Kenzaburo Oe - Somersault

'"I believe there are many like me now. Compared to two thousand years ago, many more people are leading mankind toward the final day, which I interpret as a sign that indeed the end time is drawing near. I stand before you as one of those people. Because I am, I hope to relate a vision that responds to the question I was just asked in a clearer, more inclusive way.

"'The next time one of my trances comes over me, that's what I plan to do. Striving to answer this ultimate question will add new sentences to the book in which everything, from the beginning to the end, is already written.

'"Today what we've done is confirm this. Everything has gone accord- ing to what's been written in the design, from the Prophet preparing this re- search facility, to his choosing all of you, to finally having me come here. Let's pray, not forgetting to thank the Prophet for what he's done. Hallelujah!'"

Patron's style of speaking, his pauses and his tone of voice, were just like his sermons; once he came to an end, he changed gears, a faint smile arising from something Kizu could only guess at.

"If you look at this first sermon I gave at the Izu research center, it would be irresponsible of me to insist that Guide was solely responsible for training the radical faction. As the new Guide, didn't you think the same thing as you listened to me? Anyhow, that's how it began, and though there were all sorts of complicated situations within the church at the time, my visions were what sparked the radical faction to develop its so-called Threshold Crosser device."

Noticing Kizu's suspicious look, Patron said with his fixed Cheshire cat smile, "It's a device to convert a nuclear power plant into a nonportable nuclear bomb. And if this had spread, you'd better believe mankind would have crossed a threshold it was never meant to."

The ceiling of the prewar Western-style kitchen was strangely low, the window smeared, and the putty around the frame greasy. Outside, large wet snowflakes were falling; Kizu watched them out to the edge of the faint light illuminating the scene.

It was after dinner. Patron was listening to the CD version of Furt- wângler conducting Bach's St. Matthew Passion on the sound system set up next to the dining table. Soon a cold look came to his lace, and without con- cerning himself with Kizu he shut off the music halfway through. Outside, beyond Patron's drooping shoulders, sleet was changing to snow. Kizu felt uneasy, as if his sense of hearing had suddenly been stripped away from him, and he imagined Patron must be even more sensitive to the sudden silence.

Patron went into the kitchen to start washing up, and Kizu followed after him.

There was a huge pile of dirty dishes. At the beginning of the week Guide had taken a turn for the worse and been put in a private room, and Dancer, who'd been with him the whole time, had returned in the late after- noon for the first time to report on his condition. After dinner with Ogi, Ikuo, and Ms. Tachibana, the young people set off for the hospital. Ms. Tachibana, living with her younger brother, had to be home by a fixed time, so it was left to Kizu and Patron to clean up.

With his long years living alone in New Jersey, and now in his Tokyo apartment, Kizu was used to cooking and cleaning up on his own, but Patron was a compete novice when it came to washing dishes. It might have been easier if Kizu had done it alone. Patron, though, seemed genuinely afraid of withdrawing to his bedroom study. At Dancer's insistence there were no chemical cleansers in the kitchen, so it took quite some time to wash the filthy dishes the young people had left using only a large bar of coconut oil soap rubbed into a sponge. Kizu soon took over washing the dishes, Patron the drying. As he dried one dish after another, Patron began a long monologue.

"A while ago I told you how I came to know Guide, and how I was making a living as a fortune-teller. Guide's wife and autistic son ran out on him. His wife had left a note. She said he worried so much and was so overly solicitous toward their son she felt stifled, and they couldn't take it anymore.

'If you come after us and try to get us to come home,' she said, 'we'll kill our- selves. Just leave us alone.'

"When Guide brought this letter to me he was beside himself. A woman whose son was going to night classes at the high school equivalency school felt she just couldn't stand by without doing anything and brought Guide to one of our meetings. He wasn't hoping his wife and son would come back, he just wanted to know they were all right. Instead of trying to search for them, he thought I should read the letter, go into a trance, and tell him how they were. I had two different types of trances, and this required the shallow kind, which I could go into and out of at will.

"The scene I saw in my trance was clear enough but hard to pin down.

A middle-aged woman was sitting on a bus, a bulky bag beside her. From the shadows a young man leaped into the picture, and when he reached the front row of seats he rested his hand on the shoulder of a man sitting there and, in a quiet voice, asked him if he was getting off at the next stop.

"When I'd said this much, Guide began to tremble. 'That's definitely my wife and son,' he said. What he said next was the very first of his inter- pretations of my visions, one might say. 'My son likes buses,' he said, 'espe- cially the front row. My wife or I tell him not to, but he always sidles up to the front and asks whoever's sitting there that question. My wife's people live in Boso and earn their living farming and fishing, so they must be carrying fish and vegetables into Tokyo to sell. Seeing as how they make a round trip every day into the city on trains and buses, my son must be happy.'

"Even after Guide had determined where his family was, he still came sometimes to our meetings; before long his wife filed for divorce. His wife was afraid of him and didn't show up in family court, so the divorce wasn't finalized, but Guide just left it at that. He said the reason he didn't get di- vorced was like the idea you had, Professor Kizu, of you and Ikuo grasping hands and heading off to the other side. When his autistic son was to head off to the other side, Guide wanted to be there to help him. Guide had been over- zealous in educating his son so the boy had rebelled. When Guide had tried to suppress the rebellion, the mother felt sorry for the boy and the two of them ran away from home.

"Still, though, Guide's dream was to be able to help his son on the other side, to mediate between his son's soul and God. He couldn't give up this idea.

Guide was able to interpret my visions, and finally that became his full-time role. But behind his becoming a pillar of the church lay these personal emo- tional motives.

"And now Guide is unconscious, his body reacting only mechanically.

On the one hand is the brain of the autistic son, closed to the world outside; on the other, the brain of the father, struck down by an aneurysm. I'm haunted by a scene of endless sky and far-off horizon, with two oval-shaped dishes like these lying there. And a human brain on each one."

Patron held a large plate to the lacy apron at his chest, and while Kizu pictured what was happening in a far-off building surrounded by snow, he almost burst out laughing. With Patron's combination of the tragic and the comic, his solemn seriousness and his occasional doubtfulness, Kizu couldn't help but know he was in the presence of someone quite special.

"What really hurts most when I think of Guide is what he told me after he had his first attack, when he recovered and came home from the hospital.

When the blood vessel in his forehead burst, he said, he didn't get confused right away. He felt bad, got up go to the rest room to try to throw up, and was halfway there when he suddenly found himself not inside a building but standing in a wilderness at twilight. And with a great noise, this whole wil- derness was rolling up from the edges at the horizon. And then he lost con- sciousness. Guide used this expression, which makes it seem that the vision I had that I just told you about was something he told me. That's how strong a relationship we'd built up over such a long time.