Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
This letter contained details that Ikuo found hard to talk about that day in the chapel especially since all this became the basis for a turnabout in Ikuo’s life. Even as an outside observer Ogi could sense, in this visit to the Hollow, how much Ikuo had gone through in a year’s time, and this made him realize how in his own past year with Mrs. Tsugane he too had changed.
After Ikuo and Ogi had talked together for nearly an hour, Gii came over to the space heater with Fred and said that he and the Fireflies had to do some snow removal so he’d await their visit in the afternoon, and left the chapel alone. Fred seemed to be dying to tell Ikuo something about what he and Gii had discussed, so Ogi left his talk with Ikuo for later.
Ikuo spoke in English with Fred. The type of English they spoke—Fred’s, of course, but also Ikuo’s, who had been bilingual since childhood—was not the type of English Ogi was used to hearing. But once the conversation had settled down on track and he retrospectively picked up on what they’d said and outlined their conversation in his notebook, he was able to follow the general drift.
At first Fred seemed to be sounding out Ikuo, holding some mysterious trump card in reserve. Repeatedly he asked Ikuo whether there’d been any changes in Gii’s way of thinking or his actions since the summer conference. At last night’s discussion, everyone seemed to take it for granted that Gii was going to be the successor to the Church of the New Man. But wasn’t Gii just being pushed forward like some automaton? After Patron’s death, among those influential in the church, the hard-line remnants of the radical faction left the Farm together with Mr. Hanawa, and the police and the media had sounded a warning about allowing the Technicians who remained to hold any power in the church. Wasn’t the way the church dealt with this—having a young boy like Gii as the front man—just a smoke screen?
Ogi couldn’t catch all of what Ikuo replied in English, not because he spoke too quickly but because of the content. Still, he could tell that Ikuo, very
patiently and meticulously, was responding to Fred’s provocative questions. But what really remained with Ogi was the change in Ikuo since they’d last met. He’d swept away the dangerous instability of old, the rebelliousness and negativism, the violence that even he himself couldn’t control. Very clearly Ikuo was Yonah no more.
Since the summer conference finale ended as it did, Ikuo said, Gii and the Fireflies, who were deeply involved, were naturally shaken. Especially Gii, who showed his own unique reaction to events. He was furious that the performance with which the Fireflies had planned to wrap up the summer conference was upstaged by Patron’s and Ikuo’s plans. The reconciliation began only when Ikuo explained to the Fireflies how at the very last minute Patron had turned the tables on him.
After this, nestling up close to where Gii’s thoughts took him, Ikuo opened up an even deeper dialogue with the boys. The first thing Gii said was this: His principle for living was to deny defeatism. In this point he evaluated Patron’s church more highly than Former Brother Gii’s Base Movement or the Church of the Flaming Green Tree. But in the end wasn’t Patron the most defeatist of all? He didn’t seriously ever plan to set up and run a church here in the Hollow. Instead, didn’t he just use this whole thing as a public spectacle to finally do what he couldn’t at the time of the Somersault—commit suicide? “I find it hard to forgive him for using our legend of the Spirit Festival the way he did,” Gii said.
But Ikuo patiently went on explaining things and finally Gii and the others admitted that, yes, before Patron had the idea of committing suicide at the finale of the summer conference, they’d been able to carry out the Spirit Festival, with Guide’s spirit included, and that performing this Spirit Festival in front of so many people from all over the country was the plan they themselves had so strenuously pushed forward. And it was true that Patron, when he felt he had no other way out and reluctantly made use of the Spirit Festival, did it in a way that showed great respect for the Spirits.
As for defeatism, since Patron actually did commit suicide I can’t defend him, Ikuo went on, but can’t you young people be a little more generous? Consider this: When people who’ve passed a certain age think about how they can wind up their affairs as best they can—and you could see in Patron’s final sermon the effort he made to do this—and then commit suicide, this suicide may be just like the heroic but miserable and comic suicide of the African Cato that Patron spoke of, a variation of an honest and real effort at life.
It was Patron’s fervent hope to build his Church of the New Man here, in this land. And hasn’t that been accomplished? The Quiet Women were
bent on their own plan to take the cyanide, but look at them now—they’ve accepted Patron’s final request and are doing their utmost to help run things at the Hollow. There’s no hint now of something happening like with American cultists who all want to make a beeline to heaven en masse. These women have an experienced, healthy, realistic view of things and have developed a good relationship with the local women. Right now they’re so close they go off together to the Mountain Stream Where Twenty-five Refined Ladies Shat and have a good time together picking butterbur.
It’s true the Technicians split in half, and one faction left. But the other faction stayed, abandoned the agreements made by the leaders of the Technicians before the summer conference, and formulated a new policy of full cooperation with the church. Aren’t the Technicians friendlier and nicer to us and to each other than ever before? Look at the way we’re working together to teach you and the other Fireflies.
After listening to these details, Fred asked a question. “With the Church of the New Man starting off as it did, the position of leader, Patron’s replacement, is vacant. And everyone—the office staff, the Quiet Women, and, more strongly than anyone else, according to Dr. Koga, the Technicians—agrees that Gii will assume that responsibility. How did
this
happen?”
Ikuo fielded this one. What Patron built is the Church of the New Man, so doesn’t it make the most sense for those who lead to be the ones who have, in many senses of the word, the greatest possibility of
becoming
New Men?
After hesitating to ask again the reason why Ikuo didn’t see himself as that kind of person, Fred asked, “Do you really believe young Gii is the right person to be the leader of the church?” And for the first time, Fred revealed his trump card.
In their little tête-à-tête in the corner it was obvious that Gii had been pestering Fred about something, which turned out to be whether Fred knew of any GI group in Okinawa or on the mainland that sold contraband machine guns out of the bases. Once he got hold of these high-powered weapons, Gii said, he’d have some Americans who fought in Vietnam train the Fireflies in their use. If they reinforced the ceiling of this chapel with steel sheets and the armed Fireflies holed up inside, they should be able, for a while at least, to hold off an attack by the riot police and military helicopters.
As if he were re-creating a battle scene from a Coppola movie, Gii described the Fireflies battling it out from their chapel stronghold—all the while making sure that everything he was saying was off the record. “I just want you to understand,” Gii went on, “when you talk with those groups I mentioned earlier, the level of resolve the Fireflies have as a part of the Church of the New Man. We’re ready to take on Japan and the world!”
Gii was very much drawn to the same concept of a postinsurrection millennial reign of repentance that the Izu radical faction had had before the Somersault, something that people now knew was clearly different from the Aum concept of a self-centered Armageddon. Having an insurrection lead straight to the end of the world, to nothing but death, was a defeatist attitude. “Through an insurrection based on using the Church of the New Man as our foundation,” Gii told Fred, “I want to make the millennial reign of repentance a
reality
. Even in the European idea of the millennium, a millennial reign isn’t seen as such an impossibly long time. If we turn the chapel into a fortress with the weapons that spill out of the American military bases—even if we only hold out for ten days—our call for repentance will reach the ends of the earth. We’ve already started our own Web page. And the memory of what we do, like that of He Who Destroys and Meisuke-san’s uprising, will remain forever in the realm of myth. The next New Men who arise will carry on where we left off. In other words, through the Church of the New Man we will become one with the legends of this land.”
“What do you think about these ideas of Gii’s?” Fred asked Ikuo. “You still plan to hand the church over to him?”
“Since more than anything else Gii hates a defeatist attitude,” Ikuo responded, “he won’t rashly start an insurrection. For the longest time I’ve been mulling over Patron’s final words in his sermon—the call of
Long live Karamazov!
When Dancer was going through Patron’s effects, she found a dog-eared copy of the novel with the following commentary circled in red pencil. I read this over so many times I can quote it verbatim:
“Not just Aloysha, who thirteen years hence is supposed to be crucified for being an assassin of the Tsar, but the lustful Dimitri, who carries the burden of a crime he didn’t commit, as well as the Grand Inquisitor Ivan, who cries out in his thirst for life—all of them make a complete change from their positions and reach the sublime at the chorus of shouts from the boys of
‘Long live Karamazov!
’”
Ikuo translated this very deliberately into English. After this, when he spoke next, Ogi felt he was seeing the Ikuo of old, as if a bizarre, out-of-control Yonah had removed his mask. And what he remembered later with unusual clarity was the strong feeling that Ikuo had a beauty not in keeping with his face—no, more accurately even his face was part of this now. Yet despite this he was someone who might very well be Ogi’s lifelong adversary.
All the while, a faint smile rose to Ikuo’s lips,
inscrutable
but quite the opposite of the meaningless smile that Japanese display when talking with
foreigners—the adjective that Fred used when, days later, he was going over with Ogi his notes of his conversation with Ikuo—and Ikuo said that when Patron shouted out
Long Live Karamazov!
he had to have been thinking of those here, the Japanese version of young men full of possibilities for the future.
“No matter what frightening things the young people in the church do over the next ten or fifteen years,” Ikuo continued, “as long as they’re New Men I’m not going to drive them out. I imagine that from now on Gii will, in both what he says and does, be the one who fluctuates the most violently, but right now in the church he’s our number-one New Man. I want to educate him to be the one who shouts
Long live Karamazov!
and succeeds the dead. I want to raise him up in our church—and
outside
it, too.”
Days later, when he was reviewing his conversation with Ikuo, Fred Parks asked Ogi whether, on that day in the chapel, Gii and Ikuo hadn’t planned out all their answers ahead of time—at Gii’s instigation, mainly—and were pulling his leg. But Ogi was less inclined to think about that than the crystal-clear memory he had of Ikuo that day—a memory that in later years often came back to haunt him.
4
On his final day Kizu had clearly been growing weaker, but he had his pillows piled up high on his bed and, with the lightweight opera glasses Mr. Soda had brought over as a gift when he came to visit, was gazing at the wild cherry blossoms on the east shore. Ikuo had been watching over him all night, and Dancer had joined them. The night before was a full moon with only a thin scattering of clouds, and Kizu had tried to view the cherries in the moonlight but couldn’t see them so well, he said. Checking to see that he’d be all right for a few moments, Ikuo had walked down to below the dam where Gii and some of the Fireflies were parked and asked them to take care of something.
Gii had uncoiled a long line they’d used in the summer conference from a covered outlet at the foot of the outside wall of the chapel and shone a floodlight on the wild cherries on the jutting crags where the bilberries grew. Ikuo was happy that the attempt was a success. But Kizu had been too worn out to lift his head from his pillow.
With no way for Ikuo to signal Gii and the Fireflies by the crags, the young men could do nothing but remain standing next to the floodlight. Concerned about how things were turning out, Kizu fell into a comalike sleep for ten minutes, then opened his eyes and asked three times whether the floodlights were still lit. Ikuo looked out at the moonlit ink-colored forest and the
cherry blossoms looming up palely in the floodlight and said yes. With the dark gray of the grove of cherry trees just outside the ring of light, the whole scene was one of great depth. But since there was no way they could even get Kizu’s head raised up to look out a little, Ikuo asked if he’d like the curtains closed, to which Kizu responded in a listless, muffled voice—Dancer had skillfully helped him get up the phlegm—that it wasn’t good to keep the young boys out there if they were still standing by the crags.
As the moon shifted, the surface of the lake was thrown into dark shadows and Kizu awoke from a lengthy sleep and asked Ikuo to pose for him. Dancer acted shocked, thinking Kizu was hallucinating and thought he was painting, but Ikuo knew differently. An easel stood next to the bed, with one of the drawings Kizu had done for the triptych, a sketch of a nude Ikuo he particularly liked. Ikuo stripped off his clothes and struck the same pose. Slowly tilting his head on the pillow, Kizu gazed intently at him.
“Can they see you from the crags?” Kizu asked, somewhat embarrassedly, his voice again muffled.
“Even if they can, Gii and the others don’t have binoculars,” Ikuo replied.
“Can that. . . stand up, do you think?”
Ikuo looked down. It came to him what Kizu wanted, but he couldn’t think of what to do about it. Quick-witted, Dancer got up out of the low chair, moved forward and got to her knees, held Ikuo’s penis directly against her lips, and then put it inside her mouth. The penis immediately rose up magnificently, and with the momentum as she drew her open mouth back, glistening with a line of saliva, it smacked once against her small nose. Kizu, breathing lightly, watched all this.