[In the following review, Picone lauds Ōe's “disquieting” world view in Somersault and argues that the novel broadens “the scope and form that the author's future fiction might take.”]

In his first new novel since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Kenzaburo Oe offers an examination of the nature of faith when it is balanced against the potential for human self-annihilation in the twenty-first century. A complete departure from Oe's fiction concerning his retarded son, Somersault is a conventional narrative about a fictional religious cult, partly influenced by Aum Shinrikyo and their 1995 sarin attack on the Tokyo subway. Ten years before the novel begins, a religious group's two founding leaders, Patron and Guide, betray their own movement because a radical faction within the group threatens large-scale terrorism. The leaders contact the authorities and publicly ridicule the values and beliefs their group espouses, a complete disavowal labeled a somersault. After the somersault, Patron and Guide go into exile for ten years, but reemerge as a new group of followers converges to restart Patron's movement. If Oe's previous novels have often concentrated on a father trying to decide what role his retarded son can play in the world, here Patron and his followers conceive of how to live in a world they believe is doomed to an imminent and violent end. While Oe's writing on Hiroshima is not directly invoked in Somersault, the novel does focus on how to live in a world where unspeakable actions can destroy a people's faith and shatter them physically. Instead of addressing only the survivors of violence, Oe envisions a potentially violent cult that is both perpetrator and victim of its crimes, a microcosm of a twenty-first-century humanity that is hastening its own destruction. Akin to Oe's other novels, Somersault possesses a grotesque and dark view of the world that is nevertheless flavored by the author's immeasurable humanity and ability to find beauty in dark and disturbing characters and locales. Readers of Oe's prior work will find the length and approach of Somersault an entirely new venture for the Japanese author, one that yields disquieting and unexpected results while also broadening the scope and form that the author's future fiction might take.