Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  When the two of them were alone and had finished unpacking, Dancer invited Ogi into her room. She’d opened the shutter and curtain facing the lake, had half opened the window to let in some fresh air, and was sitting on top of the covers on her bed. This bed, set out from the western corner beside the window, apparently had also been designed for the owner of the house by the church’s woodworking shop. It too was built in European folk style, a little too short to be an adult’s bed, angled so one was sitting up slightly in bed. Dancer rested her elbows on the flat frame of the bed. She motioned to Ogi, and he crossed to the desk on the north side of the room and pulled over the chair to sit beside her.

  The surface of the lake had turned a muddy brown in the rain. Right before them lay the island, the giant cypress rising from a small meadow like some gigantic bonsai plant lashed by rain, the cloud of fog covering its upper branches having descended closer to the ground than when they’d last looked upon it. The low fog hanging over the surface of the lake had crept up the slope on the east bank, where a stand of mountain cherry trees was surrounded by broad-leafed trees, and advanced up the north slope as well. The Hollow was wrapped in silence, but every detail, along with the sound of the rain and wind, seemed in motion. The wind fluttering the branches and leaves of the giant cypress sounded almost like an entire small forest. This sound filtered in the crack of the window, along with cold-damp air. It was only four in the afternoon, but already traces of a deepening twilight had begun to fill the Hollow, itself like the bottom of a pot.

  “When a huge tree like that burned up, it must have been scarier than if a house was on fire, even if no one perished in the flames,” Dancer said, as if she’d been silently mulling over Asa-san’s words.

  Seen from the north side of the lake, the giant cypress looked like a small bush that had been hit with a flamethrower, the surface of its trunk up to ten or twelve feet completely carbonized, just thick branches like black tusks remaining, with a wet cluster of small green branches sticking out around them. Though Ogi couldn’t really picture the tree burning, just looking at the clash between the inky black and dark green made his chest tighten.

  “I don’t think this was a happy place for someone to live. Do you suppose the former diplomat who lived here died in this bed?”

  Dancer’s face was ashen as she said this. She looked sleepy. Ogi stood up and reached past her shoulder to shut the window. The outline of the chapel to the southeast was vague in the rain, and a darker gray than when seen up close, the whole structure looming up against the backdrop of the foggy forest.

  “I know Patron’s decided to build a new church here,” she said, “but I have no idea what he actually plans to do. You have some idea, though, don’t you?”

  “I know about as much as you do,” Ogi said.

  “You’re in charge of sorting out all the information coming from the headquarters.”

  “But I’m not bound to Patron through faith, remember.”

  “Professor Kizu says the same thing,” Dancer said. “But both of you are very important people to him.”

  “And so are you—for a lot longer time than me.”

  “Compared to Dr. Koga’s group, though, I’m practically a newcomer. I didn’t come to be with Patron originally out of any faith. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Ogi exclaimed, in surprise, ever the innocent youth. “I’ve never heard that!”

  “I suppose only Guide knew the truth. I did tell Professor Kizu and Ikuo about it. . . but I can say it again.…”

  As one condition of being allowed to live on her own when she went to Tokyo to study modern dance, Dancer’s father made her drop by to see an old friend of his who was to be her guarantor, and then to visit him occasionally whenever she needed advice. This friend was a classmate of her father’s when they were in the science department at the university, and soon after she arrived in Tokyo, Dancer went to see him. The person turned out to be Guide, who was living in seclusion with Patron after the Somersault.

  Dancer had a hard time at first figuring out what sort of person Guide was, but he not only took her under his wing as guarantor and mentor but helped her find a place to live in Tokyo and even guaranteed a small income, having her do odd jobs in the office in their residence in Seijo. They had a woman who made their meals and did other tasks, but she quit after half a year and Dancer took on the job of running the household. Her dance lessons were just three afternoons a week in Shimokitazawa, so she had no trouble coping with both her studies and her work. After she graduated from her dance program she couldn’t find a job in her field, so while she prepared for her own private performances she worked as Patron and Guide’s personal secretary. In the beginning, at least, the office work hadn’t kept her too busy.

  “You started living in that house even though you didn’t know the two of them that well?” Ogi asked. “Pretty courageous of you.”

  “I trusted Guide, since he was my father’s friend. I didn’t know the first thing about living in Tokyo, but I felt as long as I followed Guide’s instructions I’d have nothing to worry about.… They hadn’t yet built the annex, so the three of us lived in the main house. I stayed in the room by the front entrance that you used for a while. I could lock the door, and there was a window opening to the outside, so I figured if need be I could make a quick getaway.”

  “You really were on your guard, weren’t you?” Ogi commented.

  “I wasn’t afraid or anything. In addition to the dance club, in high school I was a sprinter and middle-distance runner. Even now I’m a decent runner.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not about to assault you here,” Ogi said, naively offended.

  “At first I thought that Guide must be Patron’s parole officer, keeping an eye on him. There was something about Patron that just wasn’t right. The first time I saw him, he reminded me of freshly unearthed beetle larva. He had skin like yellow paper stretched over soft-looking flesh, his movements were slow and lethargic, and he spoke in a small voice in a kind of disjointed way. It felt like Guide was raising some weird creature, and I was his assistant keeper.

  “Before long I found out that Patron and Guide were former leaders of a religious organization who’d done a Somersault. In magazines they have those features—right?—like WHERE ARE THEY NOW? stories. A freelance reporter writing one of those came to our place but Guide, if not Patron, saw him coming and refused to open the door, so he ambushed me when I went out shopping. The reporter hardly let me get a word in edgewise, with all his questions. I just remember, out of a childish sense of justice, believing it was wrong of the founder and his top executive to have abandoned their followers.

  “I worried a lot about what they’d done, and late one night I went to Guide to ask him about it. I think I was afraid to ask Patron directly. I was still young and kind of unstable, emotionally. Guide filled me in. I’m sure he’s told you things about Patron too, and as you know he doesn’t talk about something until he’s come to a conclusion about it himself. Talking to an ignorant young thing like me was like pruning off all the branches, laying bare the trunk. Guide told me that Patron has mystical experiences . . . in other words, he journeys to the other side, talks directly with God or else has a vision from God, and then returns.

  “‘And I try to put these visions into intelligible language,’ he said, ‘not an easy job. Our reports regarding these mystical experiences have become our church’s gospel. It’s been through this process that we’ve constructed our faith.

  “‘The church movement that developed in this way gradually started to look outward, toward the world outside, and when this became a major component of what we were, Patron began to have doubts about whether our gospel was really giving people a true picture of God’s visions. What’s more, at this point some of the young people in the church began preparing to take action, and we had to stop them. It became necessary for us to publicly announce, in as dramatic a fashion as possible, that our gospel was wro
ng. That is when we performed our Somersault. Using TV to announce it proved a great success. Through the Somersault, our church and the beliefs of our followers became a national laughingstock. All those who viewed the broadcast must have had a good laugh. Patron and I survived, living on as we had, not without some pain. I’m sure you’ve sensed this?’

  “Guide opened his heart to me when he told me this,” Dancer concluded. “I decided, no matter what, I wanted to follow Patron, and for the first time I realized I was starting to believe in him.”

  4

  When Ogi woke up in the middle of the night, the first thought that came to him was the naive notion that hell must be as pitch black as this. An utterly gentle, quiet hell. Not completely without sound, though, for the lake and the hills were still enveloped in rain, but it was weaker than before. At first Ogi thought his bed was narrow, but when he stretched out it supported his back nicely and made him feel secure. As he lay on this wooden box and listened to the rain, it was as if the rain had cut off all his surroundings and was slicing through his body and into an abyss below his bed.

  There must have been some reason why he woke up in the middle of the night, but he couldn’t figure out what it was or get back to sleep. He recalled an experience similar to Dancer’s that he had soon after meeting Patron and Guide. When Ogi first started visiting Patron’s head office as part of his work with the foundation, Dancer had already been working for them for three years. Even then, Patron had impressed him as being quite extraordinary.

  At first Patron didn’t talk directly to Ogi, so it fell to Guide to explain religious matters to him whenever he had questions. Ogi’s questions weren’t ones he’d been musing over for a long time, just things he burst out with. Later he found it strange that he’d even said such things. And even stranger was the way Guide answered his questions so painstakingly. At any rate, their talks were less dialogues than lectures.

  They began like this. One day Guide appeared in the main house carrying two LP records, explaining that the new sound system in the annex only handled CDs. Dancer had gone out with Patron to the barbershop, and Ogi was to watch things at home while they were away. Guide listened to his two records, one after another, both performances of the same Mozart symphony—number 40 with Bruno Walter conducting—in one case the Berlin Philharmonic, the other the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. Ogi asked him if the two performances were very different, to which Guide replied in a rather curt way that they were both recordings of Walter in his final years and of course they weren’t the same, but you couldn’t say they were all that different, either.

  Ogi suddenly felt like asking a question that had popped into his mind many times after he’d begun his regular visits to Patron’s office. Guide was sitting silently at a right angle to him, and Ogi was distinctly uncomfortable at his sitting there right in front of him. He may well have been influenced by hearing the subtle shades of difference in the two versions of the Mozart symphony by the same conductor, though he couldn’t exactly put into words how this affected him.

  “In your faith,” he finally managed to ask, “what is salvation?”

  Guide’s response was no longer abrupt; he weighed each word carefully.

  “When I’m asked whether I have a clear notion of salvation, I can’t say that I do. Some days I feel the need for salvation very strongly, only to find that the next day I’m not so worked up about it. It’s as if the weight of my heart seeking salvation makes me sink to the bottom of a tank of water. And then I rise again to break the surface. When this happens, I think that yesterday my desire for salvation was such that my mind and body were wrenched by it, yet here I am today, so calm. Doesn’t this sense of calm, though, arise from the knowledge that my strong conviction that I will reach salvation is proof that indeed I will?

  “I suffer sometimes, writhing in pain with the need for salvation. And because of this, I don’t want to try to reach some rushed, clumsy, stillborn version. I just believe that I’m on the road to salvation and carry on from there.”

  “What does it feel like, to need salvation so much that you’re in agony?” Ogi asked.

  Guide lifted his head and gazed at Ogi, the look in his eyes half serious, half amused. His expression oozed sincerity. What he was about to say spoke to the core of his being, and Ogi could see in him the selfless, caring teacher of old.

  “This is just based on my experience,” Guide began, letting his head hang again. “There comes a time in a person’s life when he feels the unity of his self disintegrate and realizes he can’t go on living this way. You start life as an organism that knows nothing, and when you reach a certain age (for me, it was when I was past thirty), the glue that holds you together comes undone and you have no clue how to put yourself back together. And before long you die like this, broken in bits, and that’s the end of you. It’s no different from a bug’s life, I thought, and I suffered knowing this. Now when I think of it, though, comparing myself to a bug was bit arrogant on my part.

  “You find yourself seeking salvation, and though this desire isn’t always right there on the surface it never dies out and remains deep down inside you. Just when I was feeling this way, another crisis occurred in my life and I happened to run across Patron. When I began working with him later on, though it didn’t take me to salvation, I did find the agony of feeling my mind and body being dismembered was, to a certain extent, alleviated.

  “As time passed, I became a little independent of Patron and formed my own sect within the church. This became the reason he and I were driven to the point of doing the Somersault. Now it’s just the two of us. But if you ask whether meeting Patron and having gone through hardships with him has made me reach salvation, the answer is no, it did not.

  “Here you need to understand that in some basic sense Patron, too, is split in two. At one extreme there’s the Patron who has mystical experiences. Before the Somersault I helped him relate the visions he had as part of this. I clung to both of these extremes in turn.

  “He’d go over to the other side, and make a connection with God quite smoothly, but those mystical experiences were, for Patron, such a trial that it was painful to be beside him and see how much it took out of him. My role was to transmit the experiences he described in that condition, and I became his closest companion.

  “Once he overcame his exhaustion, though, he’d begin to consider God on his own. This was the other extreme—the fact that he didn’t think of God in personified terms—which again led to suffering. I said to him, ‘But you’ve come face-to-face with God, haven’t you? You go over to the other side, and you receive your visions from something that can only be called God. Never once as I’ve worked as your translator have I doubted that.’ But Patron was unable to agree with my words of encouragement.

  “Patron enters a deep trance where he’s swept away to the other side and, through this experience that’s completely out of his hands, he’s with God. But once he returns to this side and his mind and spirit are back under his control and he regains his identity, he insists that the personified God he’d pictured all these years is not the way things really are. And I think he suffers mightily because of it.

  “Before long Patron began to think the following ideas, which formed his basic teachings before the Somersault. ‘God is in the world. If that weren’t true,’ he explained, ‘the whole world would be as scattered and pointless as the pain you feel tells you it is. Imagine another Earth existing on the outer reaches of the solar system,’ he said, ‘or maybe beyond the Milky Way. A world where God does not exist. Everything on that planet is in pieces, so much so that even if human beings appeared and evolved, they wouldn’t be able to maintain their civilization for many centuries. Human beings would be scattered and die out, and the world would be bereft of people. Whether this is a kind of wilderness-as-hell or a paradise for creatures other than man, I don’t know.…

  “‘On our planet, mankind hasn’t self-destructed but somehow continues to cling precariously
to life. Somehow or other order is maintained, and it’s hard to deny that this is because of God’s presence. Millions of people—Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists—have personified this God, but I don’t see God this way. Though I do want to construct a theory about this God who most definitely does exist.’ This is what Patron said.

  “‘Wide awake on this side,’ Patron continued, ‘I want to find out exactly what it is I confront when I go over to the other side. Once I get a clear picture of this, the world shouldn’t be in pieces for me anymore. Since this conviction that the world is not in pieces is something I’ve created on this side, with my eyes open, I can feel relieved about it. Once I can grasp that sense of relief, my awakened spirit can put in proper perspective the God I see in my visions—and this should lead to a deep and profound sense of spiritual peace I can experience in both worlds. But if I die before I can attain that peace, then I’ll be torn between the two worlds and my disintegrated body and soul will flutter down into the abyss.’

  “Patron was so open to me, I believed everything he said. And I was certain that someday, through this man who himself would be saved, I would reach salvation too. But I also considered at times what it would be like if I didn’t reach salvation through him, and intimations of that frightening thought made me shudder. Patron seemed to struggle with the idea of the need for salvation in an incomparably deeper way than I ever did. One thing I was sure of, though, was this: Apart from his intercession, I could never be saved.”

  As these memories of what Guide had told him came back in snatches, Ogi once again had a sense of what had woken him up. Ah, he thought, this is what I felt earlier. He opened his eyes to the dark purplish gloom and turned on the hard flat bed to face the man-made lake.