Somersault (46 page)

Though he’d been trying to keep his voice down, Dr. Koga’s clear enunciation was enough for the people seated around them to hear. However, the man across from them in the aisle seat, dressed in a blue suit and narrow necktie, had on a pair of earphones and his nose stuck in a weekly magazine; next to him, in the window seat, was one of those middle-aged matrons Kizu could never see in Japan without feeling on edge, decked out in a Chanel suit and Hermès scarf, who—and Kizu found this strange as well—like most Japanese women as soon as they sat down in a train, was napping.

“They want me to work beside Patron to help fill in the gap left by Guide, but I’m not an extraordinary man like he was,” Kizu said, not worried about those around him hearing. “It’s not so much that Patron has agreed to this, but more like what you said, that Guide is alive within him even now. He’s defined my role as historian for the new church. The best
I can do, I think, is to keep an illustrated journal of the events that take place.”

Koga gazed at Kizu, his expression filled with a kind of childish curiosity that made one think how well brought up he was.

“An illustrated journal—what a wonderful idea! One with professional drawings, no less. You know, when my shock-troop colleagues were arrested and interrogated they couldn’t answer the questions well, so they handed over an illustrated journal instead, minus any text. The police leaked this to the press and it appeared in newspapers and magazines. I was taken aback by how childish and grotesque their drawings were.

“This group were the best and the brightest in the fields of chemistry, physics, and engineering, but they were part of a very visual generation, raised on comic books, that can express things more easily in drawings than in words. Guide, myself, and the other older people there treated these youngsters as true intellectuals, but when I saw those drawings I saw for the first time how immature and dark their inner worlds were.

“The media claimed that the radical faction at the Izu Institute was attracted less by religion than by the magnificent research facilities, but I’m convinced it was their own suffering and fears that attracted them to Patron’s teachings.”

“What about yourself?” Kizu asked. “You’re well known for your medical research, and you don’t appear to me to be going through any inner turmoil.”

Dr. Koga didn’t answer right away but, with a calm expression bordering on the gloomy, he stared down at the hands in his lap, agile sturdy-looking hands, Kizu thought. “I don’t know if this will provide material for your illustrated journal, but I’m quite the opposite from what you imagine. If it hadn’t been for Patron’s support I never would have survived the past fifteen years. I rely on Patron totally. If I hadn’t met him I never would have escaped from a horrendous situation.

“After I graduated from medical school and had just finished my internship, I found myself in a frightful state that I thought I couldn’t survive. All the confusion going on with the student movement had something to do with it, but in the end it boiled down to a personal matter, which manifested itself in an inability to touch other people’s skin. I was desperate. Not only couldn’t I perform my duties as a doctor, I was not even sure I’d be able to go on living.

“I went to med school because of my mother. The last four generations in my family had studied at Tekijuku, and as far as my mother was concerned if I didn’t go there I could forget about the future. If you look at my name it’s
all too clear—my given name is written with the same character as the
teki
in Tekijuku. My mother’s father was a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Health and Welfare, and it was my mother who really wanted to marry my father, who was a doctor.

“I was born in Boston, where my father had been sent as a research assistant, and I lived there until I was four. So I was one of the first ‘returnee children,’ as we now call them. Back in Japan I suffered through all kinds of bullying. I liked languages and wanted to study literature, but when I told my mother this she exploded. Naturally she brought up all our ancestors who had studied at Tekijuku. ‘It doesn’t matter what language you’re talking about,’ she said, ‘Chinese, Dutch, whatever—the only reason people should study them is to use them as tools with which to make a contribution to society. But making a career out of languages is a waste. Name one of the six hundred students at school who’ve made foreign languages into a useful career!’

“So there it was: I entered medical school. After graduating and finishing my internship I ran smack dab into a brick wall. The word
doomed
would be appropriate. I couldn’t touch people’s bodies anymore. Usually when you say
people’s
bodies you mean people other than yourself. But unless I used a cloth or paper to come between me and my own skin I couldn’t even touch
myself
, if you can imagine. Thin latex gloves were out because there’s no resistance and it feels even more like real skin.

“After a while it wasn’t just touching people that disturbed me, but also talking with them, and I became painfully conscious of other people’s gazes. Being a doctor was out of the question—or even being a patient. I wrapped my hands in bandages, wore tinted goggles, and stayed shut up in a Japanese-style room. And my mother, who’d managed to have her son follow in the footsteps of his illustrious ancestors and graduate from medical school, stayed by me day and night, lamenting what I’d become. Who could stand that? Ha ha!”

A glint in his eyes, Dr. Koga laughed heartily, his sturdy teeth shining.

3

Before long Kizu began to notice that Dr. Koga’s expression and forceful way of speaking was attracting other listeners. The businessman across the aisle had removed his headphones and was leaning toward them, while the napping woman, too, had woken up and was gazing in their direction. The people in front and behind them weren’t visible, but the two men in
suits diagonally across from them to the right, rather than trying to ignore Dr. Koga’s penetrating voice, had turned around with evident curiosity.

Eventually Dr. Koga realized what was going on. Coming to a convenient break in the conversation, he stopped, returned briefly to his seat, and brought back a small booklet. The booklet had a bright resin-coated cover and a title in a foreign language Kizu couldn’t read. Dr. Koga opened the book to a spot he’d marked with a colored card, and there was the heading “The Untouchable Body” and his own name.

“Since it doesn’t seem appropriate to continue to talk about it here,” he said, “why don’t you read this? We can talk more after you grasp what an awful fix I was in. We compiled this booklet after the persecution by the authorities had calmed down and we’d rebuilt the organization. We edited this as a collection of all our testimonies of faith. The shock we got at the childish-looking pictures those young people drew spurred on all the members of the workshop to try to organize their thoughts and write them down.”

“What does the title mean? It looks like German,” Kizu said, before letting his gaze drop again to the pages of the booklet.

“It says
Andern hat er geholfen
. I’m not sure where this expression comes from,” Dr. Koga explained, “but in English it means
He saved others
. It expresses the feelings of some of my younger colleagues who, even after the Somersault, continued to believe in Patron.”

“I’d always imagined it was just as the media reported,” Kizu said, “namely, that after the Somersault the former radical faction detested Patron and Guide as traitors and that Guide’s death was their act of revenge. I was sure Patron was next on their hit list, which made me worry when I saw how happily Patron accepted all of you back into the fold. But from your perspective Patron was more a tragic figure, wasn’t he?”

Dr. Koga squinted as if smoke from a campfire had wafted up in his face. Without a word, he stood up and traded places with Ikuo.

Feeling as though Ikuo was blocking out the other people in the train for him, Kizu eagerly read the booklet to find out what came next in Dr. Koga’s story.

From morning to night, my mother mumbled some strange things. The words were directed at me, but in such a low voice I couldn’t catch them. Her words leaked out like a faucet that won’t stop dripping.

When my mother could still speak clearly to me, she often quoted two poems:

“I, who sleep without awakening from the world of dreams, which I clearly see to be insubstantial—am I really human?” And “When you
realize that your state in the world and your mind are not in accord, then truly you will understand.”

At the time I was sure my mother couldn’t be quoting from classical poetry and only later realized my mistake. For her, after all, Japanese poetry was anathema, for all her ancestors who’d studied at Tekijuku viewed scholars of the classics as their sworn enemy. So I was convinced that these two poems were something she’d conjured up herself as a kind of parody of classical learning. She muttered these words over and over, never explaining what the poems meant, but her mutterings themselves had a kind of dramatic presence, and I knew they expressed a powerful idea that had taken hold of her.

“Even if I could see this world, filled with disappointment, in my dreams, that’s the way it is, so why should I be surprised—continuing to sleep, that’s the kind of person I’d become.” And “Once I realize that my body doesn’t do what my mind wants it to, then I will understand well this world, and people, and everything.” This is how I interpreted the poems.

Since I was suffering because I was unable to control my own body, I found the second poem particularly unnerving. Even though I felt this deep down, though, I had my doubts about whether this would lead me to a generosity of spirit when it came to other people.

Once, and only once, when she happened to be in a good mood, I asked my mother about this mind-body question. “Your body and your mind are alienated from each other,” she said. “The mind is powerless to control your body. I learned this from you. Something is fundamentally wrong with a world that compels someone to live with a mind and body like that. Now I know the world is evil and sinful. This is the wisdom these poets extol,” she said.

Returning to the first poem, she went on to say that, knowing how awful and disappointing this world is, she wasn’t surprised anymore to wake up and find reality as cold as the cruel dreams she had while sleeping. In short, though she couldn’t put it into words, she was appealing to me to escape the world with her.

Though she was putting her fate in my hands, I couldn’t murder my mother. And I couldn’t kill myself either. The reason was quite simple: my phobia about touching bodies, even my own.

Before long this total despair made my mother desperate, and she committed suicide with some poison she’d gotten from a doctor relative before she was married. She took advantage of a short spell of time during
which I slept—as I lay sleeping shut up in my room as always all day long, my days and nights like a line of white and black Go stones.

I continued my daily routine, awakening only to fall asleep again. But I soon felt something was wrong with my mother because she was always so orderly but now just lay unmoving in the rattan chair on the porch, with the shutters closed. The smell was what first made me suspicious. I couldn’t touch other people, so I couldn’t do anything myself and had to leave things as they were until the woman who brought trays of food to the entrance to our room discovered what had happened after days went by with the food untouched.

Writing about it this way may make me look quite unfeeling. But I wasn’t. I was frozen; a strong sense of guilt had me in its clutches. My mother suffered, afraid to live in this world. She didn’t believe in an afterlife, she believed that at the end of life everything was snapped off completely and time in all its hideousness lost any hold it might have on us. She clung to the hope that everything could be reset to zero.

That’s how she disappeared from this detestable world of suffering. In her final act of slamming into a wall—beyond which lay nothing—and disintegrating, all she hoped for was that her son, the last thing that worried her, accompany her. For her, the sole pleasure to be found in this world lay in vanishing from it, together with her suffering son. Did her old-fashioned sense of morality keep her from inviting me to join her?

The only way she could appeal to me was by humming those two poems. But I didn’t understand what she wanted, which made her despair complete. And as this thought tormented me, I thought once more about the poems that my mother mumbled over and over again:

“I, who sleep without awakening from the world of dreams, which I clearly see to be insubstantial—am I really human?” “When you realize that your state in the world and your mind are not in accord, then truly you will understand.”

At this point, with a guilty conscience on top of everything else, I was at my wits’ end. Totally lost, I decided to get serious about climbing out of the abyss I’d fallen into.

I’m writing this in the belief that all of you who have experienced similar depths of despair will acknowledge how such a seemingly meaningless transition can take place.

This was the kind of person I was when Patron and Guide welcomed me into their midst.

4

After Kizu finished reading Dr. Koga’s essay, he was confused. He read some of the other essays that preceded and followed Dr. Koga’s, hoping to find a way out of his confusion, only to feel the strong arm of each writer shoving him aside. Were these the so-called radical faction, then, he wondered, these young people who had survived such unusual misery and relied so much on Patron and Guide’s church? Compared with these people, Kizu considered himself downright happy-go-lucky. Right now he had his face forcibly pushed up against the painful reality of his cancer, and he could only manage an unfocused feeling of regret.