I really liked A Personal Matter, but I couldn't read more than about 20 pages of this. ( )

Un profesor divorciado de mediana edad regresa a Tokio tras pasar quince años impartiendo clases en una universidad americana, para ser sometido a una arriesgada operación. El recuerdo de un antiguo alumno le obsesiona y decide dar con él. Cuál será su sorpresa al encontrar al niño convertido en un muchacho que trabaja para la facción radical de una secta religiosa, un peligroso movimiento que predica el fin inminente de la humanidad. ( )

Un profesor divorciado de mediana edad regresa a Tokio tras pasar quince años impartiendo clases en una universidad americana, para ser sometido a una arriesgada operación. El recuerdo de un antiguo alumno le obsesiona y decide dar con él. Cuál será su sorpresa al encontrar al niño convertido en un muchacho que trabaja para la facción radical de una secta religiosa, un peligroso movimiento que predica el fin inminente de la humanidad.

One of the more frustrating books I've ever read. This is hardly a story of a cult, hardly a story of "the human spirit" nor of repentance. There's bits of those things in there, but nothing stuck out in this book of interest to me. Dialogue, which is almost the entire book, is non-realist, banal and constantly focused on describing past events, relationships, etc. with a detatched air. The characters are emotionally flattened, the "cult activities" described are (and I don't mean this figuratively) like being at a board meeting, and what little glint of transcendence comes through is often cliche and shallow. Oe isn't a bad writer, and the story could've been engaging, if only it was given a little life. Some positive reviews I've come across suggest that the book is lifeless to evoke a meditative, somber tone. Possibly, but "boring" works well enough for me. ( )

"For people who feel the need for a savior deeply, on a personal and societal level, isn't even a phony savior better than none?" This is one of the several questions Oé explores through his characters in this contemporary fictional account of the building of a New Age super church. The essential doctrines of the Church of the New Man, founded by two old friends, Patron and Guide, are the impending end of the world and the urgent need for repentance. Oé doesn't bother to fill in the details. It isn't necessary. He writes about a basic need for personal meaning, a need to be in a community with meaningful goals, a need to love and be loved, and a need for a savior figure or hero who relieves us of the personal responsibility to write the rules that govern our lives.

This is not a cautionary tale, but it may be judged to be a social commentary. As is true of Oé's other books, he is a nonjudgmental observer of human interaction. His characters represent people we know, people we read about in the newspaper, people we see on the evening news. He gives us cross-cultural personalities. They have jobs, families, aspirations, and disappointments.

The main character, Kizu, is a university professor in his late fifties who is retiring in anticipation of his death. Between diagnosis and death, he embarks upon a new life, which begins when he falls in love with a young man. Oé's explicit description of the first love-making between a heretofore heterosexual, middle-class man and his young male paramour is neither lascivious nor coy, neither clinical nor sentimental. These same elements are found when he writes of heterosexual sex. He has an amazing ability to write sex that is interesting, introspective, and detailed—and never emotional. It simply is what it is. Just the way his characters are who they are.

There are several elements that I recognize from the three or four other Oé novels I have read—his nonjudgment (even when his character finds his wife having sex with another man), his acceptance of sex as a de facto aspect of humanity to be observed, his distinctly male viewpoint (his maleness permeates every word), and the motif of a mentally challenged son. In his earlier writing the flawed son is a primary element in his male protagonist's struggle. In Somersault, the son appears late in the book, with a single mother rather than a conflicted father, and plays a key role in resolving the plot.

As a whole, the book seems too long. The plot begins to unfold on page 266. That's 265 pages of descriptive preparation, of history, of setting up characters. That's just too long. But truthfully, I'm not certain what needed to be left out. If I compare that many pages to hours of looking at baby photos and watching someone's vacation movies, it's clearly too many. But without it, would I have known these people well enough to become involved in their journey that unfolds in the last 300 pages?

Every stray fragment of plot is tidy by the time I reached the final sentence: "For us, a church is a place where deeds of the soul are done." It's worth mentioning that Somersault shares an underlying theme with another of Oé's novels that I recently read, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! It is another insight of aging: There are a new population of young out there, and ready or not, we have to turn the world over to them. ( )