Before Kizu left for Tokyo, a visiting scholar of Japanese literature in the East Asian studies department (with a doctorate from Tokyo University, according to his business card) said to Kizu, "Ah, so you'll be the mendicant pilgrim returning to his ancestral shores?" It was just an offhand comment and Kizu took it as a playful remark. Nevertheless, it hit home-things were much more serious than that.
Still, out of these negative prospects surrounding his impending stay in Tokyo, Kizu was able to discover one positive goal-the desire to find the boy he'd run across at the exhibition some fifteen years before, the boy so ugly you couldn't bear to look at his face, yet who'd shown a flash of aching beauty.
Kizu wanted to meet him and see how the boy's life had taken shape in the intervening years. He grasped at a prescient feeling, akin to the dialectic of dreams, that this reunion could never come to pass, yet somehow-it most definitely would.
Soon after settling into the apartment house in Akasaka owned by his U. S. university, Kizu asked an arts reporter who had come to interview him on the state of art education in America to dig up the newspaper article on the events of that day fifteen years before. Even though the reporter's news- paper had been one of the sponsors of the contest, Kizu discovered, when the reporter sent him the article on the awards ceremony-for models constructed out of the kind of plastic blocks so popular both in America and this side of the Pacific-that it was surprisingly short and matter-of-fact. It didn't even mention the name of the boy who'd destroyed his creation just before taking it onstage for the final judging. A small sidebar on the same page, though, reported on the self-sacrificing actions of the boy and the courageous stance of the young girl, who suffered while trying to keep the model from being destroyed.
Kizu called up his contact again and was able to get in touch with the reporter who'd written the sidebar. This man himself, now an executive of the newspaper company, had been curious about the boy, who of course by now was a grown man, and had tried without success to do a follow-up inter- view four or five years ago.
At the time of the contest the boy was ten years old, in fifth grade in a private elementary school; he went on to graduate from the affiliated junior and senior high schools and entered Tokyo University. Until the time he enrolled in the department of architecture there, his name was still in his high school's annual alumni directory. He hadn't responded to the questionnaire the following year, however, and the high school listed his address as un- known. Inquiries at his university revealed that the boy had voluntarily with- drawn. He hadn't been in touch with his parents for quite some time, and even though they assumed he was all right, he might very well have been liv- ing a vagrant sort of life.
On the plus side, the reporter told him he knew how to get in touch with the young girl, now also an adult. When he'd written the original sidebar, his first inclination had been to focus on the young boy, but requests for an in- terview were turned down-whether by the boy or his parents was unclear.
So the reporter based his article on what the girl told him. He'd even gotten a New Year's card from the girl's mother in Hokkaido. The card was sent a few years ago, when the girl had gone to Tokyo in hopes of becoming a dancer; if Kizu wanted to get in touch with her he could start with the residence listed on the card.
Kizu wasn't surprised to hear that the boy, with his amazing sense of the three dimensional, had studied architecture, even if only for a short time.
Kizu remembered thinking when he saw the model the boy had been carry- ing, just before one wing of it got caught up under the girl's skirt, that its whole structure-the two boomerang-shaped wings, one on top of the other-must be an architectural design for a futuristic space station.
Kizu could understand, too, how when he got older, the boy dropped out of college. What sort of youth could be more appropriate for this boy, with his frightening canine face and beautiful, expressive eyes? This was the kind of person, after all, who could smash his own creation, something so big he could barely carry it-a creation that he must have constructed over what would have seemed like an endless year.
Since his current whereabouts were unknown even to his own family, it was probably impossible to track down the young man. Still, Kizu couldn't shake the optimistic feeling that during his special year in Tokyo he would somehow run across the boy.
One other person couldn't forget that day's meeting with the boy: the young dancer who'd been impaled by the boomerang model. She had a compelling reason for never forgetting that day, for the plastic tip of the model had robbed her of her virginity. She made this discovery during the long winter of her junior year in high school in Asahikawa, where her father had been transferred. She was having sex with the PE teacher who'd been teaching her dance, and the whole operation went so smoothly the teacher got upset, thinking she must be more sexually experienced than she'd made out, though truthfully it also put him at ease. She didn't say anything to him, but she recalled that abortive awards ceremony. When she had returned home the day of the ceremony, she'd extracted a yellow thumb-size plastic piece from the crotch of her panties, a piece covered with rust-colored blood.
The young girl knew that the way the newspaper article had portrayed events-the boy sacrificing his work in order to rescue the hapless girl from her predicament-was not what really happened. According to the article, as he was about to mount the stage with his already well-received model for the final judging, the boy had boldly taken action to save the girl from pain and embarrassment. But the girl knew that, with her stage costume on, it was a simple matter for someone to lift up her skirt, roll down her underwear, and remove the plastic wing that had inconveniently wormed its way under- neath; even with all the people around, she wouldn't have been embarrassed.
The wing tip intruding on her groin had indeed been painful, but she knew that the way she held her body, uncomfortable as it had been, kept the edge of the wing from causing even more pain.
For an instant there had been an entirely different, violent kind of pain, brought on by the boy's movement in powerfully flinging down the model.
The whole thing was a kind oí attack-an intentional attack, the girl sensed, that this boy directed against himself. Frightened by its cold-blooded barbarity, the girl had burst into tears.
These three people, whose lives crossed briefly some fifteen years before, were to meet again. The story about to unfold begins with their reunion.
As the alert reader will already have noticed, up to this point the viewpoint has been that of Kizu. The eyes that saw the young boy as a small person with the musculature and symmetry of a grown man could only have been those of an artist.
PART I
1: A HUNDRED YEARS
1
Young Ogi's new acquaintances had recently dubbed him the Innocent Youth, an appellation he didn't really mind, seeing that these people, except for the young girl, were nearly his father's age. The girl, he knew at a glance, was far less innocent than himself. Ogi recalled reading about the two elderly men-Patron and Guide, as they were called-in the newspaper some ten years before; they were central characters in a scandalous religious incident they called a Somersault. From Ogi's perspective, then, they were not only participants in an episode from the past but also men still in the prime of life- though reports of the incident a decade before had portrayed them as getting on in years.
The two men's unusual names came about in the following way. At the time of the incident, when the two severed their ties with the religious organization they led, The New York Times had substituted these playful names, and the two men decided to adopt them. Later on, they created a similarly playful name for the young girl who assisted them in their life together, christening her Dancer.