Faith tangled up in reality

A heraldic first line of jacket copy announces that “Somersault” is Kenzaburo Oe’s “first new novel ... since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature” and goes on to describe the novel’s 570 extraordinarily dense pages as “a magnificent story of the charisma of leaders, the danger of zealotry, and the mystery of faith.” If this reviewer can’t quite sign on to the thumbnail characterization, she can also hardly fault its anonymous writer. No significant concept in “Somersault” -- and there are a great many -- lets itself be caught for an instant resting in a single definition or attitude.

Earlier (and by the way, shorter) Oe novels such as “The Silent Cry,” “A Personal Matter” and “Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids” have become, simply put, modern classics, thanks to the author’s ability to mire a thoroughly individual, flawed yet sympathetic character in a nightmarish dilemma that twists and tightens despite the character’s desperate efforts to escape. In other words, Oe is a master of the somewhat sadistic stock-in-trade of any accomplished novelist.

Up until the caesura of the Nobel Prize, the aspect of Oe’s fiction that most often inspired criticism and admiration was not any lack of novelistic substance. Instead, debate centered on the “appropriateness” of his unadorned self-display, on the extent to which his fiction has drawn on crucial, intimate events from his life. In the highly acclaimed “A Personal Matter,” for example, the protagonist, Bird, is a young married man who flees the horrible reality of the birth of a severely brain-damaged son by going on a nihilistic binge of beer and casual sex, abandoning mother and child. In a much later novel, “Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age,” the narrator is the literary, middle-aged father of a mentally and physically handicapped teenager who has an uncanny musical gift, who dominates the household and is adored and feared. Oe is the father of a hydrocephalic son, who from the depths of a seemingly autistic state has composed music played and recorded by professional artists.

Fully fledged novel or not, does “Somersault” follow this method of self-scrutiny through fiction, which has become so closely associated with Oe’s oeuvre? On first examination: How could it?

The tale arrives mainly through the viewpoint of Professor Kizu, a single, childless painter and art educator with a deeply Japanese sensibility. Diagnosed with colon cancer, Kizu has returned from a college position in the States to reexperience Japan in the brief span remaining him. Kizu, although passionate and empathetic, is resolutely a man of inaction; his role in life, as in the story, is that of an observer.

The prime movers are as improbable a pair as you’d hope to encounter, even on the religious fringe: Patron (formerly the Saviour), a roly-poly old guy given to wrenching, deep-trance visions of the other side, and Guide (formerly the Prophet), a Don Quixote sans irony, the only person who can interpret Patron’s post-transcendental mutterings. The acrobatic flip of the title refers to Patron and Guide’s televised apostasy from their self-founded faith, upon discovering (a decade before the novel opens) that a subgroup of their sect was preparing to detonate a nuclear reactor in order to hasten the End. Although the denial of faith succeeded in foiling the suicide attack, it unleashed a virulent public debate, led to the pair’s ridicule and isolation (“We

Into this sad inertia breaks a forceful catalyst, Ikuo: a man of “rugged features reminding Kizu of Blake’s portrait of a youthful Los, likened to the Sun.” A loner in quest of God’s once-heard voice, at least a generation younger than the others but old in his heart, the saturnine Ikuo soon becomes male model and amour fou of heretofore-straight Kizu. When Ikuo brings Kizu and Patron together, the modest painter is proclaimed the new Guide. Patron’s messianic energies revive, but in a sort of theological double-twist he insists there will be no recanting of “the Somersault.” Instead he tells the eager, gathered remnants of his flock that he is the antichrist -- a concept that for him has much to do with the painful freedom of imagination -- and that his future mission will be “the church of the antichrist”:

“ ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Patron began again, ‘ ... I’m planning to begin a new movement.... The basic idea is that God is the totality of nature that created this world. Living a life of faith for us means being accurately and fully aware of this fact.... At the time of the Somersault, what was at work inside me was ... another theology just starting to sprout.... Nature that makes up the totality of the planet is falling apart.... God is terminally ill.

’ ... We have the right to stand up to God and say this wasn’t part of his plan! ... The ones ... who destroyed the natural world, who destroyed God and gave him an incurable disease, are none other than mankind itself.... Now -- dragging the Somersault along with me -- here I stand. And I have decided to restart my movement focusing on leading people to this kind of repentance.’ ”

That there is a great deal of this sort of talk and sermonizing in “Somersault,” circling such concepts as redemption, salvation, faith and miracles, does not surprise in a serious and morally inflamed writer’s all-out effort to capture the ineffable. Nonetheless it can be taxing for the reader. Patron’s followers are of sturdier stuff, however. The old factions come together, new acolytes sign on, wealthy benefactors emerge and the rapidly burgeoning movement, soon to be named the Church of the New Man, relocates to the remote island of Shikoku, to an age-old holy site where there is “power in the land.” Once miracle cures and stigmata materialize, the fanned flames of faith burn higher still. Thanks to the efforts of Ikuo even the wayward youth of the region are drawn in. The New Man Church is nothing if not syncretic -- enthusiastic effort is devoted to the creative revival of ancient customs, such as a children’s torch-parade into the hills, bearing the souls of the recently deceased.

Ominously for the faithful, however, their increasing visibility happens to follow closely on the “subway gassing” mass murder violence of the Aum Shinrikyo sect. Skepticism and mistrust abound, among sophisticated journalists and the country folk. Pressure on the church builds -- not only through external criticism, but also rising from unhealed wounds from the Somersault time, and not least, the continued “somersaulting” in Patron’s body and mind.

In the book there is an irreal, out-of-focus quality to this whole string of events -- not so much blurred as jiggled, as when someone shakes the camera. The deliberate, flat tone warns off any questions about likelihood or verisimilitude. It is in this distancing that “Somersault” is least like Oe’s previous novels, and least novel-like, and most like a dazzling illustration of the principles of the dialectic, carried to the uttermost limits: to the erotic nimbus surrounding death, to the very nature of God. Yet, when the metaphysical strain gives way to plain reality, as in the scrupulously drawn love scenes between Kizu and Ikuo, then a view, a phrase, a person springs alive.

And what of personal experience? It permeates these pages. On Shikoku (Oe’s birthplace), Patron is befriended by a child, Mario, who is a brain-damaged musical prodigy. Oe’s anti-militarist, anti-global-capitalist engagement is well-known, and he has spoken elsewhere (in a letter exchange with Edward Said) of the traumatic death of a close friend, a “spiritual guide,” of colon cancer. Finally, there is the understated, often wry insight of an artist of a certain age: “After the ‘miracle’ of his cancer disappearing, after completion of the triptych, Kizu became aware of a harsh reality: He had a massive amount of time left to live.”