Somersault (32 page)

The reporter sat mulling over what Kizu said. Then he nodded, snatched up the check on the table, and signaled the owner of the coffee shop.

“A lot to think over before the memorial service,” he said. “One thing’s clear, though: Patron’s found himself an excellent new Guide.”

2

The next day when Kizu and Ikuo showed up at the office, Dancer and Ogi were huddled together in the midst of a dispirited discussion. Several newspapers were spread out on the office desk. Kizu imagined they were depressed because the only article on the previous day’s press conference was written by the single persistent reporter. That morning Kizu had checked all the newspapers in the below-ground meeting room of his apartment building. When Ikuo came in the minivan, he reported that the morning TV news anchors had showed a scene of Patron talking at the press conference and made comments on the death of Guide that touched on the Somersault ten years ago.

When Kizu mentioned this to Dancer and Ogi, however, it turned out they were discussing something completely different.

“I’m not surprised, since all the newspapers are definitely anti-Patron,” Dancer answered. “What’s unfortunate is that the attitude of the media has spread to society in general. All the halls and conference sites have turned us down. This is a memorial service for someone killed by terrorists, right? Why won’t they let us use their hall? What a bunch of spineless idiots!”

A hand bell rang out from Patron’s room, and Dancer leaped to her feet. Once again her generous response impressed Kizu as she disappeared down the darkened corridor, a worried look on her face. The hand bell, Ogi explained, was originally used in Patron’s church to signal the beginning and end of prayer time. After the Somersault, neither Patron nor Guide had touched it, but since Guide’s death, Patron had sought it out.

As was his wont, though, Ogi didn’t explain any further, instead taking up where Dancer had left off. “None of the people we’ve been negotiating with over possible venues has criticized Guide for being responsible for terrorist acts. And they remember Patron and his Somersault very well. All the early reports in the papers touched on the former radical faction that held him captive and drove him to his death. Could they be afraid of an attack on Patron?”

As he listened to Ogi, Kizu thought of the lounge in his apartment building where he’d read the newspapers that morning. If you removed the partition between it and the dining room, it could easily seat four or five hundred people, even allowing for a small temporary stage. The dining room was closed, and the apartment bulletin had reported that very few people used the lounge. It shouldn’t be hard, should it, to rent that room?

“The underground lounge of my apartment building is built in American style and would seat five hundred people for a meeting,” Kizu said. “Why don’t you try there. The building manager is an American, so I doubt he’d react the way Japanese do. There’s no parking lot, but it’s close enough from the Akasaka–Mitsuke subway to walk.”

After Ikuo parked the minivan in the garage, he and Ogi spread out a map of Tokyo and began examining it. Dancer came back in. As soon as Kizu had explained his idea to her, she nearly yelled at the young men.

“Why are you wasting time checking out the location? Every other hall has turned us down, so that’s our last hope. Have the Professor call right away and begin negotiations!”

The apartment manager responded that as long as it wasn’t some openly anti-American political meeting he didn’t see a problem. Thus the first hurdle regarding Guide’s memorial service was overcome.

Ikuo was put in charge of coordinating initial arrangements for the service, as well as organizing a security team. Considering how kind the manager had been, they wanted to do their utmost to see that no acts of violence took place in the confines of this American-owned property. As far as preparations for the service, everyone, from Kizu on down, pinned their hopes on Ikuo. Ikuo’s plan of attack, however, remained secret, and he said nothing
about the lineup he had in mind for the security team. Kizu recalled the three young men at Patron’s press conference, and how Ikuo had, if only for a short while, dealt with them. At any rate, Ikuo was out of the office on related matters when Kizu stuck his head in and spoke with Dancer. Ogi, too, was out helping arrange the service, so Dancer and Ms. Tachibana were left to run the office.

“Professor, you know Ikuo best, right?” Dancer said. “He’s such a male chauvinist that if you or Patron aren’t there and I ask him how arrangements are going, I barely get a response.”

“You have to admit he’s reliable, though,” Ms. Tachibana added.

Dancer and Ms. Tachibana were hard at work addressing individual invitations to the memorial service, using the list of names Ogi had come up with, lumping together those who had founded their own special groups after leaving the church. Patron had hoped to invite the church’s Kansai headquarters, if there was enough space in the improvised meeting room. Dancer reread the letters they’d received from individuals, as well as the replies sent in to Ogi’s inquiries, checking to see that there wasn’t some hidden leg-pulling in the letters. For her part, Ms. Tachibana addressed the envelopes in a tranquil, beautiful script.

“Neither Patron nor Ogi can detect simple malice in others,” Dancer explained, “but I can sniff out people who aren’t up front. Due to my bad upbringing, perhaps.”

“Patron took great care with letters from people he didn’t know,” Ms. Tachibana added, ever serious. “I was quite moved to find he’d kept the note I sent him years ago about my younger brother, folded up all nice and neat.”

“Such a heartfelt letter must have been a great encouragement to him,” Dancer said. “There are several letters that respond to Guide and Patron’s having fallen into hell. Patron and Guide have always been kind to me, and I’ve never properly expressed my thanks. I did and said some things to Guide I wish I could take back now, but I can’t.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Ms. Tachibana said, looking straight at Dancer so intently through her oval glasses that Dancer could only look down.

“I’d like to explain to Patron about the place we’re going to use for the memorial service,” Kizu said. “Could I see him now?”

“I’ll go see if he’s up. He hasn’t been sleeping well lately and has been taking medicine during the day.”

Soon after Dancer left, the sound of the hand bell ringing from Patron’s room told them he was awake.

3

When Kizu went in, Patron was standing beside the armchair waiting for him, wearing what looked like a brand-new light-colored gown. To Kizu he seemed quite lively.

“I understand you negotiated with the people from the American university,” Patron said.

Kizu proceeded to tell him about the underground lounge at his apartment. The building’s main entrance was at the basement level, with the first floor facing an expansive garden in back with a pond; the gently sloping garden had a calmness about it you wouldn’t expect to find in the heart of Tokyo. The participants would walk down from the right side of the building and enjoy the vista as they headed toward the memorial service.

Kizu finished his explanation, but still Patron stayed beside him. He didn’t seem to have anything he wanted to talk about but just cheerfully enjoyed gazing at Kizu. Kizu broached the topic of Guide’s background and what he’d heard from the newspaper reporter, and Patron filled in even more of the details. Guide’s uncle—who’d found the infant Guide beside his dead mother at a collection spot in Nagasaki for bodies of people killed in the bombing and taken him home—was a man of strong faith. As he grew up, Guide mourned his absent mother; though he knew how she had died, he had no actual memories of her. He felt his mother’s death and his father’s disappearance after the war were part of God’s plan for him and had led to his good fortune in being taken in by his kind, naively optimistic uncle, but still he struggled with a sense of guilt toward his parents whenever he went to church.

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 rebuilt 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 being tested. Was this the will of God? 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 youthful 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 blameless. 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 repentant, and he began to work to see this happen. This was a huge undertaking, 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 radioactive 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. If someone were to stand at the ruins of Urakami Cathedral, 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 related these stories. Kizu wondered how, because of Guide’s past, the Somersault
reverberated differently within his inner being from within Patron himself.

“I know even less about the Somersault than I do about Guide’s background, 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 feelings. 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 undertake 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 concerning the entire process of my constructing a new church.”