Kenzaburo Oe - Somersault

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 after- life, she believed that at the end of life everything was snapped off com- pletely 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 po- ems. 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 simi- lar depths of despair will acknowledge how such a seemingly meaning- less transition can take place.

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

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 consid- ered 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.

The people who wrote these essays had crawled on all fours across their own individual wildernesses of suffering to arrive at a faith in Patron and Guide. And on their backs they struggled to carry the heavy social burden of being a member of the ostracized radical faction. As if this weren't bad enough, their leaders abandoned them, ridiculing the doctrines they believed in as laughable and meaningless. Yet for ten years they had borne it all and never lost their faith. And among them now were those who had to carry the addi- tional burden of Guide's death.

When Kizu had seen these former radical-faction members at the me- morial service-the very picture of late-thirties and forties vigor-he had already felt how soft, both physically and mentally, he was in comparison.

Though he had yet to see the town in Shikoku where they'd be living together, he felt a tangible menace in the place. After they left Kyoto, the view from the train was filled with rows of houses and hills covered with thick growths of broad-leafed trees. Kizu wanted to lose himself in this familiar, nostalgic scene. He stirred and felt, deep down in his lower belly and near his back, the resistance of a hard foreign substance. So he wasn't entirely soft, was he, with this hard intruder in his fifty-plus-year-old body? It made Kizu want to laugh as he simultaneously gave himself credit and put himself down.

Beside him, Ikuo lay back in his seat, eyes shut, but the movement behind his lids showed he wasn't asleep but was reacting to the slightest movements from Kizu. From Kizu's viewpoint, Ikuo was a great emotional and physical support for a soft late-fifties man with a serious illness; at the same time it was also clear that he had a great interest in, and was helping to support, a group Kizu wouldn't want to get on the bad side of.

Soon after they left the New Osaka Station, Kizu stood up and Ikuo shifted his legs to let him pass, throwing him a questioning look. Kizu merely nodded and walked down the aisle to where Dr. Koga was seated. Both he and his companion were asleep. There was something about Dr. Koga's pos- ture and expression in particular that pierced Kizu to the quick. He passed them and sat down in a vacant seat.

The window seat beside him was vacant as well, and Kizu tried to make his harsh breathing calm down. Standing or seated, Dr. Koga was clearly a person who'd done a lot of physical training, but now he looked like a strangely aged infant, his upper body collapsed diagonally across the seat, hands clutch- ing his tucked-up knees. His broad eyelids were yellowish, his mouth open, teeth clenched. Beside him, Mr. Hanawa lay diagonally in the other direc- tion, his dark face etched with tiredness. He too had had an extraordinary life and an accumulated exhaustion that in ordinary circumstances he willed into submission.

They arrived in Osaka much earlier than scheduled. Kizu continued to sit by himself until the announcement came that they had reached Okayama.

As they changed trains, Kizu followed behind Ikuo as he carried their bulky luggage, trying not to catch Dr. Koga's eye. When the new train crossed over the Seto Bridge, Kizu pretended to be absorbed in the sea and the small is- lands outside.

Once their train began to run along the Yosan Line, it was just the four of them in the Green Car in the middle of the train. Despite his short unsettled sleep, Dr. Koga looked refreshed, and when he invited him over, Kizu sum- moned up the courage to continue their earlier conversation. Ever since they entered Shikoku the hills had taken on a decided gentleness, the forests grow- ing thicker, no doubt helping Kizu's shift in mood, the scene outside the win- dow growing closer to his mental picture of his homeland.

The four of them unwrapped the Matsuri Sushi box lunches Ikuo had purchased in Okayama, and when the cart came around selling drinks, Dr. Koga teasingly had Ikuo buy two cans of beer for each of them. The beer made Dr. Koga even more lively than one would expect of a man his age.

"I just want to be with Ikuo," Kizu began, "which is what's led me to participate in Patron's new church, even if I don't have much time left. I appreciate Patron's generosity in allowing someone like me in. Though it does bother me sometimes how wishy-washy I am, a follower without faith."

"I'm thankful you can be with Patron," Dr. Koga said. "I know having you with us will liven things up. But more than that, Ikuo needs you. If you hadn't come he never would have joined us. I've talked with him a lot recently, and one thing I can say with certainty is this: Your participation in the church is a great thing-not just for Ikuo but for Patron, and for the former radical faction too."

"For better or worse," Kizu said, "Ikuo and I are pretty tight. But truth- fully I don't know how useful I'll be to Patron, or to you and the others."