Kenzaburo Oe - Somersault

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 headquar- ters 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 re- lationship 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 ex- amined 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 sav- ior 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 mo- ment. 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 sav- ior… Since the day I first thought that, Ikuo, I no longer had qualms about being called savior-real or fake."

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 can't 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 rela- tionship 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 fol- low 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 con- duit 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.