Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  He realized right away how flippant this would have been and breathed a sigh of relief that he hadn’t actually voiced the question.

  Later on he discovered another reason why he was happy he hadn’t said this at the time; he was no longer convinced that the word Somersault could sum up Patron’s whole life. After Patron and Guide admitted the way in which the term had been used to ridicule their actions, Kizu couldn’t quite understand its new connotations. Another thought struck him: that if there was a book called Somersault he wanted to read it because it would contain something written about him.

  With all this as background, Kizu was able to draw out from Patron a more focused response about his special book. On this particular day they were all discussing the mystical experiences Patron had had that Guide had described to Kizu and Ikuo. Deepening his understanding of this was, for Kizu, of the utmost importance. As the person chosen by Patron to be his new adviser, Kizu wanted to take over Guide’s responsibilities as much as he could. But ever since he’d agreed to assume the role, Patron had been somewhat casual about it, never pressing him. Still, he felt increasingly anxious.

  “Guide told us once,” Kizu began, “that when you are in a trance you’re standing in front of a whitely glowing object, like a net that shows the entire past, present, and future of the world. I always assumed that mystical experiences meant you were communicating directly with God, which is why I thought this netlike structure must be God. The structure also struck me as a fantastic model of the world’s whole past, present, and future. But the other day the idea came to me that perhaps this whitely glowing model itself is that one-of-a-kind book you told us about. So when you’re in your trance you’re focused entirely on reading that book.”

  “I agree,” Patron said, his response so matter-of-fact that Kizu had doubts about what he’d just said. “But if I’d told Guide, when I related my visions to him, that it was the same as reading that book he wouldn’t have accepted it. Books are limited in all kinds of ways, aren’t they? A book has words printed in it. While you read it you can’t change it. Reading can’t be the same as living in the real world. Guide insisted on this rather simplistic line of reasoning.

  “If you look carefully at that whitely glowing structure, you’ll see that inside the net there are rapidly moving minute particles. Since it’s structured this way, you can read your own present, Guide said, and you can live it and change your future. What I meant by a special book was exactly this type of new-style book.”

  “So,” Kizu began, summoning up his courage, “was the Somersault, then, a kind of misreading the two of you had, as leaders of the church and, more specifically, of the activities of the radical faction? And didn’t you and Guide notice this?”

  “A misreading?” Patron gave it some thought.

  Just as Kizu was about to withdraw his careless comment, Patron answered him with unexpectedly honest words.

  “In this large book there’s one thing that can’t be misread, and that is the fact that, if mankind fails to repent, an irreversible time is fast approaching. Truthfully, though, if I were to describe for you the scene of the end of the world that I spoke about in the afterglow of my trance, and that Guide heard in the context of words on this side and then related to me, you’d be discouraged by how very ordinary it is. It’s a picture of a medium-sized provincial city here in Japan. The afternoon is shining down on the scene, but it’s entirely desolate. No dogs wandering around, no napping cats. The streets are filthy with garbage, but the amount remains the same; no garbage has been freshly discarded. All manufacturing facilities have stopped. The people haven’t been completely eliminated yet but are living off the remains of what’s been manufactured and not replacing them once they’re used up. There’s no electricity, no running water, no public transportation. Everyone’s waiting for death in inconspicuous corners of this city, lying there, curled up, helpless babies once again, bereft of the skills needed to live.

  “Why did things reach this state? Was a neutron bomb dropped that spared the buildings but is killing the people and animals through radiation? Has a hitherto unknown epidemic broken out? It would still have been fine if this was just one medium-sized city that the outside world kept isolated, waiting for the radiation or epidemic to run its course. But if the exact thing is happening everywhere around the globe, doesn’t this scene show us the human race becoming extinct?

  “What I was surely doing was reading one page of this heretofore unknown kind of book to Guide. How was this going to take place? Could it be halted? And what was God trying to tell us? I was supposed to read on, a Herculean task. Guide and I were agreed that we were standing at that very starting point.”

  2

  “Looking back on it, I see this is where, for the first time since we’d begun our movement, a crack developed in our sense of oneness. Back at the very beginning, Guide discovered in me the person he’d been searching for and shaped me in that image. I have already told you what happened after that. At the same time, I discovered in him someone I could lean on. I pressed him hard, too, to make him become that support.

  “He dubbed me Savior, but I didn’t have any confidence that I was one, though he was way too strict to let me joke around about being a false savior or anything.

  “Sad to say, I didn’t think he’d always stay with me as my prophet. He took the words I spouted out when the effects of my deep trances were still with me and translated them into proper language. But every moment I was afraid that someday he’d find it too much trouble and get up and leave. If that happened, I’d be nothing. I’d still babble out delirious nonsense after my trances, but what would be the point?

  “I had the feeling that maybe Guide didn’t really need me. And this made me fearful of two things. First, I was afraid I was forcing him to work for me, and this might cause him to leave the church. Second, I was afraid that, as he became a more experienced prophet, he’d find me inadequate as a savior and look for someone more suited to the role.

  “So a fissure opened up between us. By this time our church was already registered as a nonprofit religious foundation, which immediately made tax matters easier to handle and gave our followers legal protection. Up to this point, Guide, who’d studied mathematics, was our accountant, but after this some followers he’d trained took over the finances. This freed him up to do other things, and he used this free time to organize within the church a group of hand-picked followers, bright athletic young people. Since we started the church, I’ve always wanted all members to be equal. That’s why I didn’t create any official positions. After some time passed I told him my concerns about expanding his elite group any further. But he told me to let him have his way; having been a teacher for so many years, he said, he found it a real psychological boost to be able to have young people in his charge again.

  “I haven’t really said anything about my own position in the church, have I? Anyway, the basis for our teachings was this: that we should all be conscious that the end of the world was approaching, and be more open to it, on both an emotional and an intellectual level. And most importantly, we should repent. Isn’t it a tragedy for this planet to be destroyed—a planet that has sustained so many countless lives—because only a small minority are truly repentant? (Though some people would argue that the only thing that’s destroyed is the environment needed for mankind to survive, not the planet itself.)

  “With these feelings in mind, Guide and I began spreading our message to the world. That’s all it was, really. To tell the truth, I would have been happy dealing with the end of the world and repentance just on my own personal level. If I had my own time connected with God I’d be able to face death without any regrets or fears. I wasn’t thinking about the afterlife or the salvation of the soul, just that I’d be able to survive for a certain time. During that time, as the end time drew near, I’d have a clear understanding that it was the end, I would repent as one, individual human being, and, as far as possible, I would end my days
in a personal relationship with God, like some mystical hermit. That was my dream. And it could have come true.

  “Why did someone like me, then, become the leader of a religious organization? Why did I come to have so many people call me Savior, and why did I let them? The reason is that I didn’t train myself enough, like the hermits of old had. Ultimately I couldn’t free myself from the one basic element of humanity—language. During this time, my trances steadily became more profound. I was also able to expand the visions I encountered and make them more real. And I couldn’t keep silent about it. I was awed by the magical power of language.

  “There are two aspects here. The first is connected with the contents of my trances. I’d fall into a deep trance and enter the world beyond. After returning to our world, I couldn’t keep from mulling over the visions I’d had there. And here, the role Guide played was decisive. I’d turn to him and talk about the visions I had but couldn’t understand. Words just spilled out. He’d put what I said into some sort of logical order, and I’d tell him his words weren’t like the experience. And once again, he and I would try to get closer to what I saw in my trances. The visions and these new words would illuminate each other. That’s how I learned the irreplaceable power that words can have.

  “The second aspect of language was this: When, through Guide’s help, we were able to narrate from what I’d read in that book in my trances, people began to come to listen to us. Before I met Guide I’d been doing something similar. At first it was just one or two people who’d listen to my solitary tales and then use the details as a kind of fortune-telling to figure out their future. The number of people gradually increased until there was a set group of about fifteen who’d gather together. And then new people would come, men and women with pressing concerns of their own. A woman would ask how she could get her runaway drug-taking son to come home. A man would say he treated his father-in-law so coldly it’s practically like he committed suicide, and how can he deal with this? As I got a reputation for being able to give people hints to solve their personal problems, more and more people began to gather around me. I was able to live on their offerings. Up to then I’d eked out a living writing record reviews for a music magazine.

  “As I’ve told you, it was at this point that I met Guide. He came to a gathering to get my advice on a very personal problem; his wife and autistic son were afraid of him and had run away from home. Even if we can’t get back together right away, he said, he wanted to find out where they were and whether they were okay.

  “And he did get some results, so afterward he still kept coming to see me. He’d come alone and we’d have long talks. One day he happened to be there when I went into a trance, and he took care of me for several days. After I was back to a normal state of consciousness, Guide told me, in clear language, what my mutterings had meant. I can never forget how surprised and happy I was when my visions were revived like that. That’s how our relationship began.

  “Before long he began seeing me as a savior. I don’t know whether, in the beginning, he believed that or not. Maybe he thought it was an amusing nickname. But I began calling him Prophet, because of how he interpreted my visions. Those names helped our relationship run more smoothly. That was the turning point at which what had been a private gathering turned into a religious organization.

  “Our church grew overnight. We started out with fifteen people, and in less than two years over five hundred people had renounced the world to join us. Having people renounce everything to join wasn’t Guide’s idea. One old lady did it and others followed suit. Since becoming a renunciate meant selling your house and land and donating all your assets to the church, our financial situation improved by leaps and bounds. Guide took care of the bookkeeping, as well as of the steps needed to make our church nonprofit. As I mentioned before, at that point we had over two thousand members.

  “At this stage my own personal prayers and teachings were simple. I remember being questioned once by a Belgian reporter who was writing a piece on our church. I have trances, I told him, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the approaching end of the world. This helps me be more open to it, intellectually and emotionally. My goal is complete repentance. As the power of the repentant grows, our connection with God will exceed the level of each individual and may even influence society.

  “Suspicious of why the interpreter was silent, the Belgian reporter asked, ‘Is that all?’ just to make sure. ‘Are your teachings really that simple?’ The way he said it implied he was trying to unearth some secret teachings that had to exist in a church like ours, with over two thousand renunciates and funds exceeding two billion yen. To tell the truth, though, that was all there was to it.

  “It was after our church became a religious foundation that Guide created his group of the best and the brightest of our young people. He expanded this group at a feverish pace. He bought some resort facilities in Izu that had belonged to a printing company and showed them how to fix it up; when it was finished it was quite a nice research facility. He created research teams to carry out inquiries in many fields—chemistry, biology, and physics—sparing no expense. At first the team members were selected from among our followers and were allowed to carry out the kind of research they had been doing in their former graduate schools and research labs. Over time, though, these members began to ask that former colleagues be allowed to join them. As they did their research together, the new people would usually become believers, a development that took off quickly.

  “Guide was always so excited when he reported to me on the activities of the Izu center. Those researchers who joined the church had all had some spiritual unease, and some people had dropped out of the competitive world of graduate school and research labs. Others couldn’t get along with their academic advisers. Once these young people found our state-of-the-art research facility, they cooperated with their fellow researchers and immersed themselves in their research.

  “The results they came up with at the research facility were good enough to present at international academic conferences, but in Japan once you leave your research lab it’s difficult to get another job. These young researchers were oblivious to that, though, and went at their research with all the enthusiasm of young people training for a soccer match. Their attitude toward their work might very well be a model for how young people today should repent. All fired up, Guide told me he dreamed about organizing the education of this kind of young people.

  “However, among this elite group, whom I’d left up to him for the most part and whom he mostly trained, a special sort of movement arose concerning our religious activities. In other words, what the press later dubbed the radical faction. This radical faction grew so quickly that it forced Guide and me to do our Somersault, but at first I had no misgivings about them whatsoever. Rather, I felt a childish sense of relief. With this elite corps going at their research with such zeal, Guide wasn’t likely to leave the church anytime soon. That’s what I hoped.”

  3

  “Before long, Guide began running religious seminars at the Izu center and invited me to lecture. As I’m sure you know, Professor, from your years of teaching, seminars are an interesting forum for teaching because of the interaction between people involved. I was used to speaking about my religious experiences as the visions I’d emotionally and physically experienced, with Guide helping to interpret them, but at the seminar the young people challenged me, and I discovered a new light shining on the page I’d seen in my vision. I found myself rereading this in front of them. That was how I discovered the way to proceed.

  “I remember the first seminar well. Guide picked me up at headquarters and accompanied me to the Izu research center; our headquarters had begun as just a single rented room in Asukayama, where we used to meet, but soon we purchased the land and the whole apartment building and made a headquarters appropriate for this period of growth in the church.

  “I had little academic background, and I thought it was a bother to have to g
o to Izu to appear in front of these former students from science departments and medical schools. But something beyond this bothered me. The research facility, once a company resort, looked like an old deserted house from the outside, but once inside you could see how the members’ devotion had made it into a pleasant place. To my surprise when I actually saw them all together, I found Guide had assembled over forty of these men and women.

  The seminar began in a conference room right after we arrived, as we ate lunch. I was scared to death, but soon I was completely absorbed and found myself saying things I never would have normally said aloud. Guide, seated beside me, sometimes tilted his head to one side in disbelief, but still he viewed the proceedings happily.

  “This elite group at the Izu research center was much more alert and active than the young followers at our usual gatherings. They sat at these old-fashioned long tables, no doubt left over from the days when the center was a recreational facility, and leaned forward toward me in rapt attention. I wasn’t used to such attentive expressions and shining eyes. It gave me the kind of happy feeling you get when you see something completely new and unexpected. Finally Guide spoke.

  “‘This isn’t the first time you all have met Savior, is it? Most of you have heard him talk before, at various branch gatherings. I assume you’re all pleased to have this opportunity to ask him questions directly?’

  “They responded with youthful laughter, and one young woman spoke up and said it was the first time she’d actually seen me. She was part of a little five-person group that was seated in the front row, on the right. As soon as I entered the conference room I’d felt something was different about that group. The young woman’s hair was pulled back so tightly her forehead looked stretched, and though the color of her eyes was not pure Japanese, she was a type of person you might run across on the streets of Tokyo. Gesticulating in an offhand way that was different from people raised in Japan, she made the following statement: