Kenzaburo Oe - Somersault

"Up till the stage where the ideology behind this young elite sect in Izu was set, Guide and I worked in harmony. Once the whole body of believers accepted the Izu sect's ideas, and the shock troops that would initiate a crisis grew until they had the power to destroy an entire city, then my sermons anticipating a crisis would take on a real sense of power. Guide wasn't the only one who believed this; I did too.

"The reason I preached about making my visions of the end of the world a reality is that I wanted the people who live on this planet to have the courage to face that crisis, while they still had the energy to be restored to life out of the ruins that, even then, were already appearing. What would be the point of hav- ing the human race repent en masse if they didn't have the courage or energy to do anything about it? That was my doctrine, and this was supposed to be the source of the orders for whatever actions the church was about to take."

This is a sermon in itself, Ogi thought. The sense of emotional tension that came across struck him as incongruous, so much so that he felt like in- terrupting Patron to say, Hey! I'm not one of your believers, I just work here!

Though he was, of course, up to his ears in helping Patron restart his reli- gious activities. What did Dancer think about all this? Just as this thought occurred to Ogi, Dancer interrupted Patron, though what she said didn't answer Ogi's unspoken question.

"Ogi and I have heard all this before from Guide," she said. "He painted a vivid picture of what the end of the world looks like in visions. Isn't that right?" Ogi, suddenly urged to agree, nodded but felt uneasy about how Patron would interpret his assent. "We've all read newspaper articles about overpopulation, our lack of resources, and the destruction of the environment, but the images that Guide painted for us really struck us to the core. They were heartrending. Guide told us you have profound visions, which you de- scribe in a torrent of words. He also told us he feels a great anxiety as he interprets these visions, anxiety about whether or not he's getting them right."

"It's not that I see visions," Patron said, "but rather that I'm assaulted by them, and the question then is how to convey this to people. The only way I could put them into some sort of logical language was through Guide's help.

He's the one who understands better than I-at the linguistic level-what my visions are all about."

"But it seems to me you're the one who established the basic system of the church," Dancer said. "Guide told me, too, that it might be impossible to convey the whole of your visions in language people can understand. Man- kind faces a cruel future, is at a dead end, staring at a wall; as long as people don't have a way to scale that wall, they'll never understand the depths of the crisis they're in. People are really good at ignoring danger. The task for your church was to bring the end of the world closer, to let people actually see it.

How was this supposed to happen? The only alternative was to present a model of this crisis to force people to repent. The tactics of the Izu radical faction were to precipitate this crisis, radically and concretely. That's what Guide said. Patron has just spoken of this, but the point I'm trying to make is that the two of them were in agreement at that time."

Ogi decided that Dancer's long interruption was a tactic of her own to give Patron a break from doing all the talking. But it also worked to encour- age the others to speak up, and now Ikuo raised a question.

"Setting aside the issue of the Izu radical faction and their gaining power in the church, if Patron's visions were the basis for the church's teachings, wasn't that doctrine correct and isn't it still correct? I mean, during the past ten years this crisis hasn't been resolved, has it? So why was it necessary at the time of the Somersault to deny these teachings? You and Guide announced that it was all nonsense, right?"

Sitting in a faded purple chair that Ogi remembered from childhood, Patron shifted to face Ikuo. As if to put a stop to this, Dancer spoke up.

"If you're going to talk about Patron's state of mind at the time of the Somersault, then all of us-since we weren't present at the time-need to consider the background. Don't you agree, Ikuo? The elite group that Guide created was already acting on its own, trying to bring ordinary people face- to-face with what Patron envisioned in his trances. When they got the idea to move the whole church body in that direction, the radical sect went ahead and took action, attempting to get the entire church implicated. Although the church's attitude wasn't yet set, the radical faction went ahead with its adventurist schemes."

Ikuo still didn't give up trying to speak directly to Patron. "I was still basically a child," he said, "when I saw the whole Somersault affair on TV.

Your announcement seemed like one more in a long string of jokes. This was right after Chernobyl, and I remember being upset, thinking it was absolutely insane to intentionally try to cause an accident like that. But I was also agi- tated by the thought that God had told the radical faction to Do it."

"If it was really God telling the radical faction to act, they wouldn't have collapsed so easily," Dancer said, not giving Patron a chance to respond. "With the information that Patron and Guide gave the authorities at the time of their Somersault, the radical faction's shock troops were arrested on their way to the nuclear power facility at Mount Fuji and their intentions for the plant came to light; the authorities, though, downplayed the scale of what they were plan- ning. Once power was brought to bear on the situation, in other words, the whole thing was treated as a farce. Guide told me that since it would have been too much for the government to admit the existence of a sophisticated plan to blow up nuclear power plants, they treated it as a crude, childish idea as a way of defusing any concerns the public might have. And what was par- ticularly effective in this effort to downplay and mock the plans-as you are well aware, Ikuo--was Patron and Guide's Somersault, that comical TV performance."

As Ogi saw it, Ikuo's question to Patron was at the heart of what really concerned the young man. He didn't think Patron, having undertaken this short trip to the cottage, could very well refuse to answer, nor could he un- derstand why Dancer insisted so strongly on blocking Patron's reply. Ogi was just about to summon up his courage and tell Dancer to let them hear what Patron had to say when the phone rang.

The phone was in the dining room, next to the spacious living room with its fireplace; to keep the heat in during the winter the glass door between the two rooms was kept closed. The ringing startled them. It was not yet 9 P.M., but all the surrounding houses were shut up and the silence of the high plain was more like the middle of the night. Ogi stood up to answer the phone and noticed that Patron looked particularly tense.

The caller wasn't unexpected-Ms. Tachibana, who was taking care of things back at the office-but what she had to say was. Several former mem- bers of the church were scheduled to visit Guide that evening, and he'd told Ms. Tachibana not to prepare any meal for them but to just serve tea; if they showed up after she went home she should lay out the tea things before leav- ing. He also told her that if Dancer called on their way to Nasu Plateau, Ms. Tachibana wasn't to say anything about Guide's having visitors.

The visitors didn't come while Ms. Tachibana was at the office, so she went ahead and followed the recipes Dancer left her and made dinner for Guide, whose diet had been restricted ever since he fell ill. After arranging the dinner on the dining table, Ms. Tachibana left to return to the college town where her brother was waiting in their apartment. Around eight o'clock she began to worry about the visitors and phoned the annex to tell Guide to leave the dirty cups and dishes for her to wash later, but there was no response. She called the office in the main building, but still no answer. She was so worried she thought she would go back to Seijo, despite the late hour.