Kenzaburo Oe - Somersault

Watching as Kizu was carried up the slope, gazing steadily at the green- ery, which had deepened in color in the week of his absence, Asa-san spoke to Ogi, who stood beside her.

"I'm not saying that Professor Kizu needs to return to America, but wouldn't it be best if he chose a real hospital in Matsuyama or Tokyo and settled in there? I think coming back to the Hollow means he's resigned him- self to the inevitable."

Ogi went over to the home on the east side of the monastery occupied by Patron to report to him that Kizu was back from the clinic. Patron asked about Kizu's condition and about any new symptoms and was dissatisfied that Ogi wasn't able to give more details. Before long Patron announced he'd be paying Kizu a visit. Ogi returned to the office to consult with Dancer, and in the evening, with Dr. Koga joining them, they discussed how to carry out this request.

The sky was dark and threatening rain as Ogi and Dancer walked single file through the dark silent woods to Kizu's house, shining their flashlights at Patron's feet. Contrary to the usual feeling one got that the darkness was pushing down to the lowest reaches of the woods, the chapel and the monas- tery across the lake seemed to recede and somehow it felt entirely natural that-despite the large number of people living there-there wasn't a sound.

Kizu was sitting in his angled bed, propped up by cushions, and in front of him were three dining room chairs. Dr. Koga was already ensconced on one of them. Patron and Dancer sat down on the other two, while Ikuo and Ogi stood at the foot of the bed, their backs to the dark window.

"I'm sorry to have caused all this trouble with such dramatic events,"

Kizu said, in a voice that, as Morio had pointed out, was small but lively.

"If anyone's been acting melodramatically, it's me" Patron said. "Once my fever came down I was back to normal, but I've stayed in my room be- cause I was embarrassed to see all of you. Are you in pain?"

"No, not right now."

"It must have been quite painful when you collapsed."

"I didn't even have time to think about it, the pain was so bad-more than I had thought a person could endure… Physical pain can make your whole world collapse. It made me think how extraordinary your Somersault must have been, as a shock to your whole person. I realized I'd taken advan- tage of our closeness in age and said some pretty stupid things. It's made me think about a lot of things…"

Patron didn't respond directly, and everyone else was silent. Just say- ing that much had left Kizu gasping for breath.

"You've just been allowed to come home," Dancer said, "and I'm sure the trip has worn you out, so it's best not to talk too much."

"Don't worry," Dr. Koga countered. "Professor Kizu isn't your run-of- the-mill invalid. He's the kind of person who can take physical pain, shift it over Xospiritual pain, and use it to bolster his creativity. I've never had a patient like him before."

"I've only been away a week," Kizu said, "but I feel uplifted to be back with all my friends again. This really has become my home. I got a little car- ried away just now and said that after all the pain I experienced I reflected deeply on things, but I can't get Patron's wound out of my mind. I had just sketched it, too… For ten years, you said, you were in hell, and I was think- ing about what you endured… To borrow Dr. Koga's words, along with the spiritual pain, imagine such a persistent physical pain on top of it… It's the kind of pain that hits you all at once, but no matter how overwhelming it is you know it will pass. If the body is killed, the pain will disappear. But that's not true of spiritual pain, is it?"

Patron was silent. Dancer said to him, "When you were in the midst of your fever you didn't get a chance to see Professor Kizu's sketch. Could we all look together at it now?"

She went to the room next door, closed off by a wide sliding door, and brought over the framed sketch. Kizu asked Ikuo to fetch the preliminary sketchbook he'd used for the final panel of the triptych. As the latter was opened onto the floor, Kizu stretched out his neck toward it like a turtle.

"The one in the frame is the sketch I did of your wound, which I col- ored with watercolors. The next one, and the page in the sketchbook, are sketches I did the night I was hit by that sharp pain, while I was thinking about the tableau. Both of them center on the Sacred Wound, and I did them to try to clarify my feelings about Patron's injury.

"My pain was entirely physical, but while I was racked by it, and after a week when its aftershocks continued, when I look at these earlier sketches I feel my way of thinking about the tableau has changed. Seeing as how I've come up with a new concept, I thought I'd ask Patron to come here to pose for me."

"Well, there's no need to hide my wound anymore, so why not?" Pa- tron replied. "Somehow your painting captures a side of me that now, even at my age, I'd never noticed before."

In his house on the north shore of the Hollow, Kizu still felt a quiet sense of excitement after Patron's visit and lay awake far into the night. Even with- out the medicine Dr. Koga had prescribed, he was able to control the pain deep in his abdomen; he was beginning, in fact, to feel a kind of symbiotic relationship with it.

Kizu realized again how hard it is to call up a memory of pain once it's passed. Still, after such overwhelming agony, he was able to put the lesser pain he felt at present, and any anxiety about the future, into perspective.

The pain that had assaulted him in the middle of that night he could certainly feel for what it was, yet it went way beyond what anything within him could actively resist. He'd felt driven, spiritually and physically, into a gigantic dark tunnel of pain, violated, with no hope of escape. During the intermittent periods when the pain receded, he was surprised that an insig- nificant being like himself was able to put up with so much. And then the pain would flare up again and he'd be driven back, deep into that dark tun- nel. What frightened him most was the fact that there was no downtime, no letup from this abnormal power. Every time he was once again spit out, alive, from the depths, only to be handed over to a different form of pain-one that was within the realm of comprehension.

The pain that Kizu felt deep in his gut was somehow now accompa- nied by a sense of nostalgia. Not a nostalgia based on some past event, but more like a sense of déjà vu.

Ever so slowly the pain reached its peak, and Kizu suppressed a groan.

The dregs of pain floated up on his expelled breath; his feverish body began to smell.

The second or third day, when all his organs felt stiff and hard, he couldn't understand where the pain was coming from, what the dynamics of the pain and his body movements were, and how they were related. Kizu was both afraid of this unknown opponent and roused himself to resist it, shifting positions in bed to test it. He tried this even more efficiently now and was finally able to pinpoint the pain's exact locus. This time, in place of a groan, he exhaled deeply.

The sound came back to him as a sigh, a composed expression of his inner being.

"Can't you sleep?" Ikuo called out to him. He had apparently been awake all the time. "Is the pain really bad?" As this familiar voice rose up like dampness from the foot of his bed, Kizu felt a childish exhilaration.

"It does hurt, but it's not the kind of pain I usually feel inside… more like an imaginary pain. Like soldiers who get their legs blown off in war and still complain that their knees hurt."

"Would you like me to prepare a suppository?" Ikuo asked.

"I'd rather not."

"How about a sleeping pill?"