Somersault (70 page)

“The Young Fireflies talk of the Hollow as a special place,” Ikuo said. “During the insurrections at the end of the Tokugawa period and the beginning of the Meiji, people dragged down bamboo to use as weapons from the huge bamboo grove. Right here, which used to be a basin, was where they stripped the leaves off, the ground completely covered in green and the farmers drunk. The Base Movement started here as well, as did the Church of the Flaming Green Tree. I believe there really is what everyone calls the
power of the land
, what Asa-san calls the
power of the place.”

“Will Patron’s church be able to rely on this power?” Kizu asked.

“It’s like a stage where something’s going to take place, where something sacred will manifest itself.… I’ve felt the same thing once before, in another place.… Two days ago, when the moon was full, I came back here, to see how the Fireflies had rearranged the rooms, and spent the night. I couldn’t get to sleep either, and as I looked out at the bright moonlit scenery outside I remembered that other time and place.”

Kizu waited for Ikuo to continue his reminiscences, but after a moment of silence the young man brought up another subject.

“At noon the next day everyone was asking me, very concerned, about how you were. With what happened with Patron’s Sacred Wound, things change so fast. The Quiet Women have started to formulate some plans of their own in addition to their group prayers, while the inner circle of Technicians, who’ve been wavering a bit since Guide’s death, are now much more focused again—as Dancer, for whatever reason, had predicted.

“I came here following Patron rather than his church, hoping he was going to take some action. So I’d like to consider these things going on among the church members as a kind of forewarning of things to come. If the internal pressure building up in the Quiet Women and the Technicians blows, I don’t think Patron can just sit around twiddling his thumbs. I’m like Dancer—I much prefer to see signs that something is about to happen. Two days ago I was convinced that something important is about to take place on the stage before me now, this moonlit Hollow. People say any convictions you have late at night are illusory, but tonight I’m getting the exact same feelings. I think the reason you’re back here, Professor, is so you can observe whatever it is that’s going to happen on this stage.

“Whatever it is,” Ikuo went on, “I don’t want the Young Fireflies to fall victim to it. I bring this up because they consider these grounds in the Hollow a special place, the site where they’re planning to construct their new lives. So whatever happens, they’ll be involved.”

Something occurred to Kizu. “Every time I talk with you about the book
of Jonah, I see you standing on Jonah’s side, grumbling about what the Lord wants you to do. But your attitude right now isn’t just that of a Jonah.”

“What do you mean?” Ikuo asked, caught off guard.

“It’s a simple thing, really. Not long ago I put it this way: Jonah stands up to God, insisting that he destroy Nineveh the way he originally planned. But God, lamenting the loss of over 120,000 children plus countless head of cattle, doesn’t burn the city. And the people repent. And now
you’re
worried about children not becoming victims, right?”

Ikuo turned his forehead, lumpy like the surface of a pumpkin, toward the moonlight, while below his deep eye sockets all was dark and hardened.

“I’m not making fun of you,” Kizu said, “merely pointing out this contradiction. A contradiction you’ve never had before in your life, never thought about, but one that’s significant nonetheless. If you hadn’t come to this place and gotten to know the Fireflies, this contradiction never would have entered your world . . . never would have grazed you conceptually.

“I began to think about this when you were staying with me in the clinic,” Kizu said. “In the middle of the night when I looked out at the backyard I saw a group of Fireflies huddled together, all gazing up despondently at my window. Soon after I laid my head back on my pillow, you got up from your sofa and, thinking I was asleep, crept out of the room. Pretty soon I heard an irrepressible stir. Just seeing you made the children in the backyard so happy. You’re very close to these kids, and you have a premonition that something is going to take place here. Whatever it turns out to be, you’ll be a part of it, and they can’t help but get dragged in. You can’t shut out such devoted admirers.

“No matter what sort of amoral activity you get involved with, it’s not going to shock me into retreating. This is the stage where I’ll spend my final days, and no matter what takes place I’m ready for it. But I must say I don’t mind seeing you agonize over how to keep the Fireflies from getting hurt.”

2

Ikuo looked lost in thought. The fog that covered the lake rose up in eddies. At first Kizu thought the wind was making it swirl, but looking closely at the outline of the giant cypress he noticed the fog was still. Was it a change in humidity that made the fog form at night? Still feverish, Kizu was sensitive enough to smell the cold coming through the bare window.

“Why don’t we close the curtains, Ikuo.”

Silently, with unfaltering steps, the young man moved over to the window. After closing the curtains, he walked around the bed to straighten the
curtains on the opposite side, through which vertical shafts of moonlight filtered in. His eyes were used to the dark, so he moved quickly and surely. Kizu could just make him out as he climbed back in bed and pulled up the covers. Drawing back slightly, he sat up, clasping his knees together.

“There is something I really wanted to tell you tonight,” Ikuo said. “It’s connected with what you talked about earlier. It’s the most important experience I’ve had up till now. I was going to tell you about it once—the time that Guide urged me to appeal to Patron, when I had you write that letter for me. But I didn’t have the guts.

“I told you about how I heard a voice from above?—the voice of God, I called it, telling me,
Do it!
—though I didn’t tell you what I did in response to that voice, just that I was waiting to hear the voice again. I know you’re tired, but I wonder if you would mind listening to me?”

Ikuo spoke politely, though clearly not expecting a negative reply.

“I feel a premonition, I guess you’d call it, that something important will occur here very soon. The Technicians are making preparations; even the Quiet Women are active. The buildings here in the Hollow belong to the Kansai headquarters, so of course they have every right to do this, but they’re planning to hold a gathering here in the Hollow with Patron and a large number of their followers. After people found out about the Sacred Wound, Patron became very upbeat about this plan and told Ogi to take charge. Most likely it’ll be held in the summer.

“With all these things happening and me involved, I have to come up with a plan. But what
kind
of plan I still have to figure out. One thing I need to decide is how far I should involve the Fireflies. I’ve been thinking about this all week. For several days running, Gii’s brought the Fireflies over to stand guard over me, as it were, since seeing me just sitting silently and thinking has him worried.

“The Fireflies are kids, after all, so they’re self-centered. They’re enthusiastic about doing whatever it takes to establish Gii’s ideology. If an emergency arises with you, Professor—or even if it’s not an emergency—and you’re put in a hospital in Tokyo or New York, I probably won’t be coming back to the Hollow. And that’s a worry for them too, from their ideological standpoint.

“So there’s this basic egotism involved, but you should know that every one of the Fireflies participated in the silent prayer meeting the Quiet Women held for your recovery. Two hours without a break. It must have been pretty hard on them, don’t you think? That’s an incredibly long time for young kids to sit still and keep their eyes closed, but Gii made sure every single one of them took part.

“Two hours.… Yes, that must have been hard on them,” Kizu said.

“Their goal was to keep you here and to keep me tied to this region. They came up with other plans too, including one to threaten us. This was connected with something I told Gii about my past. I thought you might not be getting back to sleep soon, so I wanted to tell you this story now.

“When I was fourteen years old I hit my tutor, an American named Schmidt, with a poker and hurt him quite seriously. And then when I was sixteen I hit him again with a poker and killed him. Behind both attacks was the homosexual relationship we had. If you and I decided to cut our ties with the Hollow and move to Tokyo or America, Gii planned to blackmail us by sending letters to the newspapers accusing us of creating a ring in which we sexually abused young boys.

“I haven’t told you before about my early life, but now I’d like to. My father was a banker who was stationed abroad for many years, and my mother was a piano teacher. Through my parents’ professions we got to be friends with the family of an American who ran a music publishing firm that operated in the United States and Japan.

“I was the youngest child in my family and ended up becoming closest to this family—the Schmidts. My parents were particularly keen on having me remain bilingual, since we had lived in England, Canada, and the States until I was ten, and I was fluent in English. I wasn’t a particularly studious child, but I loved making models, and when I wasn’t doing that I played all day outside our house in the suburbs, where the natural surroundings were still quite beautiful, so physically at least I grew up strong.

“Every weekend I was sent to stay over at the Schmidts’. His wife was Japanese, and they had a grown daughter, and Mr. Schmidt did his work at home, in a separate cottage, and that’s where I slept on an army cot they set up for me. It was during this period that you and I had our near miss at that plastic model competition. What you saw there was an indication of the violence I was capable of My sexual relationship with Mr. Schmidt started when I was ten and a half and continued until I was fourteen, when I took that poker in the cottage—the poker he used to show me how to build a fire and keep it going; he was my teacher in many ways—and I hit him in the back and thighs. He suffered compound fractures and was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

“My parents and Mr. Schmidt came to an understanding, though, and I wasn’t hauled off to court. Mr. Schmidt was quite generous to me, and after he returned to working in his house he restarted our English conversation lessons. I can’t believe my parents weren’t aware of the sexual element in the background to all this. But my father was a self-centered, closed-in person,
and he was relieved to let Mr. Schmidt’s generosity and good intentions settle matters.

“So I kept going over for my lessons, though I didn’t spend the night, and two years later Mr. Schmidt was going on a business trip to Vienna and Salzburg in the musical off-season—his job then involving reissuing a series of old LPs—and asked me to go with him to push his wheelchair. I think Mr. Schmidt sort of put the screws to my father to get his consent. I could tell because when we were leaving my father looked kind of depressed. Anyway, after a busy week in Vienna, on the day after we went to Salzburg, I clubbed Mr. Schmidt to death.

“I wasn’t taken into custody by the police but taken to a hospital in Vienna, where one of the counselors was a Japanese specialist who was a professor appointed to the staff there and the other counselor was a professor who’d taken his degree at Stanford. I spoke a lot, both in English and Japanese. I tried my hardest to give them the impression that I’d been forced into killing Mr. Schmidt because I’d been victimized. They believed me. Later on I heard that one of the counselors had been quoted in the newspapers to the effect that the real criminal in this case was the murdered man himself!

“Police investigators dispatched to Japan unearthed another young man who’d been sexually molested by Schmidt, which was a plus for me. Naturally they asked me why I hadn’t told anyone, but one commentator also noted how Japan isn’t the kind of country where sexual victimization is part of ordinary discourse.

“At least I was able to lead the hospital and the police investigation in a direction that was advantageous to me, convincing them that the physical and emotional wounds I’d been carrying around for so long finally exploded, and that not only was the process whereby I was injured completely overlooked, but that no one—neither my parents nor my doctors—had detected the calls for help I’d been sending out since the first incident. In other words, I put myself forward as the tragic victim in this whole affair.

“This was the spin I put on Schmidt’s death for adult consumption, but inside I had a different understanding of it—not that I was aware of it at the time—and this has been a major issue for me ever since. When Mr. Schmidt was in Tokyo he had no compunction about walking around town accompanied by a young boy playing the role of page. This turned out to be very trying for me when we were in Europe. In front of the hotel staff he treated me as he would in Japan, but when he was in a formal situation with his social betters he treated me like some Oriental valet.

“The day the murder took place there was to be a dinner with a famous conductor who would be presenting a limited-engagement series of concerts
in Japan, and though someone was needed to push Mr. Schmidt’s wheelchair, they assigned that job to a member of the hotel owner’s family. I was ordered to stay behind in our hotel room and be content with a room-service supper.

“Mr. Schmidt was decked out in formal wear, waiting for them to come get him, and I was watching Japanese cartoons on TV when he called me to come over to the terrace of our suite’s sitting room. It was still some time before sunset, and because the hotel was situated on a hillside, you could see a broad vista, including the dark sky threatening thunder.

“Mr. Schmidt asked me if I recalled the sketch of the Alpine valleys in the copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Madrid notebook he’d told me to look at before we left Japan. The place where we were headed next was the area where his parents had been born and raised, from which they set off when they moved to America. He said that place resembled the drawing, which is why he’d wanted me to see it.