Kenzaburo Oe - Somersault

Guide's father was at the front in China when Nagasaki was hit by the atomic bomb. After he was repatriated, he made one visit to his brother-in- law's family, in the Goto Islands off the coast of Nagasaki, where they'd been evacuated. He didn't reclaim his son, and even after Guide's uncle had re- built the clinic and moved back to Nagasaki City, he didn't get in touch. The one time he was at his brother-in-law's in Goto, this repatriated officer was obviously greatly disturbed. He drank to excess and told them how in China, he'd witnessed unspeakable atrocities committed by Japanese troops. He had planned to resist if they tried to force him to massacre peasants and rape women, but he knew it wasn't enough just to sit by passively while others killed and looted.

The fact that he was an officer, a doctor, also weighed heavily on him, because of what the Chinese novelist Lu Shun had written: If you're going to war, it's best to go as a doctor… It's heroic, yet safe. You can't avoid beingtested.

Was this the will of GodP Ever since he was a child, Guide had thought often about God's will, no doubt because of his father's stories, as told to him by his adopted father.

The Nagasaki that his father saw after he was repatriated was utterly destroyed by an atomic bomb, the second to fall on Japan. Nagasaki had the highest concentration of Catholics in Japan. He'd committed no atrocities himself, yet his own wife, a woman of strong faith, was killed and her youth- ful body destroyed, leaving a baby behind. This had to be God's will, God's plan, he concluded. A sin is committed in a certain place, and just by being in that place aren't those who didn't participate equally guilty? Further, when God punishes us, he doesn't distinguish between the sinful and the blame- less. We're punished for the simple fact that we're human.

Guide's father understood this through his experience. He realized that to live is to suffer and through this he could find repentance. Nagasaki must be filled with people who feel the same way. Together with them, he wanted to make Nagasaki a shining example in Japan of a place filled with the re- pentant, and he began to work to see this happen. This was a huge undertak- ing, well beyond him no matter how much time he devoted to it. I won't be able to come see my son very often, he told his brother-in-law, but I hope you'll forgive me, as someone who shares my faith.

His brother-in-law, also a doctor, was much more of a realist. He was resigned to the repatriated officer's never regaining his mental stability and leading a steady life. Ever since he'd made his way through the still radioac- tive rubble of Nagasaki searching for his younger sister and his nephew, he knew that even a tragedy of this magnitude would lead only a small minority of people to repent. II someone were to stand at the ruins of Urakami Cathe- dral, show a charred Pietà to all the survivors milling about, and shout at them to repent, he might very well be stoned to death.

Guide's father disappeared after that, but his brother-in-law began to hear reports about him. They weren't detailed, but the outlines were clear enough. He didn't hear about any repatriated officer being stoned to death after shouting to people to repent in the nuclear wasteland of Nagasaki, but he did hear news of a young leader walking a tightrope separating the legal from the illegal in regard to concessions at the occupation force's base in nearby Sasebo. Had his young brother-in-law done a complete about-face? Was he doing his best to commit sinful acts, testing God's will and God's plan in an utterly un-Catholic way? After a while these rumors of a young leader in Sasebo faded away. This wasn't a time when the Japanese yakuza gangs were able to fight the MPs and survive.

So Guide was raised by his stepfather, who himself drank as he re- lated these stories. Kizu wondered how, because of Guide's past, the Som- ersault reverberated differently within his inner being from within Patron himself.

"I know even less about the Somersault than I do about Guide's back- ground, but I guess I'm digging into what makes me most anxious," Kizu said, summoning up his resolve. "Guide considered you his Patron, too, and the names you used were perfect for the kind of relationship you had. Didn't you take turns being the leader?"

"That's right," Patron replied. "Actually when it comes down to church doctrine and activities, I think Guide was much more the leader than I ever was."

"Which is exactly why I can't fill his shoes," Kizu insisted. "You're a unique person, and I know Guide must have been too. But I'm not. I want to help you out, but the one great hope of my life, my one and only desire for the future, is to be with Ikuo. Ikuo is absorbed in working for you, so here I am.

"Although I'm aware I can never measure up to Guide, I still want to do whatever I can. I was hoping you'd teach me what role you envision this new Guide playing. Otherwise I'll be lost. At my age it's not easy to take on new responsibilities without understanding what you're supposed to be doing.

It's very hard for me, a lovesick old man who wants more than anything else to hang out with a certain young person, to just slouch around the office with nothing to do."

After he said this, Kizu felt the blood rise to his face. And he felt Patron gazing at his hot, fleshy face-at first with a flash of surprise, then with a sense of sympathy tinged with sad resignation. Kizu knew that what he blurted out was considered beyond the pale here in Japan, but it did reveal his true feel- ings. And when he spoke with Patron, more than anything else Kizu wanted to show how he really felt.

After a moment of silence, Patron said, "Professor, I'd like you to under- take something that goes in a different direction from what Guide did but that's also absolutely essential to our movement. If I say this you might get upset, thinking it's something I just came up with on the spur of the moment, but as someone once said, a historian is a prophet who looks backward. The late Guide was a forward-looking prophet, and I've been thinking of having you be a backward-looking one. I'd like you to play the role of historian con- cerning the entire process of my constructing a new church."

"Historian?" Kizu echoed.

"I haven't hurt your feelings, I hope?" Patron asked timidly, even fearfully.

"No. I appreciate your thought."

"Before I met the late Guide," Patron went on, "whenever I had visions, I thought they were symptoms of an illness. As I began to awaken from trances I couldn't control, I blurted out delirious things-the kind of things I never imagined would be intelligible. While I still had a family, my wife took care of me while I was in my trances; she was convinced that they were attacks of mental illness. She called it-my spouting all this nonsense after I awoke- the return of the wobbles.

"I mentioned this before, but it was Guide who took this delirious talk and made sense of it. This enabled me to relate my experiences on the other side. The accumulation of all this became the teachings of the Savior and the Prophet. Alone, I never would have been able to do a thing."

"But first you had those trances and visions, right?" Kizu said. "Guide wasn't creating anything new, he was just telling you what you yourself had said. You said the words, delirious though they might sound, and he just re- arranged them into something logical. Like Guide did, I sense in you a strange and wonderful power to inspire. I'm not good with words; it's only when I paint that the things influencing me come out smoothly. Take that watercolor of Ikuo and me walking in the sky-it's not so much that what I painted hap- pened to correspond to what you envisioned but rather that the silent words inside of you took hold of me, inspiring me to paint that picture. But being your historian would involve words more than painting, wouldn't it?"