Kenzaburo Oe - Somersault

The reporter hardly let me get a word in edgewise, with all his questions. I just remember, out of a childish sense of justice, believing it was wrong of the founder and his top executive to have abandoned their followers.

"I worried a lot about what they'd done, and late one night I went to Guide to ask him about it. I think I was afraid to ask Patron directly. I was still young and kind of unstable, emotionally. Guide fdled me in. I'm sure he's told you things about Patron too, and as you know he doesn't talk about something until he's come to a conclusion about it himself. Talking to an ig- norant young thing like me was like pruning off all the branches, laying bare the trunk. Guide told me that Patron has mystical experiences… in other words, he journeys to the other side, talks directly with God or else has a vision from God, and then returns.

'"And I try to put these visions into intelligible language,' he said, 'not an easy job. Our reports regarding these mystical experiences have become our church's gospel. It's been through this process that we've constructed our faith.

'"The church movement that developed in this way gradually started to look outward, toward the world outside, and when this became a major component of what we were, Patron began to have doubts about whether our gospel was really giving people a true picture of God's visions. What's more, at this point some of the young people in the church began preparing to take action, and we had to stop them. It became necessary for us to publicly announce, in as dramatic a fashion as possible, that our gospel was wrong.

That is when we performed our Somersault. Using TV to announce it proved a great success. Through the Somersault, our church and the beliefs of our followers became a national laughingstock. All those who viewed the broad- cast must have had a good laugh. Patron and I survived, living on as we had, not without some pain. I'm sure you've sensed this?'

"Guide opened his heart to me when he told me this," Dancer concluded.

"I decided, no matter what, I wanted to follow Patron, and for the first time I realized I was starting to believe in him."

When Ogi woke up in the middle of the night, the first thought that came to him was the naive notion that hell must be as pitch black as this. An utterly gentle, quiet hell. Not completely without sound, though, for the lake and the hills were still enveloped in rain, but it was weaker than before. At first Ogi thought his bed was narrow, but when he stretched out it supported his back nicely and made him feel secure. As he lay on this wooden box and listened to the rain, it was as if the rain had cut off all his surroundings and was slicing through his body and into an abyss below his bed.

There must have been some reason why he woke up in the middle of the night, but he couldn't figure out what it was or get back to sleep. He recalled an experience similar to Dancer's that he had soon after meeting Patron and Guide.

When Ogi first started visiting Patron's head office as part of his work with the foundation, Dancer had already been working for them for three years. Even then, Patron had impressed him as being quite extraordinary.

At first Patron didn't talk directly to Ogi, so it fell to Guide to explain religious matters to him whenever he had questions. Ogi's questions weren't ones he'd been musing over for a long time, just things he burst out with. Later he found it strange that he'd even said such things. And even stranger was the way Guide answered his questions so painstakingly. At any rate, their talks were less dialogues than lectures.

They began like this. One day Guide appeared in the main house car- rying two LP records, explaining that the new sound system in the annex only handled CDs. Dancer had gone out with Patron to the barbershop, and Ogi was to watch things at home while they were away. Guide listened to his two records, one after another, both performances of the same Mozart sym- phony--number 40 with Bruno Walter conducting-in one case the Berlin Philharmonic, the other the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. Ogi asked him if the two performances were very different, to which Guide replied in a rather curt way that they were both recordings of Walter in his final years and of course they weren't the same, but you couldn't say they were all that differ- ent, either.

Ogi suddenly felt like asking a question that had popped into his mind many times after he'd begun his regular visits to Patron's office. Guide was sitting silently at a right angle to him, and Ogi was distinctly uncomfortable at his sitting there right in front of him. He may well have been influenced by hearing the subtle shades of difference in the two versions of the Mozart symphony by the same conductor, though he couldn't exactly put into words how this affected him.

"In your faith," he finally managed to ask, "what is salvation?"

Guide's response was no longer abrupt; he weighed each word carefully.

"When I'm asked whether I have a clear notion of salvation, I can't say that I do. Some days I feel the need for salvation very strongly, only to find that the next day I'm not so worked up about it. It's as if the weight of my heart seeking salvation makes me sink to the bottom of a tank of water. And then I rise again to break the surface. When this happens, I think that yester- day my desire for salvation was such that my mind and body were wrenched by it, yet here I am today, so calm. Doesn't this sense of calm, though, arise from the knowledge that my strong conviction that I will reach salvation is proof that indeed I will?

"I suffer sometimes, writhing in pain with the need for salvation. And because of this, I don't want to try to reach some rushed, clumsy, stillborn version. I just believe that I'm on the road to salvation and carry on from there."

"What does it feel like, to need salvation so much that you're in agony?"

Ogi asked.

Guide lifted his head and gazed at Ogi, the look in his eyes half serious, half amused. His expression oozed sincerity. What he was about to say spoke to the core of his being, and Ogi could see in him the selfless, caring teacher of old.

"This is just based on my experience," Guide began, letting his head hang again. "There comes a time in a person's life when he feels the unity of his self disintegrate and realizes he can't go on living this way. You start life as an organism that knows nothing, and when you reach a certain age (for me, it was when I was past thirty), the glue that holds you together comes undone and you have no clue how to put yourself back together. And before long you die like this, broken in bits, and that's the end of you. It's no differ- ent from a bug's life, I thought, and I suffered knowing this. Now when I think of it, though, comparing myself to a bug was bit arrogant on my part.

"You find yourself seeking salvation, and though this desire isn't always right there on the surface it never dies out and remains deep down inside you.

Just when I was feeling this way, another crisis occurred in my life and I hap- pened to run across Patron. When I began working with him later on, though it didn't take me to salvation, I did find the agony of feeling my mind and body being dismembered was, to a certain extent, alleviated.

"As time passed, I became a little independent of Patron and formed my own sect within the church. This became the reason he and I were driven to the point of doing the Somersault. Now it's just the two of us. But if you ask whether meeting Patron and having gone through hardships with him has made me reach salvation, the answer is no, it did not.

"Here you need to understand that in some basic sense Patron, too, is split in two. At one extreme there's the Patron who has mystical experiences.

Before the Somersault I helped him relate the visions he had as part of this. I clung to both of these extremes in turn.