The reader already knows why Kizu, teaching in the art department of an American East Coast university, decided to take a sabbatical in Tokyo. The same reason accounts for his not planning a terribly strenuous schedule dur- ing his sabbatical year. The university provided housing for him in an apart- ment building that had been acquired during the Occupation, changed management several times, was rebuilt, but continued to be owned by the university. The building was not solely for the use of faculty sent by Kizu's university-Japanologists from other universities were housed there as well- but as a faculty member from the home institution, Kizu had been given priority and provided with an apartment on the top floor, a two-bedroom apartment with four rooms altogether. He made the spacious living room and dining-kitchen into one large room, setting up beyond his dining table a space that became his studio. Between these he placed a sofa and armchair, and this became the spot where he spent most of his time.
Three days later, in the morning, the young man phoned, but Kizu was con- fused for a few moments, unable to recall who he was when he gave his name.
At the athletic club, though the way he spoke and the topics he talked about were intelligent enough, one couldn't separate his voice from the forceful physicality of his brawny features. On the phone, though, his voice came across as gentle and clear.
Once the young man was in the apartment, Kizu had him sit on the sofa that formed the boundary of the studio, and he sat down on the matching arm- chair, next to which was a table on which he'd placed the reference materials.
Ikuo-the young man's name-was dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and a cotton shirt with rolled-up sleeves over it; dressed, he looked much younger than when he'd been nude in the drying room. From Ikuo's unease as soon as he entered the apartment, though, Kizu had the feeling that these nondescript clothes were not his usual style and the young man felt ill at ease in this plebeian setting.
After Ikuo began coming to Kizu's place to model for him, he explained why, on this first day, he had gazed so intently at everything around him in the apartment. The ceilings, he said, were much higher than those in his own place in Tokyo. Not just the inside of the apartment, but the elevator area and the first-floor lobby with the residents' mailboxes were larger and had a rough- hewn no-nonsense look to them. Listening to Ikuo explain his sense of in- congruity with the surroundings, Kizu understood why, in contrast, he had felt so quickly at home. The apartment was an exact replica of the faculty housing in New Jersey he'd lived in as a new instructor for seven or eight years.
With Ikuo posing questions, Kizu showed him the research materials he'd promised and talked about what he'd learned about the book of Jonah while doing research for the children's books on the Old Testament.
"These are notes I copied from a translation of a book by someone named J. M. Meyers," Kizu said. "Meyers says that Nineveh was the capital of Assyria and a very large place, though saying that 'It took three days to go all around the city' has to be an exaggeration. Still, it's estimated that the population was 174,000. The Bible says, 'There were more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well.' I realized that apart from the livestock the focus is on the children. Experts probably don't make much of this, however. In short, what God feels most sad about are the children and the livestock-the innocent. After all, the ones who have sinned are the adults.
"One other point Meyers makes is that the citizens of Nineveh are Gen- tiles. According to the words of God that Jonah conveyed, what stopped God from destroying the people of Nineveh was that these Gentiles truly repented.
Meyers says this must have been quite a shock to the Israelites, who were con- vinced they were the chosen people. The problem was, these chosen people were obstinate, while the people of Nineveh were obedient.
"The town of Tarshish that Jonah set sail for from Joppa was a port in Sardinia with a huge blast furnace-probably the farthest destination for any ship from Palestine. So Jonah was on a ship carrying steel or steel products.
Jonah thought that God's power extended only as far as the borders of the land of Israel. That makes sense, right? The storm hits the ship, and only Jonah is unperturbed. 'How can you sleep?' the captain wonders. But it's no wonder Jonah can sleep soundly. Gentiles might not understand it, but Jonah is convinced he's escaped God's wrath, which makes any storm look like the Proverbial tempest in a teacup.
"After this comes the part where he's thrown into the sea, enters the stomach of the whale, and finally goes to Nineveh. Then God's wrath is ex- plained, and it all ends, with Meyers commenting that Jonah 'wanted to re- strict God and his saving love to himself and his people. Jonah thought he had failed and would be the object of ridicule.'"
"The part about the children is interesting, isn't it," Ikuo replied in a dreamy voice, a voice etched in Kizu's memory of this first day. "This might be off the subject, but what a terrible thing it must have been to destroy the whole city of Nineveh. For us now, mightn't it be equivalent to destroying a city the size of Tokyo?"
They didn't take this thought any further. Kizu didn't have any reason to empathize with the young man's vision of the destruction of the entire population of a city like Tokyo. And from this commentary on the book of Jonah alone, he couldn't answer the question put to him in the drying room about whether the story of Jonah in the Bible is actually the whole story.
Ikuo quickly detected Kizu's confusion and neatly changed the sub- ject. Ikuo walked around the studio, looking at the sketches and oil paint- ings Kizu had begun now that he was painting again. He was clearly pleased to see the same distinctive style as that in the children's book; the color of the original paintings, he commented, is so much brighter, and looks like the use of color you find in modern American paintings. Kizu found these comments right on target. It was during this time that Ikuo proposed that if Kizu needed a nude male model he'd be happy if he'd hire him; while he was painting, Ikuo could learn more from Kizu-two birds with one stone and all that.
This decided, Kizu saw Ikuo out. This young man, he mused, might very well have already had the idea of posing in mind before he came to visit.
Still, Kizu found the same sort of faint smile he had outside the drying room once again rising to his lips.
That weekend Kizu woke up while it was still dark out. He noticed some- thing about the way he held his body in bed. Probably because he felt the cancer had spread to his liver, these days he always slept with his left elbow as a pil- low. It was a position based on a distant memory, a memory of himself at sev- enteen or eighteen, in the valley in the forest where he was born and raised, lying on the slope of a low hill. Sometimes this vision of himself appeared in dreams as a richly colored reality, Kizu seeing this as his own figure in the eternal present. And in the predawn darkness, in a dream just before waking, he returned to his eternal present body.
Kizu was at the point where his hair, to use the American expression, was salt and pepper, yet his mental image of himself was always that of this seventeen- or eighteen-year-old. Emotionally, he knew he hadn't changed much from his teen years. He was aware, quite graphically, of a grotesque disjuncture within him, a man with an over-fifty-year-old body attached to the emotions of a teenager. Kizu recalled the thirteenth canto of Dante's Inferno, the scene in which a soul on the threshold of old age picks up its own body as a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old and hangs it from some brambles.
Beginning a week later, Ikuo began posing to help Kizu with a series of tab- leaus he'd only vaguely conceived. As he drew, Kizu, influenced by what Ikuo had said that first day, lectured as he used to do in classrooms-though of course in American universities if a professor did all the talking he'd receive a terrible evaluation from the students at the end of the semester. Sometimes Kizu would respond promptly to the questions Ikuo asked as he posed; other times he gave himself until the following week to answer. Kizu recalled in particular one question from early in their sessions.