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.
The believers occupied a closed elementary school they'd converted into a residence. They numbered some forty people, mothers and children as well as single women, all living a quiet, bucolic life. Thinking he'd just check out the environment these women lived in, Kizu set off with Ikuo at the wheel of his Ford Mustang. The wooden schoolhouse was at the base of a line of low gentle hills, but three-quarters of the school grounds had been dug up and was enclosed as a large-scale plastic-covered greenhouse. Kizu and Ikuo parked their car on the road that ran along the former school grounds and set off ón foot.
In the narrow space left in front of the school building, some children were playing in a sandbox outfitted with a horizontal exercise bar, a scene that brought on a nostalgia that pierced Kizu to the quick. There were seven or eight children, upper elementary school or junior-high kids by the look of them, all oí them dressed in simple plain clothes-very different from the aggressive, gaudy colors Kizu was used to seeing each time he returned to Japan-as if a half century had been ignored and he was swept back into the colors he remembered from his childhood.
"It's like a black-and-white movie," Ikuo said.
The children played without saying a word. Ikuo strode from the path beside the greenhouse over to the sandbox, and Kizu, hesitating, followed suit.
As he got closer he noticed that the children were gazing at a line of ants in the corner of the box. Very different from the usual overbearing attitude of kids who haven't quite decided whether or not to squash a bug, tormenting it until they did, these children showed an unexpected reverence for small living creatures.
The children didn't seem on their guard at the approach of these two strangers, nor did they show any friendly interest. The older children espe- cially seemed to be purposely ignoring them. After a while Ikuo rested his hands on the horizontal bar, too low for him, and pulled himself upright on it. He tucked in his legs, pushed his elbows tight against his chest, and slowly rotated around the bar five or six times. The younger children looked at him with open admiration. Kizu, too, found himself looking with appreciative eyes at Ikuo, from his thighs to the tips of his feet, as he held his body stationary, stretched out vertically upside down. Beyond Ikuo's upside-down body, Kizu caught sight of flower petals fluttering down from the tops of hills; looking more carefully, he saw they were wet snowflakes.
Kizu remembered the scene from his hotel window high above the New York streets, snow vanishing in the air. Sometimes he wondered what he'd been thinking about that morning. Now that he considered it again, he felt that maybe he'd made this journey here to the countryside to grope for some meaningful clue. If the snow across the ocean had been a sign, this out-of- season snow here in Japan must be one too. The children were now looking up at the snowy sky. The older children stood off to one side in a clump, but even the younger kids standing close by were calm and well mannered. All of them looked entirely relaxed as they gazed up at the swirling snow.