Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  Ikuo didn’t respond right away to Kizu’s question but just stared straight ahead. Finally, reluctantly, he answered.

  “Dancer’s doing her best, going to the hospital every day, but she doesn’t believe he’ll recover enough to take on his role as Guide again. The only thing she talked about in the car was what we can expect from you.”

  Kizu was escorted into the bedroom study by Ogi and sat down in a chair facing Patron, who was sunk deep in his armchair; Ikuo brought in a backless chair from the office for himself and sat down too. As they had gotten out of the car, Kizu had passed him the cardboard tube with the watercolor painting in it; now Ikuo laid it in his lap and rested a hand on one end.

  “We haven’t done this before, but I’d like Ikuo to join us this time in hearing what you have to say, and Ogi tells me you’ve agreed,” Kizu said.

  “It’s more proper now for me to say I’ll listen to you,” Patron said, his words brisk but his expression pensive. “Actually, I’d been hoping that we could both talk with Ikuo. There’s also another reason for this meeting today. Often just after I wake up I’m in a kind of half-awake, half-asleep state, and when that happened again this morning I envisioned a scene before me. I interpreted this as a sign that you would take on the role of being the new Guide with Ikuo beside you. I wanted to talk with you about this, and that’s why I called you here without much warning.

  “What I saw was you and Ikuo, hand in hand as I watched over you, stepping into space, each of you a sturdy support to the other in case one of you was about to fall. That was the scene I saw.”

  Kizu thought he was being taken in by some elaborate trick; at the same time he felt drawn in by those gentle, trusting eyes. He tried to resist.

  “In this scene that you saw, was the place where you said Ikuo and I were walking—a space, you called it—was it the sky? If so, what was the weather like?”

  “It was sunny,” Patron replied. “I saw newly formed clouds gleaming whitely between the two of you and me, who was waiting to receive you. The clouds were shaped like a baby whale without a tail. The whale’s head was three-dimensional; you could sense its weight, and the force of this weight made it move diagonally downward.”

  Kizu turned to look at Ikuo, who, before a word could pass between them, handed Kizu the cardboard tube on his lap. Kizu stuck two fingers inside the open end of the tube and extracted the watercolor painting, along with the cotton paper that was wrapped around it.

  Patron took the painting and held it up to the light on the bedside table. Kizu knew he often listened to classical CDs in this room, everything from ancient to modern music. The feeling rose up in Kizu that he was in the presence of a considerable connoisseur of art.

  After a while Patron lifted his eyes from the painting and laughed aloud, a simple, innocent burst of laughter. He nodded at Kizu, then passed the painting, its edges curling up on its own, over to Ikuo, who had been leaning over hesitantly to catch a glimpse. Patron didn’t say a word about the congruence between the dream or vision he’d had and the scene depicted in the painting; his hearty laughter expressed it all. He evidently saw no need for any verbose explanation for himself, or for Kizu, or for Ikuo, who was poring over the painting.

  It was Kizu, rather, taken in by Patron’s laughter and unable to suppress a smile, who felt that the painting cried out for interpretation. Kizu gazed at the painting in Ikuo’s hands, as did Patron, Ikuo angling the painting so it was easier for them to see, and once more he found himself unable to suppress a smile.

  “This light-blue sky is what I saw from my apartment window this morning, and I painted it as it was,” Kizu said. “The same with the grove of trees. The clouds, though, are something else. I’m amazed how accurate your description of them is—like a baby whale without a tail. These were clouds I saw outside the window of my university office in the States. Especially after I just took the job and was a little anxious about it, the clouds comforted me, so I added them nostalgically to the painting.”

  “That cloud-filled sky is the world on the other side toward which your soul is heading,” Patron said. “It makes sense to see it as a nostalgic place.”

  “I wonder if I was thinking those kinds of things while I was painting it. It’s a little vague to put it this way, I suppose, but I think I was envisioning Ikuo and me walking off into the bright sky as the two of us entered the world on the other side, the one you see in your trances. Rather than it being us entering my own trance.”

  “In a sense, though, they’re one and the same,” Patron said. “When you’re so absorbed in your work, you break through to the other world of my trances. That’s the ideal working relationship between patron and guide. Guide once said that’s what he was aiming at.

  “Another important thing is that you and Ikuo are holding hands. Through trances, we experience the world on the other side. But as Guide always told me, because this great flow itself is God, you can’t let yourself get caught up in the flow of ecstasy on the other side. Getting carried away by that flow means becoming one with God, and the ecstasy is a premonition of this.

  “Of course, you could argue that getting caught up in it is actually the most natural thing to do. However, inside us all we have particles of light or resonance that are bestowed upon us by the One-and-only, the Almighty, or, in more prosaic terms, by God. For an individual, coming to faith means we take these particles of light or resonance so they’re not some vague concept but are resituated in a more favorable environment in our own body and spirit. Those particles of light or resonance are inside us, but they don’t belong to us. Even less are they created by us. They’re put in our care by the Almighty. Finally—and by this I don’t mean just the inevitable result of the passage of time but also through training—we have to return these particles of light or resonance to the Almighty, where they originated. This is why we must keep them alive, unsullied. Not for a single moment must we forget these particles of light or resonance, which we take care of in our own bodies and spirit, are the source of life, which we must in the end return to the Almighty.

  “If we get drunk on the ecstasy of the trance and are swallowed up by this deep drunkenness, we won’t be able to return from that huge flow back to this side. But one of the conditions of being a living human being is that you do not stay forever over there. In other words, if you are mechanically returned to this side, you’ll never again be able to discover the particles of light or resonance within your body and spirit.

  “No matter the level of the trance you’re in, you have to wake up within it. You have to gaze at that huge flow with your eyes wide open. You have to let your body and spirit be transparent and gaze at those particles of light or resonance reflected in the mirror of that massive flow. This has nothing to do with what we might look like from the outside while in a trance.

  “You recall Guide said that when I’m in a trance I confront a huge glowing structure? That’s how he understood what I described, what I see when I’m gazing at this huge flow with open eyes. What I see and what he describes are one and the same. From the start, what you experience in a deep trance is something that can’t be categorized in words. Which means that if you do attempt to transform it into words, there’ll be many different ways of expressing it—all of them accurate.

  “To get back to your painting, you can’t let feelings of ecstasy draw you into that massive flow. So what do you do to prevent it? Mystics in Europe used lections, sacred phrases—the words of a prayer—as a kind of handrail to keep from falling into the abyss of ecstasy. They’d tie sacred phrases around their waists as a kind of lifeline.

  “In this painting, Professor, you’re walking off into the depths of the sky holding on to Ikuo’s hand. Ikuo’s hand linked with yours is your handrail, your lifeline. Led by me, you’ve made the decision to go into the world on the other side. But from the first you refuse to be inundated by it. You won’t allow yourself to be swallowed up in that massive flow. You’ve decided to protect the par
ticles of light or resonance inside your body and spirit.

  “Ikuo is your handrail, or lifeline, but by the same token if I were to lead him into a deep trance you want to keep him from sinking into that flow. And you did this painting of you and Ikuo holding hands in order to make this clear to yourself. Looking at this painting, I think Ikuo, too, can mentally prepare himself.”

  Patron turned from Kizu to look at Ikuo—Kizu found he couldn’t help but do the same with a forceful shift of weight—and Ikuo nodded so decisively that Kizu was overjoyed.

  4

  Kizu still wasn’t sure exactly what a guide was supposed to be or do, though it was clear Patron viewed him as both a personal adviser and an adviser to his new movement. Like Ikuo, Kizu was determined to absorb all Patron had to tell him. When he’d given Patron talks on the Welsh poet, Patron had been far from just a student. A new dynamic was at work here, with Patron now endeavoring to educate Kizu. Patron was attempting to revive the doctrine that he and the sick Guide had created—despite having denied it all by doing; their Somersault.

  “When Guide and I were young,” he told Kizu, “there was a time when our youthful unease and energy drove us to devour books in order to find out more about mysticism. There was a great inherent difference, though, between our reading abilities. Guide would read books I’d never pick up on my own and then underline or circle in red those parts he thought I’d be interested in. I’d read more than just those parts, of course, but never the entire book. I’d read the chapters that caught his attention enough for him to mark up. And if I didn’t understand that chapter, I’d read the ones that bracketed it.

  “Guide would use different-colored pencils to indicate the chapters that were for reference. Once he began to drink (which didn’t happen all that often) he couldn’t stop. He’d adopt this overbearing attitude that he was the one in charge of educating the leader of the church. He’s a detail person, so he made a distinction between what he was teaching me and what was originally within me, something on a different plane from what we usually think of as educating or being educated. Rather, he said he was led by what was inside me to find those kinds of books and read them.

  “Does this make me sound pretty full of myself? Guide didn’t treat me as someone with special privileges. He just happened to choose me as the Savior—at that point we weren’t using the names Patron or Guide—but he could easily have chosen someone else. What’s most important exists in every person, the particles of light or resonance that flow out from the Almighty, the one Being that was there at the beginning, the Always-already who includes the entire universe. The only difference is that in some people those particles of light are clearer and give off a much more intense resonance. Yours are extraordinarily clear and intense, Guide told me when we met; that’s where he found his surety that I was the one.

  “At that time, Guide was still teaching mathematics and science in night school. All the various students in his gloomy classroom, he said, each had these particles of light or resonance. He told me he actually got the whole concept of these particles from one of the more progressive textbooks he used for his students.

  “Most of us are convinced we’re each active subjects who happen to contain DNA, but most scholars now agree that since the dawn of mankind humans have been little more than containers, vehicles to transport the DNA that determines our individuality.

  “Guide taught me his basic doctrine: that the world was created by light radiating from the Almighty, that each of us contains within our bodies and spirits these particles of light or resonance, and eventually these will return to their Creator.

  “People tend to believe that each of us as individuals are the center of things, but we really are nothing more than vehicles for these particles of light or resonance: just portable containers, until the time when each and every particle of light returns to the Almighty and becomes the Almighty. This flowing out and return takes place in a different way from the events that we’re used to thinking about as happening in historical time. Both happen in an instant yet are also occurring eternally.

  “I can’t say I really understood what Guide meant at the time. When those particles of light or resonance return to the Almighty, they’ll cast off the body they’ve occupied. They’ll also separate themselves from the spirit, but this doesn’t mean that our individuality is discarded like a used container. Each of our individual souls will become particles of light or resonance and return to the Almighty. I didn’t entirely understand it, but I was drawn to the idea.

  “I’ve never prayed in a Christian church—let alone in an Islamic mosque or even a Buddhist temple, for that matter—and what I know about this may be the kind of random knowledge one picks up from movies, TV, and novels, but the faithful do say, don’t they, Thy will be done? There’s a scene in the Koran where Abraham and Isaac pray together as one, and you can find the same sort of thing in Buddhist tales. Thy will be done, I believe, is a universal element of prayer.

  “Even in our own church, Thy will be done was the basis of everything we did. I didn’t interpret God in an anthropomorphic way but as the light that penetrates the world, the universe, the whole, and all the details, each and every one. I said these particles of light or resonance are in me, and I’m just one speck in an infinite number, but these particles of light, like salmon swimming upstream, become part of countless other particles to create one enormous entity as they return to the Almighty. The faithful imagine this One-and-only in an anthropomorphic way, as the originating ultimate Almighty. Call it God, if you wish.

  “This being called out once to you, Ikuo, and now you say you want to face that voice again and have me act as intermediary. There was a time, apparently, when you viewed God as something like God in the Old Testament, and I think it’s all right that you want me to be a mediator for you. What the Almighty makes clear through me is directed at me, but all you need to do, Ikuo, is press the SHIFT key to change it to the voice of God you heard in your late teens. My God and the God you heard calling to you are one and the same, since the Almighty penetrates every detail in this world and in the entire universe. There can be no other God.

  “You can’t forget the voice of God you heard as a teenager. You staked your entire youth on waiting to hear the voice again. Even so, when Guide urged you to ask me to serve as intermediary between you and the Almighty, you hesitated—wondering whether it was right for you, as just one little individual, to do something that might affect Thy will be done in the world, in the universe. Guide told me how impressed he was by this young man, so poor in spirit.

  “I think Guide knew exactly what he urged you to do. Recently he ran across some words in a sixteenth-century book by a Sufi mystic that supported this belief. ‘The process of all creation, which is from God, being restored to its true state,’ the book said, ‘requires more than simply a propulsive force from God; it also requires a propulsive force found in the religious activities of the created.’ The book goes on to say that ‘this is why the prayerful hold a tremendous power in the inner world, and at the same time a tremendous responsibility to realize their messianic mission.’

  “I believe Guide wanted to make this idea the basis for our new movement. And he started by encouraging you, Ikuo. I can imagine how dejected you must have been when he collapsed, but now—with Professor Kizu taking over—you must feel as though you’ve been revived. And when I looked at this painting, I felt exactly the same way!”

  9: The Book Already Written

  1

  When Patron was a child he learned of a book he knew he had to spend his entire life searching for. “How old were you at the time?” Kizu asked, but Patron neatly dodged the question.

  It all began when Patron was attending a piano concert in place of his father, who was busy elsewhere; he was seated in special box enclosed in marble next to the main aisle that ran parallel to the stage. Right after the house lights dimmed, a tall skinny man approached him like the shadow of a bird flitting by an
d said, “You are a unique person, and there’s something written about you in.…”

  The man leaned over the enclosure as he spoke and then left swiftly, bent over from the waist like someone late to the concert trying to not bother those already seated, walked quickly to a seat in the rear of the hall, and disappeared.

  “It bothered me that I didn’t catch the title of the book,” Patron said. “The concert was an all-Bach program and I was soon carried away by the music, but I found myself wondering whether the music was conveying to me the contents of that book. In other words, the man’s words had an immediate effect, though what sort of content was being communicated, I couldn’t have said. It was as if a surgical laser beam were shining on each word of that book inside me, and it was impossible to read it consciously—at least now that’s how I look at it.”

  “I’m sure as you were growing up you read a lot of books,” Kizu said, “but did you ever run across a book and think This is it?”

  Patron let the question pass by like a breath of wind grazing him, not letting it interrupt the rhythm of his narrative. “I never thought I’d run across an actual book. Still, sometimes I felt like I was reading it and knew all the words in it. If someone made a concordance based on that book, you’d find listed in it all the words I’d ever spoken. Still, my fate as described in that book was something that I created myself over a long period of time.

  “I was always searching through large bookstores and libraries for that book, even thinking maybe I should write it myself. Indeed, it was by constructing that book that I ended up living the life I’ve led. Before I could write such a book, I had to live in a way befitting its author. So there was no need to put things down on paper, and I didn’t become an actual writer.”

  Patron said no more. While he mulled over his words a thought struck Kizu, a thought so overpowering that if he didn’t suppress it he might burst out with it: Wasn’t the title of that book Somersault? he wanted to shout.