The rubber swim cap he had on was one worn by swimming instructors, and just after the young man broke the surface from deep underwater Kizu had recognized him, for not many of the instructors had such a muscular build.
The tall girls gazing down into the pool were quite muscular, too, the base of their necks swelling up in an arc, interrupting the line of their shoulders. Once more the young man sank straight down beneath the water. Effortlessly, he let go of the inner wall of the pool, looked down, put his arms by his sides, and sank, leaving behind barely a ripple. And after a while, longer than one might expect, he forcefully yet quietly resurfaced, bobbing up past his shoul- ders, and took a huge gulping breath.
Soon the young man, gripping the trough that ran around the pool, lifted his face to look at Kizu; the young man didn't have goggles on, and his face showed nothing of the heightened vitality one might expect after such exer- tion. He completely ignored the young girls. His forehead was like a turtle's, the eyes sunken, the nose wide, lips full; the flesh down to his chin was like taut leather, the chin itself quite manly. Kizu thought he had never seen a Japanese with a face like this before, though it was most definitely of Mongo- lian stock: a fierce face yet one that looked, overall, refined. And from this very masculine face large eyes gazed out, a gaze that made Kizu feel he was being stared at by an obstinate woman.
Walking away, Kizu felt agitated. The wisdom gained with age allowed him to avoid trying to pin down this nameless unease; Kizu realized that di- verting his attention was a better course of action. After this, whenever he saw the young man leading an adult swimming class, a disquiet jolted him, and he averted his eyes.
The first time Kizu spoke to the young man was in the athletic club's so-called drying room. Things changed quickly at this club, with a third of the train- ing equipment, for instance, being replaced within the first six months after Kizu joined. Still, there was one place that was clearly a holdover from the past, a dim room about fifteen by eighteen feet that had just one small door and, in the middle, an elliptical wooden enclosure, in complete contrast to the ultramodern facilities on the other floors of the club. Inside the enclosure, dark stones were piled up and heated, like a sauna. In fact it was a kind of sauna room, though kept at a lower temperature than the modern saunas next door to the public baths.
Members sat on wide two-tiered wooden levels, leaning back against the unpainted wooden wall, drying their chilled bodies after swimming.
Children in the swimming school, of course, used the drying room, but vet- eran members plopped themselves down on oversized yellow towels and sweated in the room before they went swimming, loosening up their muscles this way instead of doing warm-up exercises.
The first time the young man spoke to Kizu, the two of them, as long- time members were wont to do, were already stretched out for some time in the darkened drying room. In the dull light, Kizu didn't realize that the per- son lying down in the far corner was this young man because-no doubt to increase the amount he sweated-he was completely wrapped in a towel from his head on down, with just his knees and the lower half of his legs sticking out.
Kizu had been in the drying room for quite some time when seven or eight young girls in their late teens took over the upper and lower tiers on the right side, directly opposite the entrance. The girls chattered away boister- ously; Kizu was already aware that they were members of the swim team at a Catholic girls high school. They were discussing the program they were preparing for their school's festival, based on the book of Jonah. They were already in a lively mood as they voiced their opinions and complaints in loud voices. One small girl, apparently an underclassman, spoke out in an espe- cially conspicuous way.
"We're the swim team," she complained, "so we should have been allowed to do the scenes where Jonah's thrown into the water, or where he's spit up from the whale's belly and swims to shore. But Sister's script has us doing the part in the storm where Jonah's grilled by all the sailors, and where he builds that hut on the outskirts of Nineveh and complains to God. What's a castor oil plant, anyway? Sounds pretty weird to me! We have to construct the set without even knowing what it looks like!"
Kizu finally spoke up. It had been through the auspices of the girls' swim coach, also an instructor of art and design, that Kizu had been introduced to the athletic club and joined for a year, and the girls had surely heard from their coach about his work in the United States.
Kizu told them how he had done the illustrations for a children's ver- sion of Bible stories. As part of his research for the book, he traveled to the Middle East, where he saw actual castor oil plants growing. "Come here this time next week," Kizu told them, "and I'll bring a colored sketch for you to look at. In the book of Jonah," he went on, "the castor oil plant is an impor- tant minor prop-no, maybe a major prop-expressing God's love." The stu- dents welcomed his proposal.
This decided, the occupying force of girls, their clumsy attempts at working up a good sweat over, left the drying room with hearty farewells more befitting an athletic meet. A jostle of muscular legs was visible just outside the cloudy heat-resistant glass of the door's window.
At this point the young man, oversized towel heavy with sweat wrapped around his waist, spoke up, his voice different from the times Kizu had over- heard it in the club.
"Professor, you seem to be quite well versed in the Bible."
Kizu was seated on the lower tier, in the back left-hand corner, the young man on the upper tier directly facing him. Perhaps not wanting to look down on Kizu, the young man clambered down to the lower tier and turned his face, the same color as a boiled crab's shell, toward Kizu, who replied, "Not at all-it's just as I told the girls. It's not like I attend church."
"I was about to tell the girls, but in the bookshelf in the third-floor mem- bers' lounge there's a copy of your children's book," the young man said. "The club's Culture Society collects and displays books written by the club's mem- bers. When I was a child-and until much later, in fact-I was amazed at how realistically people and objects are depicted in Renaissance paintings, and I find your illustrations in the children's book very similar. Children find this espe- cially appealing, I imagine. When I read your book, I could get a clear picture of how big Nineveh was and what the boat that went to Tarshish looked like."
The artist found the young man's observations interesting-since Kizu was young at the time he did these illustrations he'd been very conscious of his painting style, insisting on its anachronistic character-but what most impressed him was the young man's way of talking. Kizu recalled a certain Mexican stage actor with unusual looks. You would normally expect anyone aware that they had such extraordinary features to be a bit more reticent.
Kizu was silent and the young man went on. "I'm not a Christian either.
But ever since I was a child, the book of Jonah has bothered me."
"Since you've read my children's book it's obvious to you," Kizu said, "that I made the book of Jonah the centerpiece of the project."
"If I went to a church," the young man went on, "I'm sure I could hear a detailed explanation, but I don't get on well with clergy, so I've never found an answer to my concerns."