book.

“My brother lies on the floor of our apartment, in our public housing apartment, and writes his compositions on music sheets. When he makes a mistake he erases it and then writes down the right notes. It’s as if he already has the music in his head and just needs to get the notes down on paper.

“He can’t explain in words what kind of music he’s trying to compose, and I doubt he’s even thinking in words when he does compose. As the composer put it, he’s unable
to verify things in language
.

“I started thinking about the limits of my brother’s music, and I became quite sad and depressed as I realized what a dead end it was. I was feeling so down the woman I knew at the Welfare Center took me to hear Patron’s sermon.

“It took place long ago, but I still remember it well; it was as if his sermon reached out and grabbed me right where I live.

“I took notes on his sermon in my notebook here; it was based on the words of a seventeenth-century philosopher:

God revealed himself in Christ and in Christ’s spirit, not following the words and images the prophets had given.

When the true spirit of things is grasped, apart from words and images, then and only then are they truly understood.… Christ actually, and completely, grasped this revelation.

“As I listened to him read each sentence aloud and then comment on it, I couldn’t contain myself. I had to ask a question. The meeting was held in a small shop converted into a residence, which because of rising land prices was about to be sold; fifteen or sixteen believers filled this dim room near the entrance, and we were seated just behind them. I raised my hand, leaned forward, and nearly shouted out my question. ‘Sir,’ I asked, ‘I don’t know anything about this special person named Christ, but could this be applied instead to someone else—say, an unfortunate person? A person who doesn’t even know he’s unfortunate and has a pure heart? Is it possible that God could reveal himself directly, not through words, but through
music?’

“After I said this, Patron wove his way on unsteady legs through the narrow space between the people sitting in front and came and held my hand and whispered to me,
‘That’s exactly right!’
I was still a young girl, and those words stayed in my heart. I felt as if my body and heart were filled with light.”

As if to calm the tide of excitement, Ms. Tachibana was silent for a time, staring at the black trunks of the cherry trees in front of her. Ogi turned his gaze not on the shadows of the cherry leaves but toward the deep-hued autumn foliage of the mistletoe, even now turning darker as night approached. So even a woman like this, he thought, a serious, modest person who calmly goes about doing her own job and living her own life, was encouraged by
Patron. And now, even ten years after the Somersault, that emotion still remains alive inside her.

“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time,” she went on, “but if Patron can come to the Moosbrugger Committee, I want to bring my brother along as a kind of test—to see whether Patron would reveal God in him, directly, without words or images. In the past, when my brother listened to music, you could see light filling his body and heart. That was when my parents were still alive. But now he’s more like an old man; his head droops. I want him to meet Patron and be filled again with light, the way he used to be. Wouldn’t that be a sign of God’s revelation? I know my idea is a little wild, but after all the trouble you’ve gone through I just had to tell you. I’m sorry to have kept you so long—I appreciate your listening to me.”

“No, I’m the one who should thank
you,”
Ogi said. “I’m glad to hear that Patron has such power, even after the Somersault. Once his plans crystallize, you can expect a letter from him.”

Ms. Tachibana nodded and stood up, made a slight bow, and walked off alone down the stone pathway in the direction of the Yotsuya Station. Ogi could imagine her taking walks here during her lunch break, with an invariably gloomy, serious look on her face. With her stolid way of walking, which took one’s attention away from her features or manners, she disappeared down the path, her heels clicking against the stone paving.

So that he wouldn’t seem to be following her, Ogi had set off in the opposite direction, down the path through the cherry trees. The farther he went the darker it became, and the only way he could reach the paved road lined with streetlights was to stray off the path and head toward the grassy slope. The moment he stepped off the path that sloped down through the trees, a thick branch of a cherry tree raked across his eyes and nose.

Holding his face, he plopped down on the withered lawn and grumbled a complaint directed less at his own pain than at something beyond.

“Why do there have to be so many unhappy people in the world? No wonder someone like this self-styled Patron of Humanity appears. What in the world is happening to life on this planet?”

3

When Dancer asked Ogi to report on his progress in contacting people, he submitted a revised name list to her, but he decided to approach Patron directly about Ms. Tachibana.

“Do you happen to recall,” he asked Patron, “a small gathering about ten years ago when a young girl, whose younger brother was mentally challenged, asked you a question? She wasn’t one of the followers of the church. This girl, still in her teens at the time, listened to your sermon and said her whole body was filled with light.”

Patron’s pensive face, which looked like it was covered with a thin sheen of oil, came alive, the color rising.

“I
do
remember that,” he said, his voice so suddenly transformed that Ogi nearly regretted his words, thinking they’d been too much of a shock. “The girl told me her body and heart were filled with light, and I could see that her skin, even the part covered by her clothes, was glowing.”

Ogi recalled Ms. Tachibana’s forehead, perfect for the kind of crown that adorned a Girls’ Day doll, her tiny lips and chin. An image of her face as a youngster—not a particularly attractive girl—flashed through Ogi’s mind. And of light flooding through her thin, pale skin from
within
.

“That woman belongs to a group called the Moosbrugger Committee, which is on our list. In fact, she’s the one who wrote to you. She wants to invite you to visit them. Before things become too busy with your new activities, would it be possible to fit a short meeting with the members of the committee into your schedule? She said she wanted to bring her mentally challenged brother along, too.”

Ogi made up his mind to report to Ms. Tachibana that, although Patron couldn’t make a firm commitment at this time, he did get the feeling he was leaning in that direction. The university library was closed, though, for a Founder’s Day holiday. He phoned Mrs. Tsugane, and she told him her husband had received an award given in northern Europe for his designs for improved furniture for elderly patients. He was in Europe now to attend the awards ceremony, and she was bored and asked Ogi to come over to see her. She had something she wanted to talk with him about, she added. Her voice had a force in it that couldn’t be denied, so Ogi agreed to meet her Saturday afternoon at the entrance to the Culture and Sports Center.

On the appointed day, though, when she alighted from the elevator, Mrs. Tsugane wore a cold, serious expression completely in contrast with her voice on the phone. Silently, she led Ogi along a stone path heading toward the top of a hill right before them crowded with various cultural facilities and stores. Sculptures lined the narrow path, Ogi taking particular note of a combination of slabs of metal with complex reflections of the light and
one mounted on a concrete base like an egg sliced in half. Elderly couples and small groups of young girls especially seemed to enjoy shaking the movable metal parts of some of the statues and stroking an almost comically old-fashioned realistic statue of an infant.

With no rhyme or reason to the way the level areas and steps were adjoined, it was a tiring walk up the slope, and Mrs. Tsugane, lost in thought, eventually led the way to an outdoor amphitheater surrounded by a horseshoe-shaped ring of sunken stone seats; she went halfway around and began descending the south side of the hill. Without a word to Ogi, she strode off quickly toward a colony made up of a small group of residences and an apartment building rising up from slightly below.

She stopped at the brick entrance of the nearest residence, surrounded by yew trees, and for the first time seemed to relax. She had Ogi wait at the foyer as she went in, bustling noisily just past the door and then inviting him in. A spacious living room/kitchen greeted Ogi, a sparse woods visible on a steep slope outside. The lace curtain on the inset window was drawn, blocking the unusually strong sunlight that had made them both perspire on the walk over. Ogi sat down on a sofa, his position affording him an angled view of the scenery to his right, and gazed at the framed picture hanging on the wall in front of him, a colored print of a railroad station constructed of iron, viewed from the front, and a plan, drawn in pencil, that continued on the same paper.

“This is where I escape to,” said Mrs. Tsugane, catching what Ogi was looking at as she brought in a liter bottle of Evian and two fluted glasses. “My husband picked that up in France. He has a number of sketches of railway bridges too, all of which have a pagoda on them, obviously not of practical use but more as a type of monument.”

“It’s from the end of the nineteenth century, around the time the Eiffel Tower was built,” Ogi said, noting the date on the print.

“That was the age when metal structures had a religious feel to them,” Mrs. Tsugane said. She sat down on the sofa, waiting for Ogi’s gaze to move from the print to her. “It’s been so many years, but I wonder what happened to my missing panties? How about telling me the details?”

Ogi blushed, and felt like he was left dangling stupidly in the air. He fingered the Evian bottle on the low table, wondering how he should begin, as Mrs. Tsugane leaned forward and stretched out her hand as if she were about to slap his knee. Instead, she leaned back and said, in an intelligent, serious tone, “Please don’t get angry, but just hear me out. I’m not doing this to have fun at your expense. It’s just that recently I feel anxious, as if I’m stuck in a rut, and I feel a lot of nostalgia for those old days, and for the high school
student who was so curious about my panties. I can imagine how tough it must have been for you, with your brother and his wife always leaving you out of their activities. And I wonder why I didn’t do anything to help include you.”

“The other day, after I got back to my apartment, I thought a lot about that,” Ogi said. “Back then I just put your panties on and felt a gentle calm come over me and went to sleep. . . but I can’t remember at all what happened the next morning.”

His words felt forced to him, a sense of reality missing from them. He blushed even more, afraid she might think he wasn’t telling the truth, and took a sip of water. But Mrs. Tsugane seemed to accept everything he said. She even inclined her head coyly to one side.

“This might be a naive question, but when a young man wears a woman’s panties—assuming everything’s normal with him—don’t things get out of hand?”

“Not for me. Everything settled down nicely. It felt like my whole body was cocooned in a fluffy softness, and I slept soundly.”

As she listened to Ogi, a yawn came to her flushed, small, round face, taking Ogi by surprise. Despite this, she appeared still to be deep in thought, and finally said, in a low voice, “Maybe you wanted to become a girl, you poor thing.”

That certainly made sense, Ogi mused, when you consider how his genitals subsided and how calmly he slept after putting the panties on. Having confessed, his face red and drooping, Ogi realized that he might seem to be enjoying a kind of masochistic solace in all this, which made him blush all the more.

Mrs. Tsugane stared steadily at him for a time, then gulped and, steeling herself, made a decisive announcement.

“Certainly you don’t strike me as girlish now. The subconscious desires you had as a young boy are still with us, inside your trousers. And the girl I used to be and the woman I am right now are very happy, I can tell you. Your brother and sister-in-law teased me no end about the panty incident, but it also brought on some erotic dreams. Why don’t we reward our formerly naive selves? What do you say? Let’s do it!”

Up the spiral staircase with its metal banister that ascended from the entrance with its vaulted ceiling, there was just one large bedroom, with a toilet and bath attached. The room contained little more than a vanity mirror and chair, an oak sideboard, and a double bed spilling over and occupying the rest of the space. Mrs. Tsugane turned down the bedspread and light blanket and, standing firmly on the rug, legs set apart, took off her skirt, shrugged off her silk slip, and let it drop to the floor. After carefully removing
her stockings, she was taking off her panties when a faint smile spread lines from her flushed eyelids to her cheeks. Ogi didn’t like that particular look, which was directed at him, but not to be outdone, he enthusiastically sloughed off his clothes.