Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “After one of these deep trances, when I was exhausted and recovering in bed, Guide became terribly irritated and spoke to me more gruffly than he ever had before.

  “Stop fabricating things, he told me, just because you say you can’t get any orders from the other side. I’m your Prophet, you know—and also for those serious, outstanding young people who want repentance more than anything, I’m their Prophet as well!

  “As I looked back at Guide, who was glaring at me as he sat in a low chair beside me, folding his long legs, I realized he’d seen through my phony vision, and I felt ashamed.

  “Knowing full well that I was lying, Guide had still gone ahead and interpreted it as I wanted him to, transmitting it to the young people who’d sent me the petition. Not only that, he’d done everything in his power to aid the researchers who, encouraged by my words, had begun making concrete plans to put them into practice. He’d been so earnest about restructuring the research institute, doing all he could to accomplish this and passing along the questions the researchers had for me. And yet he knew I was lying! How did he know that?

  “After all these years with me, had Guide lost confidence in the one who pointed toward the end of the world? And in desperation had he made a gamble? While fabricating a vision, I was trying to convince myself that as long as there was not a second vision that denied the first one, that meant it was confirmed. Most likely Guide, my longtime spiritual companion, felt the same way.

  “After having invited the young people to take action, and having done his utmost to aid their preparations, wasn’t he afraid—just at the stage when they would be putting their plans into action—to admit that whatever they did from now on had nothing to do with the will of the other side? Weren’t his misgivings the same exact things I was afraid of? The thought made me shudder.

  “Events quickly moved toward the Somersault. I assume you saw the farce on television. Here I’ll just touch on the how it came about and the plan we put together with the authorities.

  “The idea for the Somersault was quite sudden. Already the relationship between Guide and me was strained. One evening he arrived unannounced. He stormed into my bedroom and yelled at me that the young people had decided to implement their own insurrection. They were going to occupy several nuclear power plants. This would mean not only their own deaths but the annihilation of the church. ‘They have to be stopped!’ Guide shouted. ‘I don’t have the power to do it, and neither do you, but we have to do something drastic!’

  “I hesitated to hear the plan Guide had already formulated. I blamed him and asked him why the young people in the research institute decided to take action unilaterally. Guide said that since yesterday they’d been insisting they also could hear—all on their own—a voice from the other side.

  “I was frantic. I’d fabricated a message to the young people to the effect that God was ordering them to start in a new direction. But hadn’t this been God tricking me into an unconscious self-defensive maneuver because I didn’t want to hear His actual frightening voice?

  “And now, carrying things one step further, when both my conscious and unconscious were doing their utmost to reject this, wasn’t I being tricked again by a different strategy—the young radical faction’s own collective illusion—that made all resistance futile?

  “Guide could see how shaken I was. He glared at me; he said, ‘I won’t let either you or the young people in Izu destroy our church. If I have to drag you around with a rope around your neck, I’m going to make sure you take responsibility for this! Those folks in Izu will learn their lesson!’

  “As all of you saw on television, I had to do some things that were far more shameful than being dragged around with a rope around my neck. The ones who suffered even more directly because of the Somersault, though, were those members of the shock corps of the radical faction, especially those responsible for the Threshold Crosser device. A hurried meeting was held between us and the police, the federal authorities, and executives of the power company. We decided that my Somersault announcement would avoid any mention of this device. Mr. Omuro, though taken into custody, not only avoided going to trial but vanished altogether. There are rumors he escaped to an American military base on Okinawa. Some say he was given a series of electroshock treatments and completely lost his memory. Others say they’ve seen him wandering among the homeless on the streets. Another rumor has it he was stabbed to death by the yakuza. This worried Guide most of all. This was the most base and cruel outcome that Guide feared would happen because of the Somersault.

  “During that period I felt a great joy and at the same time a deep fear. Because I was convinced that God existed, in a realm beyond my arbitrariness. Even if it was a useless bit of resistance, I wanted to betray and deny that God. I was resolved to do that.”

  19: Acceptance and Rejection (II)

  1

  Patron’s talk was serving as an inaugural sermon for their new chapel. Sitting nearby, Ogi could tell how deeply moved Ikuo was by what he heard, though he himself had a hard time following it all. At this point Dancer raised up her pale face and spoke.

  “I’d like to hear from Ikuo too,” she said. “You’re a new member who had nothing to do with the church before the Somersault. But you’d been interested in Patron for a long time and got close to him very quickly.”

  “You’ll have to take my background into consideration,” Ikuo answered briefly, still under the spell of Patron’s magnetism.

  “Why don’t you start there,” Dancer said. “I don’t fully understand the reasons why you were so attracted by Patron that you became an ardent member of the church almost immediately. I know you said you came to the office originally to see me, someone you’d come into contact with a long time ago who was now working for the founder of the church, but that’s not the whole story. You knew quite a lot about the Somersault already, didn’t you?”

  Ikuo looked like he’d finally made up his mind to speak.

  “It’s true I was interested in Patron and Guide’s Somersault,” he began. “I was interested, as well, in the fall of Aum Shinrikyo. When their headquarters at the foot of Mount Fuji was surrounded by the police, I was glued to the TV. It looked like a gunfight might erupt at any moment. I was on pins and needles, wondering whether Aum, with all those chemical weapons, was going to counterattack and start a real revolt. At the time there was another show on TV, a special retrospective on the Somersault. I remember seeing the actual broadcasts, though I was just a child then. Watching these old video-tapes they were showing as a kind of adjunct to the massive coverage of Aum made me interested in Patron and his church all over again.

  “With Aum, of course, in the end nothing happened. Asahara, who should have given the order to attack, was arrested, discovered asleep next to a trunk full of money. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was when I heard this!

  “To tell the truth, when I saw Patron on TV, he looked insincere and aroused my antipathy. Guide, on the other hand, didn’t say much and seemed more trustworthy.

  “Patron explained in this singsong voice how the visions he’d had on the other side were all so much nonsense. ‘The church’s planned actions are just a joke,’ he said. ‘So I call on all members of the church throughout Japan to stop this farce!’

  “What Guide said was a little different. He was asked whether the relationship between the two of them, Guide believing in Patron as the savior, Patron seeing him as the prophet, was also just a joke they’d come up with. ‘It might very well be,’ he said. ‘I believe that the visions from the other side I’ve interpreted have, through our own mistakes, changed into something they shouldn’t be. I hereby declare that all I’ve said till now is null and void. And I want each and every follower to accept this immediately.

  “As for Patron, I thought that if a savior were to announce himself in this day and age he might very well be like this—a pitiful comic figure.”

  “I think your view of me applies before the Somersault too,
Ikuo,” Patron said. “Even after Guide forced me into the role of savior I didn’t really have a strong sense of what it meant. At the time of the Somersault, I had to deny this idea completely, so this was probably the first time I ever really examined the notion of myself as savior.

  “Until I met Guide I was more of a mystical hermit. For a long time I had my trances but couldn’t put my visions into words. And that’s how things would have stayed if I hadn’t met Guide. Not only would I have spent the rest of my life without calling on the world to repent, I might very well have died without ever noticing all those words stored up inside me. Even now all over this planet there must be lots of hermit mystics like that.

  “But once this chubby little middle-aged man was told he was the savior Guide was seeking, he was forcibly dragged out of his dark cave, redolent with his own odors. You’re the savior I’ve been seeking, Guide told me, which may have been just a thought that occurred to him on the spur of the moment. Once he voiced it, though, and once he added that he was my prophet, Guide really began to work actively on my behalf.

  “We established a set relationship after this, that of speaker and listener. I’d always treated my visions like a bout of fever, wanting only, after it was over, to escape from the aftereffects. But Guide took my random mutterings and returned them to me in the form of logically consistent statements. The words I’d mumbled, still dizzy from my trance, now came back to me, via Guide, in a very realistic outline. And reflected in the mirror of Guide’s words I saw an image of myself bathed from head to foot in the light from the other side.

  “That’s how I came to think it was all right for me, the intermediary along with my prophet for these visions from the other side, to be called a savior.... Since the day I first thought that, Ikuo, I no longer had qualms about being called savior—real or fake.”

  2

  Ikuo raised his massive head to look at Patron, and though his words were polite enough he spoke quite firmly.

  “What I’d like to ask Patron is this: When you come back to this side, you speak about the visions you had. And Guide retells them. But in that process, aren’t there some things that cant be expressed in language, certain things that get omitted in the process? When I still hadn’t known you very long, Guide challenged me to ask you an important question. I think he wanted a young person to take over where he had unexpectedly been defeated.

  “While Guide was raising you up he was afraid you’d run wild and be out of his control. Ten years ago, if you had enthusiastically supported the faction’s plans, before Guide discarded his scientists he would first have had to figure out what to do with you.”

  Patron listened carefully to what Ikuo said and was silent for a while before he replied.

  “One of Guide’s goals in founding the research institute was to select young people who would stimulate me. But when the institute was complete, the young people all assembled, he felt he had to train them himself the way he wanted to, as a church elite. But he went too far.

  “As a result, when the young people forged ahead on their own, he had to cut them off, coldly, without a moment’s hesitation. That’s what brought on the Somersault.”

  “Guide was a born teacher, I think,” Dancer said. “When I first got to know him, he wasn’t interpreting Patron’s visions, but he did help bring Patron and us closer together through words we could all understand.

  “Professor Kizu told me that people who are able to experience a relationship with God directly are called mystics. And that people like Guide who can clearly expound what the mystic is trying to convey have a completely different type of gift.

  “A weekly news magazine once ran a special edition titled BIOGRAPHIES OF DUBIOUS POSTWAR JAPANESE MESSIAHS. I was secretly reading the magazine in the office when all of a sudden Guide grabbed it away from me. ‘In my night school classes,’ he told me, ‘I was quite adept at confiscating comic books the students were stealthily reading.’” Dancer grew teary at this, but soon recovered. “And after he looked at it he made me laugh when he said how surprised he was at the number of saviors there’ve been in Japan. And he asked me this: ‘If Patron isn’t the true savior, would that bother you?

  “‘Real saviors are few and far between,’ Guide told me. ‘For people who feel the need for a savior deeply, on a personal and societal level, isn’t even a phony savior better than none? And who’s to say if a savior is real or fake? Though of course it’s best for people who feel the need for a savior and follow him, repenting as we head toward the end of the world, if he turns out to be real.’

  “I agreed with him,” Dancer went on. “I think Guide educated me not to be some amateurish mystical type but someone who could serve as a conduit to society at large. This was the exact opposite of the challenge he threw up for Ikuo.”

  “Guide was a true teacher, for Ikuo and for you,” Patron responded. “I too was taught by him.”

  Dancer waited for Patron to continue, but since he didn’t, she let out everything she’d been holding inside.

  “I don’t know if I really understand Guide’s way of thinking,” she said, “but you might recall, in one of the myths Socrates discusses, how there are people who are like spheres, before people are differentiated into male and female? Guide told me once that he and Patron used to be connected like that, their bodies and spirits with one big artery-like pipe running through them. ‘Our hearts are one,’ he said, ‘pumping blood into that pipe.

  “‘For Patron,’ Guide went on, ‘the conversion of his visions into words is like synthesis or hormone production within a living organism. At that stage the materials or hormones aren’t yet complete. Those flow into the pipe in my direction. And I return this to Patron,’ Guide said, ‘as something solid, as hormones without anything extraneous.’ The relationship between Patron and Guide, then, was as seamless as a dream.

  “When I heard this, I thought that though Patron and Guide had suffered a lot, if they continued to live quietly like this until they died these would be their happy golden years. Like an acolyte in a monastery, I was happy to serve them and I completely forgot about dancing.”

  Ikuo was irritated at Dancer’s romantic way of speaking. “But even before the Somersault,” he asked, “wasn’t there an attempt to sever the pipeline between Patron and Guide? I can understand the radical faction wanting to be directly connected with Patron, without Guide as a go-between. They must have dreamed of becoming mystics themselves, having the same kind of trance visions that Patron did, and then realizing them in the real world.”

  Kizu spoke up. “Just as with Ikuo, I had nothing to do with the church at that time. I’m basing this on church documents I’ve read. But didn’t the church teach that believers following Patron would also have trances?”

  “You have to understand there are two aspects to trances,” Dancer answered. “One aspect is as part of the daily prayers of the followers who’ve accepted Patron as their savior; the other came about when the radical faction went off on their own and committed the mistakes they did. In a normal situation, where the church was healthy, Guide should have been able to keep the radical faction under control.”

  “So the radical faction short-circuited the process, lumping themselves and Patron together,” Kizu said. “Guide felt he had to restore this circuit between himself and Patron, that he had to strengthen his control over their followers, right? So it was unavoidable that he cut off the radical faction—in other words, do the Somersault.”

  “It’s a little strange to be speculating about these things with Dr. Koga and Mr. Hanawa here with us,” Dancer said, “but I’d have to say I agree entirely. And in making sure that happened, wasn’t Guide doing the right thing?

  “The radical members who killed Guide were people who held a particular grudge toward the Somersault. They’re different from the members who’ve moved here with us. I hope the local people will appreciate the distinction. The first group held Guide prisoner and roughed him up to the point where he d
ied, so the whole thing had to be referred to the Tokyo DA’s office. It’s unbelievable how cruel they were, pushing him to the point where the aneurysm in his brain burst.

  “One thing’s for sure,” Dacner went on. “When he was being mistreated by them, Guide maintained his dignity to the very last. Toward the end of the tape recording you can sense he has resigned himself to being killed. He stood up to them. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘are you using professional equipment to record all this? Are you planning to provide the courts with proof of your crime?’ The radicals said, ‘We’re doing it so we can send it to Patron and make him suffer and die.’ They loathed Patron too. They had a great deal of anger toward both men.”

  “But didn’t Guide, who created the institute in the first place, have a pretty intimate relationship with them?” Kizu wondered. “They shelved that relationship and tried to connect directly with Patron. After the Somersault, though, the press claimed that Patron and Guide got some devilish thrill out of letting the radical faction climb to the top of the roof and then yanking away the ladder.”

  “That’s completely wrong,” Dancer insisted. “Guide translated Patron’s visions back to him in understandable language, and then he transmitted them to the followers. That was Guide’s role. Guide wanted to insert the reactions of this group of sensitive, intelligent young people into the pipeline between himself and Patron.”

  Kizu pressed on. “If anyone got a devilish thrill out of this, wasn’t it those who tortured and killed Guide while recording the whole thing? But what was their goal? What possible significance was there in making Guide suffer, physically and emotionally, to the point where he died?”