Kenzaburo Oe - Somersault

'Ikuo, have you spoken to Patron about this?"

"No. I've only just started working as his driver, and I haven't had a chance. Also, I think if I don't prepare myself before I talk with him, he'll end up having nothing more to do with me."

"But you came to work for Patron because you expected someday he might fulfill this longing you have toward God, right?"

"That's right. I met Dancer through a connection we had from before, but I felt Patron has the power to help us transcend our limits-something not unrelated to God."

Ikuo's words were not entirely unexpected, yet as he listened to this earnest confession Kizu was surprised and sympathetic.

"If that's the case, you should tell Patron exactly how you feel," Guide said to Ikuo, speaking the exact words of encouragement Kizu had been about to use. "Right now it would appear that Patron is laying the groundwork for a major vision, the kind that has eluded him for so long. At the next opportu- nity he may be able to interpret God's message to you in that blurred net of light. I'll call it your God for the time being, but there's no contradiction between that and Patron's all-inclusive God."

Kizu didn't quite follow Guide's final words. Ikuo went back to the first remarks, to make sure of what was most critical to him.

"Why would that be significant for me? Is it okay for me to think that he's interpreting a message from the God who once called out to me and was silent afterward?"

"What's wrong with that? With Patron trying to undergo a deep trance for the first time in so long, this may be an encouragement to him. Your ques- tions to Patron may spur him on."

"But if that happened, would it be a good thing?"

"If what happened?"

"If I happened to give him a push that affected the way he's living his life."

"You're afraid as an outsider you may have an influence on Patron?

Rather than an old person like me influencing him, it may very well need to be a young person who's struggling, working beside him, searching for the way. The poor in spirit. That would be you, all right. Though I've always seen you as the opposite type."

Guide was clearly drunk by now, but Ikuo pressed on.

"I don't want to hear Patron telling me some story just to make me happy."

"Patron isn't that clever," Guide said. "It's more likely the opposite. It you help him find his direction and give him a shove, that'll be his way of putting his life back together. Right now Patron's beginning a new movement.

It's actually been my hope that with his newfound desire to be active again, a young person like yourself who takes these things to heart would give him a shove in the right direction. Speaking from experience, though, once you get deeply involved with Patron, you won't come out unscathed. There's no way to avoid being influenced."

"So what should I do?" Ikuo asked. "If I were to sit down face-to-face with him, I wouldn't be able to say a thing. Committing a terrorist act would be a whole lot easier."

"Summon up the courage to appeal to him," Guide said. "Right now, Patron is awakening from his preparations for a vision, and the physical and emotional aftereffects will last for some time. But once he's over that, let's tell him your thoughts. Professor Kizu will help us too, won't you?"

Even though he was speeding along in the dark at eighty miles an hour, Ikuo turned around to Kizu and spoke in an urgent, almost pushy, tone.

"Please write a letter for me, explaining why I need to talk with Patron.

I haven't revealed everything to you, Professor, but still I'd like you to write the letter."

Patron had taken to his bed to recuperate and now, five days later, he was allowed to return to normal activities. In the evening, while Dancer was helping him take a bath, Ogi took a phone call from Guide in his annex.

Patron's bathroom was like a greenhouse, a brightly lit wing built onto the north side of his bedroom study. Patron liked to take long soaks in his roomy Western-style tub. Cordless phone in hand, Ogi called to him from just outside the changing room. There wasn't any sound of running water, but no one seemed to have heard him, so he stepped inside the changing room and stood facing the open door to the bathroom, going too lar to turn back.

The first thing Ogi saw was Patron stretched out in the bottom of the nearly empty tub that lay at right angles to his line of sight. Dancer abruptly cut off his view as she slipped in from the side and leaned her nude body over the edge of the tub; she had a detachable shower hose in her right hand. Her head seemed bulky with her hair piled high, and she cast a piercing glare at Ogi from upside down. She didn't try to hide anything; her legs were spread wide on the tiles. With her magnificent body, then, she was trying to hide Patron's naked form. Ogi placed the phone down on the threshold and re- treated. Guess even the changing room's off limits to me! he thought, find- ing it comical and yet disturbing.

Dancer soon appeared, neatly dressed, in front of Ogi's desk.

"I guess there's nothing we can do now that you saw it," she said, in a sort of affected calm, "but I would appreciate your not saying anything to Ikuo, Ms. Tachibana, or, of course, Professor Kizu."

She turned her back on him, her rump tightly sheathed in her skirt, and walked to the kitchen; after a time, she came back, her tongue visible between her slightly parted lips.

"You saw the wound in Patron's side, right? When I said you saw it a moment ago, what did you think I was talking about?"

Dancer said this very quickly and then gazed at Ogi silently, her face flushed with anger.

"When you wash a man's body, you have to undress yourself, right? If you think I was reproaching you for looking between my legs, I don't know what to say! When animals aren't in heat, their genitals aren't even genitals really, are they? Which goes double for humans! You're no longer the inno- cent you once were. I thought you'd grown up a little!"

Dancer twirled her high waist in an about-face to the right and set off again to the kitchen to prepare a late dinner for Patron, Guide, Ogi, and herself.

Ogi felt numbed with a vague coldness as he rested his face in his hands.

He lowered his eyes to some documents on his desk, but he couldn't concen- trate on the words. I saw it, he thought, and I did turn away as fast as I could, didn't I? Didn't I try to erase what I saw as much as I could? Despite what went on with Mrs. Tsugane, I set my gaze on Dancer's fleshy genitals! But I did see it, and can see it still-that reddish dark thing on the upper part of Patron's chubby white left side.

Back when Patron was made the leader of the church, did he already have that red gouged-out pomegranate-shaped wound in his side? That wasn't a scar but an open wound, with fresh blood oozing out. Ten years ago when he did his Somersault, was the wound like that? Or did it appear in the decade that followed? Or maybe it opened up only now that he's starting a rel igious movement again? At any rate, Ogi thought, now I've seen something I never imagined I would-the strangest of wounds.

The following week was a busy one for Ogi. The reason lay in that phone call he'd answered from Guide to Patron, the urgent call that led to all those complications. Guide had told him over the phone that he wanted to have a chance to talk with Patron.

The doctor had recommended, as part of his recovery, that Patron take a short trip for a change of scenery, so Patron decided to take the three young People, Ikuo, Dancer, and Ogi, on a trip outside Tokyo. Preparations fell to Ogi. He got in touch with his mother for the first time in a long while and had her send him the keys to their cottage in Nasu Plateau-the place where he first saw Mrs. Tsugane. Ms. Tachibana dropped by the office on a day off from work at the library-she was planning to quit the job someday-and Ogi decided their trip should take place on Saturday and Sunday, when Ms.