[In the following review, Allen contends that although Somersault is replete with beautiful images and compelling ideas, the novel is both “alienating and boring.”]

Ever since World War II Japan has been our partner, whether willingly or unwillingly, in the creation of a consumer society and the development of a business-friendly world order. Yet despite the postwar proliferation of films and television, not to mention the current explosion in global communications and Internet technology, the Japanese remain strangely mysterious to Americans. We avidly buy Japan's cars, sound systems and TVs, but we have taken little interest in its cultural products, except for some comic strips and a few benign children's creations like Pokémon and Hello Kitty. There are no Japanese shows for adults on American television. Only the most fervent American cineastes make any effort to see Japanese films. And the vast majority of Americans will never in their lives purchase or read a Japanese novel.

Even a Nobel Prize-winning author like Kenzaburo Oe has had a quite modest impact here. Thanks to his becoming a laureate, though, he is perhaps the one serious Japanese novelist of the second half of the 20th century whose name is familiar in the West. At least there is an awareness that over four decades he has consistently and with humility tried to mend fences and build bridges between Japan and the rest of the world. “The fundamental style of my writing,” he stated in his 1994 Nobel lecture, “has been to start from my personal matters and then to link them up with society, the state and the world.”

The defining event of his personal life was the birth of a mentally handicapped son in 1963 and the effect this child had on the family. In books like A Healing Family and A Personal Matter he related the painful but redemptive inclusion of the handicapped boy in the family to the tragedy of recent Japanese history: the hubris and nationalism of wartime Japan; the capitulation of the Emperor and his fall from divine status; the atomic bombs; the postwar aura of humiliation and repentance; the heady years of what the Japanese refer to as the Era of Rapid Growth and the Bubble Economy; the national eagerness for spiritual peace and reconciliation.

As his work evolved, Oe was eventually disenchanted with the course it had taken. Last year he wrote to Edward Said: “The materials of my novels had become too much involved with my own life, on the one hand, and, on the other, with esoteric mysticism.” He resolved to stop writing fiction. It was a resolution he cannot have kept for more than five or 10 minutes, because in the intervening years he produced a trilogy, A Flaming Green Tree (not published in the U.S.), and now a novel that might be described as a sequel to the trilogy or at the minimum as having grown out of it, Somersault (Grove, 570 pp.). All four combine his fascination with mysticism and with the events of his own life.

Somersault is a very odd book, full of arresting ideas and indelibly beautiful images, but written in a style almost aggressively unfriendly: It is long, extremely repetitive, and suffused with a formality and emotional distance that will push many readers away rather than draw them in. Oe has said on occasion that he sees his writing as a conscious attack on the “rules” of literature. But sometimes it is worth remembering that literary rules, if in fact there are any such things, were not set by some arbitrary totalitarian fiat; they are the consequence of an age-old trial and error search for ways to please, to intrigue and to instruct. Oe has broken them all right. Unfortunately, the result is alienating and boring, as is Philip Gabriel's painfully awkward translation.

Still, there is much that is pleasing about this story of a messianic religious sect and its flirtation with apocalypse. Somersault is not so much based on as inspired by the infamous Japanese sect Aum Shinrikyo. In 1995 it grabbed the international spotlight when its radical members released a deadly nerve agent throughout the Tokyo subway system, killing 12 commuters and injuring some 4,000 more. Japan, and the world, were given a glimpse of apocalypse; Oe's new novel constitutes his reaction.

The leaders of the unnamed sect in Somersault have long been known to their followers as Patron and Guide. They are in late middle age as the novel opens, and have spent a decade in self-imposed exile from their people and their church, trying to come to terms with the crisis they unintentionally caused 10 years earlier. Patron, whose trance-induced visions were translated and interpreted by Guide, had long preached the imminent end of the world and the necessity of universal repentance. Then a radical faction within the sect, an elite group of young scientists and technicians, followed their leaders' creed to what they saw as its logical conclusion. They decided to become the agents of Armageddon rather than its dupes, attempting to take control of Japanese nuclear facilities and to inaugurate a millennial reign. As one of them later remarks, “If you followed the church's doctrine you couldn't very well oppose this plan.”

When this happened, Patron and Guide recanted, or performed a “somersault.” They appeared in all the news media stating that their teachings were bogus and they were, and had always been, phonies. This was not the truth, but they were distressed by the radicals' actions and hoped to bring things to a safe conclusion. Now, 10 years later, some of the former radical faction kidnap the physically vulnerable Guide and harass him until he dies of an aneurysm. In response, Patron, aided by a few new, dynamic young followers, decides the time has come to revive the church. He has always seen the years in the wilderness as a decent into hell, and he plans a reverse somersault. “We will never again compromise,” he vows.

The church finds a new home deep in a mountain hollow, at the former site of the trilogy's eponymous Church of the Flaming Green Tree. Here Patron is challenged by his own vague ideas of what God wants from him; by the Jonah-like will to annihilation of some of his younger acolytes; and by what, exactly, repentance involves.

Oe is a writer who raises many more questions than he answers, as Somersault demonstrates. It's easy to reject a violent sect's apocalyptic vision, for example, but the concept of the world as we know it coming to an end in the next century or so is not far-fetched when one thinks, as Patron does, in terms of rapid environmental degradation. “Nature that makes up the totality of life on this planet—the environment we humans live in, in other words—is steadily falling apart,” he observes. “We've gone beyond the point of no return. God as the totality of nature—including human beings—is decaying bit by bit. God is terminally ill.” Can we be in any real doubt that a little repentance is called for?

A further unanswered question is: How genuine are Patron and Guide; should they in any way be taken seriously? Patron, it seems clear, is no charlatan; he truly believes in what he is doing. But is his belief justified, or is he simply a well-meaning yet deluded man? And are we supposed to agree with Guide, who says: “Real saviors are few and far between. 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? And who's to say if a savior is real or fake?” Those issues are never satisfactorily dealt with. Nor is the possibility that man's need for a savior might not be a redemptive quality but rather a sign of his irremediably fallen nature.

Oe's deliberate, leisurely tale, in some ways more a symposium than a novel, appears at a moment when apocalypse—whether through war, destroying the environment or terror attacks—has left the realm of fantasy and religion to become perfectly feasible. How can one respond? Can one prevent apocalypse through spirituality, or does spirituality, instead, inspire apocalyptic urges? Oe does not answer these questions either, but he certainly challenges us to ponder them.