Kizu had published a paper once in the university bulletin on women's faces in ukjyoe prints, classifying them as unassuming plain types and demoness types, and he was once again drawn to this woman and her classic features.
The next semester she didn't sign up for Kizu's seminar, but one day when there was still snow on the campus she showed up at his office dur- ing lunch break; she explained that one of the male students was bothering her, which is why she couldn't attend his seminar, but she had some of her own artwork in her apartment that she'd like to show him, she said, invit- ing him with a modesty quite unlike her previous outburst. Kizu happened to be free that afternoon, so he went with her in her Citroën to her place, where she lived with a roommate; Kizu was surprised to find it was an apartment in the center of town, outfitted with a concierge. The living room and kitchen weren't so big, but on the ceiling of her bedroom was a tem- pera painting in arabesque style of flowers and birds she'd done herself, which meant that even if she hadn't purchased the apartment she was liv- ing there under a long-term lease. Her roommate was out on a date until late, so Kizu enjoyed the chirashizushi she prepared for him and looked over several tableaus. These also depicted birds and flowers. Kizu sat on the cloth- covered sofa while the young woman sat in front of him on the floor, hold- ing the paintings she wanted to show him, dressed in a black wool outfit with a short skirt that revealed her fleshy thighs, though he pretended not to notice.
That was all that happened. Soon after, Kizu happened to be in New York City, and since the university had been unable to procure a model for him, he stopped by an adult store to buy a video so he could get an eyeful of young black and Hispanic men. He spied a three-pack of condoms for sale in a box near the register, mixed in with aphrodisiacs and sex toys, and bought it. But the woman never invited him back to view her artwork.
The particulars in the sexual harassment charge were these: First, that he came over to her apartment on a night her roommate was out, saying he'd take a look at her paintings; second, having carelessly mentioned the paint- ing on her bedroom ceiling, she was forced to show it to him; third, he made a suggestive joke about the uncensored book of ukjyoe prints she had on a bookshelf; fourth, as Kizu sat on the sofa, he looked at her inner thighs as she crouched on the floor in front of him; and fifth, during this time, he intended her to see that something was coming alive in his trousers.
As Kizu sat opposite the head of his research institute, he not only had to read the e-mails the young woman had submitted, he had to listen to the tape recording she'd secretly made of their conversation that night.
Kizu was so deflated that the institute head, who at first had had a fret- ful look on her face, burst out laughing; listening to Kizu's constrained way of talking on the tape, she said, and the woman's relaxed voice, he hardly came across as overly macho.
In fact, what really gave Kizu a shock was how pitifully immature he sounded. He was seeing himself as a precocious child talking with adults about grown-up topics, the tape mercilessly revealing how, deep down, he hadn't matured at all since those early postwar days back in his home village.
If that fidgety middle-aged character on the tape had had an ounce of courage and propositioned the woman, Kizu knew he would have been turned down flat. Suddenly, sitting there in front of the institute head, Kizu found a new self springing up, a new Kizu who acted as he never would have before.
He admitted that everything the young woman had listed had probably taken place, agreed he was in the wrong as far as what she'd interpreted as sexual harassment, and announced his decision to resign his teaching position.
The head of the institute, originally sympathetic, now turned indignant.
As Kizu left her office, the feeling struck him that he had come back to the university from Tokyo for the sole purpose of receiving this punishment, and he said to himself, silently, I've done an act of repentance1.
A second event awaited Kizu in America, one that took place in the hotel he was staying at in New York the night before his flight back to Tokyo. That morning Kizu woke with his usual uncomfortable feeling in his gut, exhausted from having forced himself to get back to sleep any number of times. In order to suppress what this exhaustion had triggered-the headlong rush of his mind into darkness-one of the pieces of wisdom he'd picked up in his advancing old age was that it was best to get up and get his body moving.
So Kizu got up out of bed, as if hurrying off somewhere, and went into the sitting room of his hotel suite, a room partitioned off simply from the bedroom by a white-framed door with a square mirror set on it--the Japanese owner had come up with double-door construction, which had proved quite popular, according to what Kizu had heard from a woman in a painting class for expatriate Japanese he used to teach. Beyond the cur- tain, which he'd left open the night before, a seventy-story high-rise build- ing with a green-and-white crown structure on top blocked his view. Below a broad layer of clouds that covered the sky, darker clouds moved, and a fine rain was falling. The raindrops fell a long, long way down. What would it look like if it snowed? Kizu wondered. And just then he discovered that it was snowing, fine flakes swirling in the air. This wasn't a particularly remarkable scene. The snow lacked force, as if it might peter out at any moment. But Kizu saw in the movements of his heart and the appearance of the snow a synchronicity he took as a sign. Inside his chest he felt some- thing, like a bulb sprouting.
Two men-one given the suspicious name Savior, the other called Prophet, abandoned their followers, did a Somersault, and for ten years lan- guished in what they termed hell. And now one of them was restarting a movement calling on people to repent: to make them deeply aware of, and prepared for, the end of the world.
He and Ikuo had joined the movement. And now Kizu had even settled his estate and given up his job. But hadn't this duo of Patron and Guide misunderstood their roles? The real Patron was actually Guide, who'd been taunted by his former followers and tortured until he died an agonizing death. The surviving Patron had been nothing but a puppet, a springboard for Guide's mystical philosophy. Didn't this account for the awful shock that Guide's misfortune and death brought on?
If that were true, it meant the new movement they were starting was without a leader, only this person called Patron and himself, a makeshift new Guide without the least hint of mysticism about him. Bereft of their true leader, they weren't even able to comprehend the meaning of Guide's sacri- fice and could only stagger about pointlessly.
The snow had stopped. The flakes had fallen past the fortieth floor, where Kizu stood, but by street level had changed to rain. With the blanket of clouds lightening and the darker clouds gone, the rain, too, seemed about to clear up. To the left of the narrow building directly across from him there was a smaller building, clouds of steam rising from it, beyond which he could see the trees in Central Park, with their fresh spring foliage. Moving his eyes as if following along with a soft-tipped watercolor brush, Kizu continued to gaze at the clumps of leaves propped up by the young, uncertain trunks of the trees.
12: INITIATION OF NEW BELIEVERS
1
The reporter who covered the memorial service press conference had sent Kizu a fax telling him where to find a group of women believers who had left the church after the Somersault and were now living a communal life in the southwest part of Kanagawa Prefecture. So on a Saturday after- noon near the end of April, Kizu set off for this suburban bedroom commu- nity, one that still had a scattering of rice fields, about an hour from Shinjuku on the Odakyu express train.