After he met Ikuo again, Kizu had remembered a paper presented at a symposium his institute had sponsored that used as its text etchings based on old French prints depicting the stages through which a human face evolves out of wild animals' muzzles. When he first heard this presentation, show- ing how the cruelest of human faces developed from the line that began with the muzzle of a bear, Kizu had thought of the young boy carrying his plastic model. However, the bear-man's eyes were sunken and expressionless, while the young man's, equally sunken, had been full of suggestive feeling.
Kizu gazed steadily at his young friend. Ikuo sensed he was being looked at, stood up, threw his robe aside on the chair he'd been sitting on, and laid his naked suntanned body on the sofa. He spread his legs wide and beckoned to Kizu with a shy look. Though he was sunk back deep on the sofa, his long bountiful penis was clearly visible, already raising its head. Kizu went off to the bathroom first. Ikuo seemed ready to thank him for his help in bringing him together with the girl and Patron. Still, though, as he stood there, touch- ing his own penis, which was already so hard he could barely get it out of his pants, Kizu allowed himself a feeling of unalloyed pleasure.
In the afternoon, after Ikuo had gone home, Kizu was cutting his nails in the sunny spot beside the wide glass sliding doors. As he clipped the fourth toe of his right foot, he thought unexpectedly that it was like some good little beetle larva dug up from a mound of fallen leaves, very different from the other toes.
The toe of his left foot, he found, was exactly the same. He'd lived with these toes for over half a century. Why was it only now that he found them so funny?
Thinking it over, he paused in his clipping. It wasn't that his powers of observation were fading, but rather-as the last vestiges of youth disappeared from every corner of his body-that his toes had really begun Xochange. These are the toes, he thought, of someone whose cancer is back, who's going to end up an elderly corpse. If it hadn't been for his sexual relationship with Ikuo, though, he never would have noticed.
On Saturday, Kizu attended an international awards ceremony for a Japanese architect who had, during Kizu's time in the United States, garnered a worldwide reputation. He thought about inviting Ikuo, the former archi- tecture student, but the girl they'd met had asked him to take care of some- thing for her and he wouldn't be back until evening, so Kizu went alone.
Arriving at the hotel in Shimbashi, he found that only those involved in the actual ceremony were dressed formally, and he felt out of place in his tuxedo.
There were no other familiar faces at the party, either, and Kizu's relation- ship with the architect himself was superficial. When he had given a public lecture at the architecture department at Kizu's university, Kizu had served as discussant when the architect showed slides of the art museum he'd de- signed in Los Angeles.
Kizu greeted the architect and his wife and made an early retreat from the reception; next to the escalator, he ran across an American newspaper reporter he knew who wrote about the arts and architecture. The man, an old acquaintance, was also decked out in a tuxedo, and Kizu called out to him, kidding him he was going to stand out dressed like that. The reporter had been invited to a small dinner alter the ceremony, but decided to bow out, instead inviting Kizu, whom he hadn't seen in a long time, out for a chat. He led Kizu to a basement-level bar, and they settled in at the counter.
They'd just finished one glass of white wine each and were about to order another when the reporter's long-winded commentary on architecture connected up with the religious leader the girl was working for. It all started when the reporter mentioned an extraordinary place he ran across in the for- ests of Shikoku.
'The area is like a solitary island," he said, "in the hills about a two-hour drive from the airport. Makes you feel like you're being shown around the remnants of Japanese mythology. You arrive at this dead end with a sea of trees blocking the way. And in a village of fifteen hundred souls, can you believe it, there's an ultramodern chapel and dormitory!
Makes you wonder how there could be such large new buildings in a depopulated mountain village. What happened was a new religion arose in the village, and they hired one of Japan 's leading architects to build a head- quarters. But the new religion broke up and disappeared. The village didn't know what to do. They tried to find someone to take over the chapel for them.
Then they came up with a plan to convert it to a village junior high school, but that would have been too expensive, so it came to nothing. I suppose they wanted to keep the headquarters building as it was, since it was designed by such a famous architect.
"Finally a different religious organization expressed interest in the building, a group with a really unusual background. The Tokyo correspon- dent for The New York Times told me that"-at this point Kizu could guess what was coming-"ten years ago the two leaders had renounced their faith.
They denounced all their own teachings, which was apparently a major shock!
The religious organization itself, though, kept on going, with quite a few believers still involved. Followers who left the church maintained their own divisions, ranging from a group of radical revolutionaries to a co-op of gentle Quaker-like women. Sort of an interesting case-and not very Japanese, when you think about it.
"Right now the activities of this church center around another head- quarters, in the Kansai region, where they've kept their name and religious foundation status. Most of the followers work in Osaka or Kobe and donate their pay, minus a small amount for living expenses, so they were able to purchase this chapel. And during the last ten years they completed the dor- mitory, according to the architect's original plans. Some Japanese certainly don't give up, do they?
"The religious organization, though, hasn't moved to this chapel and dorm. Small groups of them visit, staying in the monastery, which is what they call the dorm, and praying in the chapel. They also work for a week, taking care of the building and grounds, before they leave.
"I paid a visit to the building's caretaker, a local woman, and asked if these poor little lost sheep, whose leaders had renounced the faith, still be- lieve that the beloved pair will make a comeback. Her answer took me to- tally by surprise. (The old lady, by the way, was born in the village but spoke better English than the interpreter I brought with me.) 'Outsiders to the church, myself included, don't really understand this,' she said, 'but when believers pray in the chapel and raise their eyes upward, they say they see the souls of the two former leaders, separated from their suffering bodies so far away, hovering up in the air.' It's gotta be true-'cause how else can you ex- plain their keeping the faith for ten years after their leaders denied it?"
Kizu didn't let on that he'd just met a girl who worked for these two former leaders. The reporter, for his part, didn't go into much detail about this place with the modern buildings. The caretaker, afraid that tourist buses might start showing up, was wary of outsiders coming to visit. Through an introduction from an architecture journal, the reporter was able to view the inside of the chapel, but the woman never left his side and made sure he didn't take any photos.
Kizu, of course, had himself originally learned of the savior and the prophet of the end time through an interesting article in The New York Times.
The leaders' renunciation, their Somersault, he imagined, must have left an indelible impression on the two thousand or more followers they left behind, but even now, after meeting the young woman who worked for them, he couldn't shake the notion that it was all rather comical.
After hearing this reporter's story of how the abandoned followers had worked hard to collect enough money to buy and add on to the building, however, the story of this church took on a sharpened sense of reality. These leaders must really be something extraordinary, to motivate their followers so highly after they'd abandoned them.