Somersault by Kenzaburo Oe
On the appointed day, though, when she alighted from the elevator, Mrs. Tsugane wore a cold, serious expression completely in contrast with her voice on the phone. Silently, she led Ogi along a stone path heading toward the top of a hill right before them crowded with various cultural facilities and stores. Sculptures lined the narrow path, Ogi taking particular note of a combination of slabs of metal with complex reflections of the light and one mounted on a concrete base like an egg sliced in half. Elderly couples and small groups of young girls especially seemed to enjoy shaking the movable metal parts of some of the statues and stroking an almost comically old-fashioned realistic statue of an infant.
With no rhyme or reason to the way the level areas and steps were adjoined, it was a tiring walk up the slope, and Mrs. Tsugane, lost in thought, eventually led the way to an outdoor amphitheater surrounded by a horseshoe-shaped ring of sunken stone seats; she went halfway around and began descending the south side of the hill. Without a word to Ogi, she strode off quickly toward a colony made up of a small group of residences and an apartment building rising up from slightly below.
She stopped at the brick entrance of the nearest residence, surrounded by yew trees, and for the first time seemed to relax. She had Ogi wait at the foyer as she went in, bustling noisily just past the door and then inviting him in. A spacious living room/kitchen greeted Ogi, a sparse woods visible on a steep slope outside. The lace curtain on the inset window was drawn, blocking the unusually strong sunlight that had made them both perspire on the walk over. Ogi sat down on a sofa, his position affording him an angled view of the scenery to his right, and gazed at the framed picture hanging on the wall in front of him, a colored print of a railroad station constructed of iron, viewed from the front, and a plan, drawn in pencil, that continued on the same paper.
“This is where I escape to,” said Mrs. Tsugane, catching what Ogi was looking at as she brought in a liter bottle of Evian and two fluted glasses. “My husband picked that up in France. He has a number of sketches of railway bridges too, all of which have a pagoda on them, obviously not of practical use but more as a type of monument.”
“It’s from the end of the nineteenth century, around the time the Eiffel Tower was built,” Ogi said, noting the date on the print.
“That was the age when metal structures had a religious feel to them,” Mrs. Tsugane said. She sat down on the sofa, waiting for Ogi’s gaze to move from the print to her. “It’s been so many years, but I wonder what happened to my missing panties? How about telling me the details?”
Ogi blushed, and felt like he was left dangling stupidly in the air. He fingered the Evian bottle on the low table, wondering how he should begin, as Mrs. Tsugane leaned forward and stretched out her hand as if she were about to slap his knee. Instead, she leaned back and said, in an intelligent, serious tone, “Please don’t get angry, but just hear me out. I’m not doing this to have fun at your expense. It’s just that recently I feel anxious, as if I’m stuck in a rut, and I feel a lot of nostalgia for those old days, and for the high school student who was so curious about my panties. I can imagine how tough it must have been for you, with your brother and his wife always leaving you out of their activities. And I wonder why I didn’t do anything to help include you.”
“The other day, after I got back to my apartment, I thought a lot about that,” Ogi said. “Back then I just put your panties on and felt a gentle calm come over me and went to sleep. . . but I can’t remember at all what happened the next morning.”
His words felt forced to him, a sense of reality missing from them. He blushed even more, afraid she might think he wasn’t telling the truth, and took a sip of water. But Mrs. Tsugane seemed to accept everything he said. She even inclined her head coyly to one side.
“This might be a naive question, but when a young man wears a woman’s panties—assuming everything’s normal with him—don’t things get out of hand?”
“Not for me. Everything settled down nicely. It felt like my whole body was cocooned in a fluffy softness, and I slept soundly.”
As she listened to Ogi, a yawn came to her flushed, small, round face, taking Ogi by surprise. Despite this, she appeared still to be deep in thought, and finally said, in a low voice, “Maybe you wanted to become a girl, you poor thing.”
That certainly made sense, Ogi mused, when you consider how his genitals subsided and how calmly he slept after putting the panties on. Having confessed, his face red and drooping, Ogi realized that he might seem to be enjoying a kind of masochistic solace in all this, which made him blush all the more.
Mrs. Tsugane stared steadily at him for a time, then gulped and, steeling herself, made a decisive announcement.
“Certainly you don’t strike me as girlish now. The subconscious desires you had as a young boy are still with us, inside your trousers. And the girl I used to be and the woman I am right now are very happy, I can tell you. Your brother and sister-in-law teased me no end about the panty incident, but it also brought on some erotic dreams. Why don’t we reward our formerly naive selves? What do you say? Let’s do it!”
Up the spiral staircase with its metal banister that ascended from the entrance with its vaulted ceiling, there was just one large bedroom, with a toilet and bath attached. The room contained little more than a vanity mirror and chair, an oak sideboard, and a double bed spilling over and occupying the rest of the space. Mrs. Tsugane turned down the bedspread and light blanket and, standing firmly on the rug, legs set apart, took off her skirt, shrugged off her silk slip, and let it drop to the floor. After carefully removing her stockings, she was taking off her panties when a faint smile spread lines from her flushed eyelids to her cheeks. Ogi didn’t like that particular look, which was directed at him, but not to be outdone, he enthusiastically sloughed off his clothes.
Only three minutes into sex, as Ogi was moving vigorously up and down, his passion rising, Mrs. Tsugane pushed up her slim arms against his chest. Ogi was annoyed, but she modestly explained that she felt she was going to come first, and wanted him to get off her. She turned around, face down, hoisting up to a comical height the two white globes of her rump and the reddish slit between. She had all the seriousness of purpose of a little girl absorbed in play and, Ogi, once again in a good mood, couldn’t suppress a smile, feeling proud that such an intelligent older woman would openly show him such passion.
Ogi enjoyed remembering their sexual activities for many days thereafter. Even when he was taking care of the inquiries related to Patron’s name list—and the number of replies they received exceeded a hundred—he’d be possessed by fragmentary mental pictures of Mrs. Tsugane’s body, and of her fingers, and of his as they moved over her. He made out a schedule of visits to the university town Mrs. Tsugane lived in, taking care of all the business at hand up to the last possible moment—sending out Patron’s letters, getting in touch with people by e-mail, fax, and, when necessary, by phone. For her part, Mrs. Tsugane, with her insatiable desire and stamina—at least from the viewpoint of an inexperienced youth—responded to Ogi’s every need. What’s more, she displayed the kind of good sense appropriate to an older woman.
One day between bouts of sex as they lay sprawled out, resting their weary bodies, Mrs. Tsugane, puffing on a cigarette, said, sounding less like she was addressing Ogi than reciting lines from a one-man play, “Please don’t tell anyone about what’s going on between us. After my husband gets back from abroad, we won’t be able to meet as frequently, and we’ll both have time to do some soul-searching. In my experience, even if you try very hard to analyze a physical relationship, one that’s just begun, you’ll find it meaningless to do so.”
Innocent, and at the same time moralistic, Ogi listened to her, dead serious. A moment later, though, as Mrs. Tsugane, lying face down, slid up and reached out for the ashtray, Ogi’s attention was riveted by the red lines on the outer part of her small buttocks attached to thick thighs, and by her anus, like a dried jujube-tree fruit, the only part of the s
In the end, innocent young Ogi put these words of a most discreet and experienced older woman on a back burner and didn’t pursue their implications. After three weeks of bliss, though, the day came when he had to face an inevitable reality, on the heels of which he was ambushed by jealousy and ended up angry and miserable: Mrs. Tsugane’s husband was coming back from Europe the following day.
Ogi learned that they wouldn’t be seeing much of each other since she was going to take some time off from her job and spend a week with her husband at their cottage in South Izu before he reported back to his design center. When he heard this, Ogi felt like breathing a sigh of relief for his penis, which had never had such a workout. Perhaps eager to reward him for the time they’d have to be apart, when Ogi arrived at her refuge on this final day Mrs. Tsugane had laid out a plastic sheet on the rug at the foot of the bed, as well as a professional-size bottle of body lotion Ms. Asuka had given her.
Ogi had heard that Ms. Asuka worked in “adult entertainment,” but it was only when he saw this bottle that he fully understood what this meant. According to what he’d heard, the Our Own Moosbrugger fellow had used some of Ms. Asuka’s contributions to pay a visit to her massage parlor.
They spread the lotion over each other’s bodies and went through the same routine they normally performed on the bed. But this time Mrs. Tsugane didn’t let Ogi pin her down; instead she got up on his chest and straddled him, facing away from him and bending over. As he knew it would, his penis trembled from this new workout as her head bobbed up and down on it. Thinking to return the favor, Ogi stuck his neck out like a turtle, but with the rapid movement of her tight little rump, his tongue couldn’t quite reach the red slit right before his eyes. He grabbed on to her glistening white butt, a hand on each hemisphere to hold it still, and relaxed his neck. But as Mrs. Tsugane became more absorbed in performing fellatio, the bobbing movements of her head led her butt to rise and fall; Ogi touched his right index finger to the jujube fruit between her buttocks, and it slid in smoothly. As if to encourage the movements of his fingers, her rump gracefully slid down deeper and the young man’s finger came to rest on a soft cocoon like a tiny ball of finely dried hay.…
After he returned to his apartment, Ogi finally realized what that had all been about. A few days before, as they took a break in bed, Mrs. Tsugane had mentioned that her furniture-designer husband had an interest in scatology and had shown interest in her urine and feces. Once it was out of the body it was dead, as far as she was concerned, and though she had urinated on him once, she didn’t let him touch anything else, she said.
Mrs. Tsugane had given Ogi the body lotion bottle to throw away in the garbage cans outside the station on his way home, but as she did so she poured the remaining lotion into a small bottle of a generic brand of make-up, and put the apparently new container in her purse. Now when he recalled this he understood he’d been nothing more than a guinea pig in an experiment prepared for her returning husband’s new sexual proclivities. And this became the trigger for the jealousy that consumed him the following week.
4
After a truly miserable week alone, when Ogi showed up at Mrs. Tsugane’s office she was on the phone, speaking slowly and deliberately. She motioned to him to take a seat. Apparently she was talking with the PR department of a company regarding travel funding for a Polish avantgarde troupe that was scheduled to appear at the drama festival sponsored by the Culture and Sports Center the following spring. She had on a beige suit and, around her neck, a scarf of horizontal light green and grass-colored stripes. On his trip to Europe to the awards ceremony, Mrs. Tsugane had told Ogi proudly, she’d asked her husband to attend a famous scarf designer’s show of his new collection.
As he listened to her endless phone call, Ogi remembered that long-ago summer day, her tank top, and her lush heavy hair cascading down her back. Her hair now, bangs as well as the hair down the nape of her neck, was thinner and piled up on top of her head. He had learned that the wrinkles that ran from her eyes to the upper part of her cheeks grew darker as she got sexually aroused, but now they were merely an indicator of aging skin; in her profile, as she quietly but persistently made her case over the phone, Ogi could see exhaustion seeping through.
She finally finished her call and hung up, a self-deprecating look on her face at having someone else witness her struggle over the phone.
“No matter how much I plead, they won’t contribute the funds. Before the economic bubble burst, companies used to give money before they even heard what it was for. Nowadays, with the recession getting worse, they feel they’ve done their duty merely by listening.”
Ogi nodded at her. He broached the topic he’d been thinking about all the way over on the Chuo Line train, his words sounding unnatural to him as he spoke.
“It seems it’s impossible for Patron to come to a meeting of the Moosbrugger Committee. Not that he has no interest in Ms. Tachibana and her brother—quite the opposite. He wants to invite them to come to his own office. I called her to convey the news and she seemed quite taken with the idea.”
“If that’s the case,” Mrs. Tsugane said, staring fixedly at Ogi as if finally noticing him, “there’s no reason for Ms. Tachibana to attend the Moosbrugger Committee anymore. She has a close friend in Ms. Asuka, and the other people on the committee are really not her type. This would mean too, wouldn’t it, that you have no more business here? When we talked this morning, though we haven’t seen each other for ten days, you didn’t seem too enthusiastic about meeting me.
“Does this mean our relationship is over, now that my husband’s back in the country? Did your sense of morality drive you to this decision? Surely you’re not suddenly afraid of my husband?”
Ogi decided he’d best say nothing. Angry emotions welled up inside, but if he let her storm of words sweep over his head, this troublesome matter he didn’t know how to begin to approach would simply resolve itself. The ten days of misery he’d experienced had made him think things out in a more adult way. It was worse than cowardly to put all the blame on her.
“I don’t know if I can say anything about morality. But I do know that jealousy’s made me miserable these past ten days, and there’s no way out. If I said I was going to snatch you away from your husband, you’d be the first to laugh at me. But I still went ahead cooking up all kinds of silly schemes. Finally, I decided that I couldn’t keep on as I am, suffering from a jealousy that has me bent out of shape. In other words, the only way is to make a clean break.”
“Isn’t there some less drastic way?” Mrs. Tsugane asked. “Maybe we could go on as we are, for a while, and then say goodbye with only a minimum of pain.”
“The pointless suffering I’ve been through made me realize that I can’t stand being in this kind of pain anymore. If we keep on, my head will explode. There’s no other way. If we cut things off here I’ll suffer for a time, but I can tough it out.”
Mrs. Tsugane’s small figure shrank farther into her chair, as she turned her pinked-rimmed eyes to Ogi. She licked her upper lip and the skin above it with her peach-colored tongue, which Ogi found, all over again, alluring.
“You’re basically a very serious person, aren’t you?” she asked. “Your parents are probably bemoaning the fact that, of all your brothers, you’re the one who’s gone bad and doesn’t have a decent job, but you’re still as serious as the high school boy I remember, jogging for all he was worth on the Nasu Plateau. So serious you just had to steal my panties, didn’t you?
“I understand, so let’s say goodbye. I’d like you to have a keepsake—and don’t think a new pair of panties is what you want—so I’d like to give you a brand-new cassette player. With a cassette tape, too: music that Ms. Tachibana’s younger brother composed. I listened to it a little this morning, and it made me so sad I couldn’t listen anymore. After your phone call, I had a premonition of
For about thirty minutes on the train to Shinjuku, Ogi sat with his head hanging down, but then he switched on the tape recorder and listened to the tape from the point where Mrs. Tsugane had stopped it. Each of the short pieces was made up of simple chord structures and melodies, but the music felt like the cries of a bared soul. So this is how a person lives with a mental handicap, Ogi thought, and how an unfortunate woman takes care of him all on her own. Heedless of the pair of high school girls who stared at him, Ogi felt tears coursing down his cheeks.
If Patron can make a light shine in someone like that, not just in their hearts but inside their very bodies, Ogi thought, I want to do my utmost to help him. He was crushed by a lump of grief, but even if he wasn’t aware of it at the time, at the far end of his sorrow was a ray of light, and the dark monster of his jealousy was even now in retreat.
6: Guide
1
Kizu had heard from Dancer about the separate annex in the compound where their office was located, but he’d never seen it. Almost immediately after he was released from the hospital, though, Guide let Kizu know that he’d heard about him from Patron and wanted him to come over to visit, so they set a date and time.