by Kenzaburo Oe
Later on, when he reviewed the order of events in his mind, he was certain this is how it happened, but soon after he turned in the direction of what he sensed, in a sky that was so jet black he hadn’t closed the curtains before he went to bed, far off in the still-falling rain, he saw it happen. A large light lemon-yellow disc floated up, at the top of which were five shining hemispheres. The lower part was a giant black upright pillar in which were three shining rectangular doors. It was as if a UFO had flown though the vast darkness and suddenly come to a halt.
Ah! Ogi heard a voice call out, something halfway between a sigh and a shriek.
The cry came from Dancer’s room . . . so this wasn’t just some illusion he alone was seeing! Ogi looked hard into the gloom and saw the glowing saucer and the pillar with its bright doors open soon shut in the rocklike darkness.
I believe God is in this world too, Ogi thought, half asleep, but not a personified God who has the facial features of any particular race—a God instead who would appear like this structure, built of light and darkness. Ogi knew, though, that in the morning he wouldn’t be able to regain this total understanding he now had, and that he wouldn’t speak of it to Dancer. And certainly not to Patron.
18: Acceptance and Rejection (I)
1
After it grew light out and Ogi had awakened again, he lay still in his wooden box of a bed, waiting for time to pass. The night before, he and Dancer had talked until late and had made do with just a light dinner of ham and lettuce sandwiches. They’d found the sandwiches at a local market, and though the place didn’t seem to have many customers Dancer declared the ham to be fantastic and showed a great deal of interest in the people who produced it locally. That was all they ate, washed down by some milk, so now, in the morning, Ogi didn’t feel any special need to use the toilet. He also hesitated to use the bathroom before Dancer had a chance to.
Ogi gazed up from his bed at the foliage of the stand of Japanese oaks that cut off his view of the broad sky. From the window on the lake side, there were overly luxuriant pomegranates and camellias bursting with leaves as far as the eye could see. The trees were covered with young leaves, bright green against the cloudless sky; only the places where the leaves overlapped were dark green, like a multilayered watercolor. A childhood memory came to him—from a school outing, perhaps, he couldn’t recall exactly—of lying down like this and gazing up at tree branches from this angle.
Soon the whole area was filled with a cloud of soft fist-sized little lumps descending from the sky and letting out high-pitched screeches: a flock of wild birds. Two or three of the birds, like puffy little white balls, hung upside down on the tips of the slender branches of the Japanese oaks. Before long, in search of bugs to eat, the flock flew off to another corner of the slope, and a profound silence returned.
After a while, the same shout he’d heard last night came from the next room. Ogi sat up in bed, ready to meet the intruder. Dancer came in. She had on green pajamas, and her mouth was open wider than usual.
“There’s fresh blood! Just below the window!” Dancer said to Ogi reproachfully.
Ogi had slept in his underwear. He wrapped the light bedcover around his waist before going over to the window and shoving open the heavy single pane. And as he looked out, he too was taken aback. From the western edge of the house a pellucid stream seemed to meander over the grass and flow into the lake. From the stone apron where the stream turned, a red belt seeped upward toward them. Ogi took a breath and, after realizing what he was seeing, said, “They’re lake crabs that’ve floated up because of all the rain last night.”
Dancer looked back at him with a look of disgust, then took her turn looking out the window.
“They’re pretty small crabs, and so many of them. They’re not even boiled, yet look how red they are. Anyone would think it’s blood flowing.”
Her slender taut calves emerged from under her pajama bottoms. Her whole body, from her thighs, butt, and waist—trained through her dancing—to her straight shoulders and thin neck, was a strange mix of firmness and fragility.
“You spent your childhood in Tokyo,” Ogi said, “and earlier in downtown Asahikawa, right? I imagine you’ve never seen crabs float up like this before.”
“So you know all about the flora and fauna in Hokkaido. But do you know the names of the birds that were just here? The Japanese great tit.”
Standing beside the window, Dancer turned toward Ogi, seated on his box bed, the color quickly returning to her face.
“I agree with Asa-san that this is a special place,” she said, trying to regain the upper hand. “I guess I jumped to conclusions. I find it amazing how the abandoned followers of Patron and Guide, while the two of them were in hell, laid the groundwork right here, in this land. You know something? In the middle of the night, I saw a sign that the land here accepts our church!”
Ogi recalled what he’d seen the night before. But he’d also been there when Dancer had been handed the complete set of keys to the chapel. It was hard to imagine that someone else had gotten into the chapel and turned on the lights in the middle of the night.
Leaving Ogi to his thoughts, Dancer disappeared toward the bathroom near the entrance, her pajamas swishing like a dance costume.
As they ate a repeat of last night’s supper, they heard a new disturbance from the far shore. Dancer was sitting at the dining table diagonally across from Ogi, her back to the east as they ate, and they both turned to look at the glistening trees and the building, newly washed in the rain. In the forest behind the chapel, people hidden by the stand of trees were rushing by. In the wind blowing up from the south there was the sound of feet, a line of people cutting through the forest.
“Lumberjacks, maybe?” she asked. “Heading toward jobs in the woods?”
“If that’s what it is, it’d just be a couple of them. And wouldn’t they use animal trails to go up the hill?”
“People hunting wild boars?”
“It sounds too orderly, like a troop of Boy Scouts out on a hike.”
“I thought this was a quiet place, but I guess not.”
“But at least we’re not being surrounded by people with placards opposing the arrival of the ‘fanatics,’” Ogi said.
Dancer said she wanted to go over that morning to see if the cottage Asa-san had suggested for Patron to use was suitable. Before she went down along the narrow path toward the dam she went out to look at the crabs close up, only to report back to Ogi that they must have slipped into new holes that had opened up in the soil because they’d disappeared. Her shoes were muddy, and in one hand she held a newly emerged brown cicada on a butterbur leaf. One of the cicada’s forelegs was missing its first joint, and as it tried to clamber up the higher edge of the butterbur leaf it tumbled down in a comical way.
“I imagine it must have been pretty surprised after spending a thousand days tucked away under the soil to emerge and find it doesn’t have enough legs to cling to the trees. Would you choose a branch where its cry can be heard easily and put it there? The reason they cry is in order to mate, right?”
Ogi took the cicada, leaf and all, and placed the poor little creature on the branch of an oak that faced the lake, the leaves heavy after the rain.
When they stood at the entrance to the house set aside for Patron, an entrance made up of round stones held together with cement, they remembered they had left all the keys for the other buildings on top of the lectern in the chapel. Dancer went back to retrieve them.
For the five minutes she was gone, the sound of the water coursing down the channel from the forest into the lake grew noticeably louder. Worried about Dancer, Ogi peeked in from the entrance of the chapel carved into the wall. In front of the space between the lined-up chairs and the far wall, Dancer was down on her knees, leaning against the lectern. Ogi removed his shoes, went inside, and found her gazing up at him like some young girl who’d been beaten as she pointed in front of her. On the floor lay a small unblemished little sk
ull facing in their direction. Thigh bones, ribs, and other large bones were laid out to form a complete skeleton, the finger bones and other smaller bones pushed over to one side. Next to this were fragments of bones, like small branches, laid out to spell YOUNG FIREFLIES.
Dancer’s shoulders shuddered slightly, and in a tearful voice she said, “I thought that was a sign, but all it was was them stealing the keys to this place and doing this. In the morning we weren’t likely to come over here, so they grew impatient and kicked up a racket. I can’t believe how cunning these people are who don’t want Patron’s church here.”
2
After Ogi made a call from the office beside the chapel, Asa-san got in touch with Mr. Matsuo, the head priest, and they both rushed over. They didn’t think the bones had anything to do with a crime, but they didn’t disturb them until finally Asa-san told Mr. Matsuo to gather them all up in a cardboard box. Ogi returned to the office where he’d made the phone call, and Asa-san told them about the YOUNG FIREFLIES.
“That’s a name found in legends from the Old Town, the section apart from Maki Town. The name and practice died out long ago, but when one of the elderly people in the main house of my family passed away, they revived the practice at his funeral because he put great stock in the old customs. I think I have a good idea where those bones came from.
“I’m sure you got this impression yesterday when you looked up from the road along the riverbed, but the land around here is shaped like the inside of an urn. Young Fireflies refers to a custom where the young people of the town light torches and climb up to the top of the forest at night. The young people here just liked the name, apart from the ceremony associated with it, and gave it to their young men’s association.
“Children are basically very conservative, you know. Your moving in here marks a change in the status quo, so they’re against it. I’d heard rumors that they were eager to do something to express their opposition. If this is what they came up with, I’d have to say it’s pretty scurrilous. Scurrilous is the word old people use here when something’s vulgar....
“Since it’s come to this, I’ll have my husband talk with the junior high principal.
“Be that as it may, I was in charge of the keys for this building. I thought if I let them make spare keys for the chapel, they might use it for their junior high chorus practice. But they’ve repaid good with evil, you could say. It’s all quite scurrilous, and I’m ashamed and truly sorry you had to be upset this way.”
The next day, Patron, accompanied by Ms. Tachibana and Morio, arrived at the Matsuyama airport. Twenty or so former radical-faction members joined them there, having driven down from Tokyo in a caravan of sedans and a minivan. After linking up with Kizu, Ikuo, Dr. Koga, and Mr. Hanawa, who’d arrived at Matsuyama Station on the Yosan Line, the entire group arrived at the Hollow in force.
Apart from Dancer and Ogi, this was the first contingent of the new church to arrive in the area, and a few local people waited along the road by the riverbed to watch their arrival. In the lead car Morio sat next to Patron in the backseat, dressed quite stylishly in a long midnight-blue overcoat, gray chinos, and lightly tinted metal-frame glasses. Seeing him sitting there gazing up with his splendid forehead and strongly etched nose, someone reported later to Asa-san that he was sure Morio must be the founder of the church.
Having set up his residence in the Hollow, Patron decided to meet within the week with the widow of the founder of the defunct church who had transferred the chapel to them. With so many new people coming from the outside to live in the area, the question of securing enough food for all of them had become a pressing matter, and as one practical step toward solving this, Asa-san introduced the widow, Satchan, the owner of the Farm, to Patron.
Asa-san had been hoping that Patron would talk to Mr. Matsuo, herself, and others who had been connected with the Church of the Flaming Green Tree about the new church he planned to start here. The people of Maki Town, too, had expressed the same hope, and now that the church had actually begun moving in, they again proposed such a meeting to Asa-san, who was acting as intermediary between the church and the town government.
One practical issue soon arose. The group in Maki Town opposing Patron had already published a broadside revealing that the former radical faction would be participating in Patron’s restarted religious movement and that one of the leaders of this faction, Mr. Hanawa, would be living here with his colleagues to help Dr. Koga. What’s more—and this was the critical point—the town would be hiring Dr. Koga to run the clinic in the Old Town. As before, objections sprang up among the town leaders that the former radical faction, the one the newspapers had accused of the death of Guide, was going to be moving into the Hollow.
These issues would normally have been discussed by the mayor and Patron, but Patron was asked beforehand to talk in an informal town hall meeting with local citizens.
Asa-san, who had already convinced Ogi that she was a person who held considerable sway locally, as well as someone who didn’t beat around the bush when it came to formulating plans, proposed that Patron first meet with Satchan, and Patron agreed. Dancer took advantage of this opportunity to ask Ogi to seek a more detailed explanation than they’d heard before as to how the former radical faction was to be dealt with.
What worried Ogi most was that the widow of the founder of the Church of the Flaming Green Tree might not like it if internal affairs of the church were discussed with local people—especially in the chapel. But Satchan agreed to attend, as long as Asa-san and Mr. Matsuo were also there, and for the first time in a long while entered the chapel that her church had once owned. Town officials had also wanted to attend, but Asa-san had been able to limit their attendance to just a few of the more influential members.
“How do you feel about the religion you’ve created, leading people to salvation—and about your own salvation?” Satchan asked, to start off the meeting.
“Well,” replied Patron, recoiling somewhat, “didn’t you and your late husband also found a church?”
“Satchan merely wants to ask an honest question of someone who is involved in a similar movement—and in the same place, no less,” Asa-san explained encouragingly.
“I don’t feel so much that I’m continuing some teachings of the founder of our church,” Satchan explained in a softer tone. “I spend more time considering how my husband felt about things himself, as a flesh-and-blood human being. I believe he tried to lead his followers to salvation, but when I remember how he died I wonder whether he cared about his own salvation at all. I’ve been pondering this for quite some time.”
Patron clearly relaxed when he heard this. He also seemed to show interest in this earnest individualistic woman, well into her middle years.
“Before I did the now-infamous Somersault,” Patron said, “when I was quite involved in religious activities, I don’t think I really seriously considered my own salvation either. It was after I fell into hell that the question of my salvation became a pressing matter. When you lead a religious organization, you soon become terribly busy, rushing around like crazy all the time. I had no time to consider whether I was saved, or wasn’t saved, or even whether I would reach salvation in the end or not. What I wanted most was to lead the suffering young people who came to us for salvation. I actually groped for ways to push them in that direction.
“What I know from my own experience—and this is the same both at the beginning of the church and when it was at its height—is that there was indeed a way for the suffering people who came to our church to find the salvation they sought. All of them were proceeding toward their own salvation. The greater their awareness that they were not yet saved, the greater their conviction that they were on the path to salvation, despite the difficulties they might encounter. In fact, it was the very awareness that they hadn’t yet reached salvation that accelerated their faith.
“As I’ve thought about my own salvation, or my image of salvation in the ten years since the So
mersault, my ideas have become simplified—boiled down to a single mathematical formula, if you will. When a person thinks about death or is actually facing death, if he’s convinced that his life and death are fine the way they are, isn’t he saved?
“In my new church, my followers should be able to say, when they think about death or are actually staring down death, Let’s go! Hallelujah! is another way of putting it. The basic orientation of my movement is to lead people gently in that direction. In order to do that, though, one has to truly repent. As long as one has a true awareness that the end of the world is near, this can be accomplished.
“The new church’s religious movement I’ve been contemplating is that simple—that naive, even. What I want to convey to you is that in the ten years since the Somersault this is the kind of simplicity, naive, unadorned, and stripped of anything extraneous, that has occupied my mind.”
“The Savior of the Church of the Flaming Green Tree, that’s what we called my husband,” Satchan said, “if the Savior were alive now, I think he might not see what you’ve said as so simple or naive. Quite frankly, he wasn’t very educated when it came to religious ideas, yet he was possessed by spiritual matters and in that sense was an unfortunate person. He was still a sort of lackadaisical savior when his old enemies stoned him to death.
“He was called Savior like you were, but he wasn’t the ultimate Savior. He believed that until the advent of the ultimate Savior there would be countless saviors, that when the final Savior appeared all other saviors, being linked with him, would—in the end—become real saviors. He gave a sermon on this, here in this chapel....
“He recognized himself as a sort of lukewarm savior, one of those countless lackadaisical saviors.... That’s the sort of thinking he wanted to believe in. Fifteen years after his death, I’ve grown more sympathetic to that view.
“If I understand your remarks correctly, putting my own spin on them, since I believe my husband’s one of the ones who will be tied with the real Savior, I know that even when I’m on the verge of death I’ll feel saved. The details of my own personal history would surprise you, but I would like to second what you say, as far as my own life is concerned. Let’s go! Though I have the feeling that when I’m actually on my deathbed and say that, there won’t be anyone around to hear me.”
