[In the following review, Lovell complains that the narrative in Somersault is too formulaic and flat, asserting that Haruki Murakami's Underground offers a much more compelling portrayal of Japanese cults.]

Only three contemporary Japanese novelists—Banana Yoshimoto, Haruki Murakami and Kenzaburo Oe—seem to get much attention in English translation; each has a few signature themes. Yoshimoto specializes in stories of female drifters, dysfunctional families and comfort food. No Murakami novel would be complete without alienated protagonists, alternative realities and spaghetti. Kenzaburo Oe's preoccupations and motifs, though more serious, have been equally recurrent: the nuclear threat, handicapped young men with a talent for musical composition (based on his own son Hikari), the spiritual condition of modern Japanese. Somersault, published in Japan earlier this year and Oe's first new novel since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, brings together these elements once more, but with a new thematic focus: the rise of religious cults in late twentieth-century Japan.

Cults in Japan made the international news in March 1995, following the sarin-gas attack on the Tokyo subway carried out by members of the Aum Shinrikyo sect, in which twelve people died. The tragedy provoked a fit of national soul-searching, as victims and observers asked themselves how Japanese society had managed to nurture this viperous cult in its bosom, and why the emergency services and the subway-users caught up in the attack responded so lackadaisically as the catastrophe unfolded. In 1997, Haruki Murakami, taking a break from his tales of spaghetti and the unexpected, published Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, a collection of interviews with victims and former members of Aum Shinrikyo, interspersed with the author's own meditations on what the incident signified for the state of his country. In Underground, the usually whimsical Murakami seemed to take on the serious, intellectual mantle of Oe, who throughout his writing career has asserted the responsibility of Japanese authors to reflect critically on their society.

Conversely, in his treatment of religious cults, Oe appears to have moved closer towards a Murakami style of narration, uniting a cast of drifting, bohemian characters linked by shifting sexual liaisons and existing in the alternative reality of a religious sect. The action of the novel begins ten years after the “Somersault” of the title, the occasion when Patron and Guide, the two leaders of an influential religious movement, publicly denounced and dissolved their cult, having discovered a plot by its radical wing to seize a nuclear power plant and build a bomb. A decade on, when Guide is kidnapped by the same militants, suffers a stroke and dies, Patron decides to restart the cult with new helpers: Ogi, a salaryman who drops out of his company job to work for Patron; and Dancer, a female dance student who acts as Patron's nursemaid and minder. They are soon joined by Kizu, an artist in his fifties who is dying of cancer, and Ikuo, his young homosexual lover. These two are drawn into the movement by Dancer, whom they first encountered fifteen years earlier when in a bizarre incident Dancer was impaled on a building model Ikuo had entered for an architecture competition judged by Kizu.

This diverse team of followers are joined by a few of Patron's former disciples and connections: the filmmaker Ms Asuka, who finances movies by working in the sex industry; Ms Tachibana and her handicapped brother, Morio, a talented composer; Mrs Tsugane, an administrator who makes use of Ogi for sex experiments while her husband is abroad. The church is established in a small rural commune, where its new initiates join with other remnant groups of Patron's former followers, such as the devout, Quaker-like “Quiet Women”. Again, however, Patron's intentions for the cult are subverted by the radicalism of its members. Plans for a mass suicide at the new movement's first conference are sabotaged by Patron and his inner circle, but the conference's Festival ends in tragedy for the movement's leader.

Like Murakami before him, Oe is exploring the phenomenon of religious sects in an effort to illuminate the spiritual lives of contemporary Japanese, whose mental vacuousness and complacency he has attacked in the past. An intensely philosophical book. Somersault is dominated by passages which elaborate the fictional cult's religious vision on issues of scriptural symbolism, salvation and redemption. Oe's serious intellectual interests are emphatically present throughout, to the point of making the characters and the novel as a whole often seem mouthpieces for the technical intricacies of religious doctrine.

But this attempt to explain the mysteries of faith and religious leadership is made in a novel that fails to realize the dramatic potential of religious cults: a work of theology rather than fiction. Dialogue and narrative fall curiously flat; few passages from the book suggest themselves for quotation, as the text for the most part lacks the neat turns of characterization and description needed to bring a fictional world alive. Oe's emphasis on theology over character produces a cast of unconvincing ciphers, and a climax that fails to shock. By the time a revelation about Ikuo's past finally arrives towards the end of the book, the reader has lost interest in making sense of the protagonists' backgrounds and motivations.

When Kenzaburo Oe won the Nobel Prize, he declared he would no longer write the kind of autobiographical fiction for which he had become renowned. Somersault, which bears the hallmarks of the author's longstanding intellectual concerns, represents an intriguing experiment in theme which ultimately founders on his neglect of the fundamentals of novel-writing. Those interested in contemporary Japanese cults will find a far more compelling and dramatic portrayal of personalities, motives and consequences in Haruki Murakami's nonfictional Underground.