Free Somersault by Kenzaburō Ōe

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 something 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 pillow. It was a position based on a distant memory, a memory of himself at seventeen 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 tableaus 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.
    “Last time,” Kizu said, “you asked me what it means for a person to be free. I think I struggled with the same question when I was young. So I gave it some thought. An anecdote I once read about a painter came to mind.
    “In order to give you an idea of how I understand it, I need to give you another example, not from some book I read but a quote I heard from a colleague of mine who teaches philosophy, which is: A circle in nature and the concept of a circle within God are the same, they just manifest themselves differently.
    “The anecdote took place during the Renaissance, when an official in charge of choosing an artist to paint a mammoth fresco requested one particular artist (an artist I was quite taken with when I was young) to submit a work that best displayed his talents. The response of the artist—which became famous—was to submit a single circle he had drawn.
    “An artist draws a circle with a pencil. And that circle fits perfectly with the concept of a circle that resides within God. The person who can accomplish this is a free man . In order to arrive at that state of freedom, he has had to polish his artistry through countless paintings. It was as if my own life work I had dreamed about was contained in this. When I was young, I mean.”
    Ikuo continued to hold his pose, gazing at the space in front of him, listening attentively, his expression unchanged, his rugged features reminding Kizu of Blake’s portrait of a youthful Los, likened to the sun—Kizu feelinghe was brushing away with his crayon the shadows of Blake’s colored block prints that shaded Ikuo’s nude body.
    Ikuo was silent until their next break. “I’ve been thinking about something very similar to what you said, Professor. People say young children are free. Okay, but if you get even a little self-conscious you can’t act freely, even though you might have been able to a few years before. When I was no longer a child, I fantasized about a freedom I could attain. And not just talking about it like this,