by Kenzaburo Oe
“By Patron?” Ikuo asked, his face no longer red.
“By both of them. He said that in Indian mythology there’s a duo much like them.”
“You mean playing the roles of Patron and Guide?”
“Not exactly. I think he meant their faces, bodies, the way they talk and move and walk. The combination of the two of them.”
“Since your teacher’s a dance teacher then, he can perceive the secrets hidden behind physical movement?”
“Physical expression, you might call it,” the young woman answered. “He can detect the inner being of people by how they move. He showed a lot of respect for Patron and Guide and even danced for them in the annex they built for me to practice dance in. The teacher’s students, the musicians who accompanied him, were quite bowled over. They hadn’t seen him dance for ages.”
“Did those students accompany him?” Kizu asked. “Maybe they had some premonition that he was going to dance.”
“When I saw that they’d brought their instruments, I had a feeling that maybe he would dance. I mean, what with meeting Patron and Guide and all. Maybe he sensed this and had his students prepare for it.”
Several varieties of intricate dessertlike hors d’oeuvres were brought to their table. Ikuo polished off one dish in a single bite and turned to the next. The young woman possessed a healthy appetite too, assimilating the fuel she needed like an automatic machine.
Next they were served foie gras topped by a dark wine-colored sauce. The waiter had made a point of emphasizing that it was flown in from France. Ikuo gobbled his up quickly, and Kizu transferred his own to Ikuo’s plate, eating instead some warmed vegetables he’d covered with the sauce. The young woman gazed at this, her mouth slightly open in what seemed to be her usual expression as she pondered things.
“I don’t like Patron eating rich foods either,” she said.
After this, they ate the final dish in silence—a moose steak that, by chance, they had all ordered from the two choices on the menu. Kizu followed the young people’s lead. Ikuo must have been mulling over things to say while they ate, for just as they began their after-dinner coffees he burst out again with an unexpected question.
“The names Patron and Guide—have they used these names ever since they first started the church?”
“I don’t think so,” she answered. “In the church they used others.”
“So even though they left the church they still maintain the ties they made to it and use those names. In other words, the game continues?”
The young woman took her coffee cup from her still slightly parted lips and returned it to the saucer. She stared fixedly at Ikuo. Kizu found it hard to separate his imagination from his memory of events, but he was sure that fifteen years before he’d seen the same look in her eyes.
“It’s not a game,” she said. “If you define a game as play, something done for fun, then no, these two men weren’t playing a game these past ten years—they suffered too much for that. True, they left the church, and Patron is as we speak planning to begin a new movement. And Guide’s collapse has been a major shock to him.... Anyhow, to start a religious movement you need a committed core of followers. We’re that first core of people now who are committed to Patron. Do you really imagine such a small group has the leisure to play games?”
“What kind of teacher of mankind will Patron be in this new movement? And where will Guide lead humanity?”
“The world is on a path to destruction,” the young woman said. “Patron is planning to be mankind’s teacher in these perilous times. And Guide, assuming he recovers, will be his right-hand man. They’ve suffered the past ten years in order to discover this new way.…
“Now it’s my turn to ask a question. You asked what roles Patron and Guide will play in this new movement. Why did you want to know this? Or is this just your own game to pass the time while we’re eating?”
Ikuo turned red again but spoke with conviction. “I’ve been living my whole life with the idea that the end of the world isn’t that far off,” he said, “and I always wanted to be there to experience it. So why is it strange for someone like me to be interested in what the Patron and Guide of mankind are planning to do?”
“It’s true,” Kizu broke in. “He has been thinking about the end of the world for a long while. Remember, he’s the child who destroyed the plastic model of a megalopolis he’d so carefully constructed. After he smashed that model to bits, isn’t it understandable for him to have a vision of the destruction of Tokyo? Though I suppose you could label that just a child’s game.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t a game,” the young woman answered Kizu, “since any kind of event—once it takes place in reality—leaves traces behind, especially with children.” He found himself staring at her waxlike ears as she turned and focused on Ikuo. “I understand you gave a lot of thought to the end of the world, but have you ever belonged to any group that actually dwells on the end time? Any Christian denominations, for example?”
“I’ve put out a few feelers.”
“What to do you mean by that?” she retorted.
“I mean I don’t belong to any religious group now, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t tried out a few.”
Kizu expected the young woman to feel rebuffed and pursue the matter more, but she didn’t. Instead she looked at Ikuo with interest and said calmly, “I’d say you didn’t meet me again just out of nostalgia for something that happened fifteen years ago. I think you’re seriously checking out Patron and Guide. How about visiting our office as a next step? Meeting Guide’s out of the question now, but I’d be happy to introduce you to Patron. I know I’m repeating myself, but he’s gone through so many trying experiences that I can’t be too careful.”
2
Ikuo and Kizu stood under the eaves of the restaurant, the zelkova tree dripping copiously, and said goodbye to the girl. She flipped open her umbrella, and the two men ran out into the pouring rain and made a dash for the nearby parking lot. If Kizu had been alone he would have had one of the waiters bring his car around, but he decided to keep pace with his young companion’s way of doing things.
“It seems to me that having a religious leader’s office in a residential area like this might make the residents upset enough to force him out—not the old-time residents, maybe, but the nouveau riche. But she seems pretty carefree.”
Ikuo said this as they drove past a crowded intersection, hemmed in by a bank on one side and a train station on the other, and caught sight of the girl and her practiced dancer’s gait.
“Maybe it’s because they’re not holding any religious activities there now,” Kizu speculated. “She said they were in the planning stages of a new movement. When this so-called Patron and Guide were involved in the scandal where they apostatized, they did have their headquarters downtown, as I recall. I remember reading about it in The New York Times. After they renounced their faith they must have wanted a quiet place to live. They call it an office, but apparently it’s also their residence.”
Two days before—to the kidding of his apartment’s super, who chided him for his pointless faithfulness to the American economy—Kizu had purchased a brand-new Ford Mustang, the same car he drove in the States, and had promised to let Ikuo do the driving, but since he wasn’t used to a steering wheel on the left, today Kizu took the wheel. Besides, Kizu figured that part of Ikuo’s forwardness at lunch was the wine talking.
As they headed toward Shibuya, Kizu asked Ikuo about something he hadn’t quite understood during his conversation with the girl.
“As I explained earlier, Ikuo, I really do believe you’ve been thinking about the end of the world ever since you were a child. And that what happened fifteen years ago is not unrelated to that.
“What strikes me as odd, though, is that you don’t seem to recall much about the Somersault incident ten years ago. I read about it in the papers in the United States, so it must have been big news in Japan. The Times said it was widely reported on J
apanese TV, and that Patron’s remarks on television also played a major role.”
“At the time it was called the Church of the Savior and the Prophet,” Ikuo said. “I realized today when I was talking with that girl that I heard about it through the media.”
“Then why didn’t you put out feelers, as you put it, to that church? Because it wasn’t that well known before the leaders’ renunciation?”
“For me, at least, it wasn’t,” Ikuo said. “I first heard of it when the leaders publicly announced they weren’t saviors or prophets after all, and everything they’d preached was a bunch of bull. I watched the reports afterward that made fun of them and just felt contempt for people who’d do what they did. I really wanted to know what mankind should do, faced with the end of the world, and—I don’t know—perhaps I felt betrayed.”
Kizu glanced at Ikuo’s face. His tone of voice indeed contained a hint of a grudge.
“So what about the young lady? Seeing her after fifteen years—”
“I was surprised she was just as I remembered her,” Ikuo said, his voice now calm. “It was like looking at your painting; her eyes were still like faded India ink, her mouth still open as if that were the correct way to breathe.”
“Ha! She does seem to like to keep her mouth open, doesn’t she. And her eyes!” Kizu said, as if ever the artist, continuing the sketch. “When they look at you they turn even darker.”
“I also had a feeling of déjà vu, as if I knew exactly how she would turn out when she grew up.”
Kizu understood exactly what he meant. Déjà vu neatly summed up his own feelings when he met Ikuo again and discovered he was the young boy from so long ago.
“She’s definitely unique, isn’t she?” Kizu said. “I knew that the first time we talked on the phone. Her job—her lifestyle choice, I guess you’d say—is pretty extraordinary, too.”
“Do you think she believes in the new teachings of that old leader who did a Somersault?” Ikuo asked. “For the sake of her dance, even though he hasn’t restarted his religious movement yet?”
“Are you going to accept her challenge and go meet this Patron?”
“I haven’t really thought about it,” Ikuo said. “First of all, I really don’t know much about this Somersault.”
“Shall I give a little lecture, then, based on what I know from The New York Times? The media over here treated the leaders’ recantation entirely as a scandal, and I think that’s what you remember. The Times correspondent, though, was really fascinated by the story. The religious group had been founded by two middle-aged men. One of them formulated their basic doctrine based on his mystical experiences. Over time he refined this. The second man’s job was verbal expression of the mystical experiences the first man had. He was also the one who took care of the day-to-day running of the church.
“The Times correspondent reported on their church for a year. He got to know the two leaders well; he’s the one, in fact, who dubbed them Patron and Guide. I imagine he used these names because calling them Savior and Prophet would have provoked some serious negative reactions from his American readers. After the Somersault the two of them adopted these names themselves; they weren’t fond of their earlier names, anyway.
“Anyhow, just around the time the correspondent was wrapping up his reporting, the Somersault incident occurred. What happened was that the two leaders negotiated with the authorities to inform on some potentially dangerous activities of a radical faction within their church.
“It was on a much smaller scale than Aum Shinrikyo, but the research facility they owned in Izu became the focal point of the radical faction’s activities, the cornerstone of which was their plan to occupy a nuclear power plant. One of the people at the research center had a PhD in physics. They wanted to turn a nuclear plant into an atomic bomb to force the leaders’ teachings on all Japanese, or at least to preach the need for universal repentance now that the end of the world was drawing near. Or maybe by blowing up two or three nuclear plants they felt they could make everyone experience how very near the end of the world was. Their entire plan for repentance was based on this. Radical political groups all have the same basic idea, don’t they—pushing the country into crisis? But here the target was nuclear power plants. From the beginning this was an apocalyptic teaching.
“The church’s leaders found they couldn’t suppress the radical faction that had sprung up among them, so they went to the police. Sensing this might happen, the radical faction dispersed throughout the country. No one knew when or where they might attack a nuclear plant. At this point the leaders asked to hold a press conference. They indicated ahead of time what they planned to do and asked for full-scale coverage. I’m sure the authorities helped out in this as well.
“The first leader—Patron, as he’s called now—sat in front of the cameras on live TV and told the church’s radical faction members scattered throughout the country to abandon their plans to occupy a nuclear plant. We are neither saviors nor prophets, he said. Everything we’ve preached till now has been one big joke. We abandon the church. Everything we’ve said and done was a silly prank. Now that we’ve confessed, we want you to stop believing.
“Especially you members of the radical faction, he went on. I want you to understand that our church is a sand castle built as a lark. We enjoyed playing the savior of the world and the prophet at the end time, using all those high-sounding phrases and acting solemn and grave. Thanks to all of you we had a wonderful time, especially getting incorporated as a religious foundation two years ago and receiving tons of money for our playacting. But this is as far as we’ll take it. It’s all a big farce, get it? Look at me, here on TV. How could you possibly believe I’m the savior of mankind? How can this scornful-looking partner of mine sitting here really be the prophet of the end of the world ?
“Through this TV performance, the nation learned all about their Somersault, to use the term coined by the Times correspondent. The word became a popular expression in Japan for a time.
“To tell the truth, I don’t know the scale of this event in Japan. I know that the news shows on commercial networks followed up on the story, treating it as slapstick comedy, though I heard that NHK didn’t report on it at all. Didn’t you see this when you were a child? What interested me while I was in the United States was the correspondent’s follow-up article on the aftermath of the incident. ‘The Japanese have a psychological aversion to recantations,’ he wrote, ‘so with this announcement that everything they preached was just a joke, this false savior and false prophet came under severe attack.’ The correspondent also reported the outrage of ordinary Japanese citizens, who heaped abuse on the two men, and he included letters from people unconnected with the church who complained about its immorality.
“The correspondent found this one-sided attack rather strange. ‘Through the Somersault of this false savior and false prophet,’ he wrote, ‘it is possible that several cities were spared a nuclear holocaust. The authorities insisted it was impossible for a nuclear power plant to be invaded and said a bunch of young amateurs would never be able to convert it into a stationary nuclear weapon. But how true was this? The people of Japan didn’t give any credit to the church’s two leaders who’d risked everything to defuse the crisis, concentrating instead on a moral critique of their recantation. This criticism became even more intense once it was known at the trial of the radical faction that, because of the deal they’d made with the authorities, the two leaders were going to avoid prosecution.’ The correspondent ended by saying that the Japanese were certainly a strange race.
“Ikuo, I’m sure you saw these reports on TV and elsewhere about public opinion in Japan at the time, right? You wanted to be there to see the end of the world, after all. What did you think about it?”
“As I said before, I had nothing but scorn for them,” Ikuo replied, “especially when those afternoon women’s talk shows kept playing the so-called savior of mankind’s recantation speech ad nauseam. Even thoug
h I was only a kid, it made me laugh. Deep down inside, though, I think I was disappointed.”
3
Having talked for so long, Kizu drove in silence for a while. From Ikuo’s continued silence, Kizu could sense something he couldn’t quite lay a finger on, something he hadn’t been conscious of recently. His liaison with Ikuo had given him back his self-confidence, though he sometimes felt their relationship was different from that of gay couples he used to see in his university community. Maybe it was the same with those couples, but Ikuo didn’t seem to accept the kind of closeness you’d expect to arise from physical intimacy and made it clear he wanted to maintain a certain distance from Kizu.
Ikuo seemed genuinely interested in the reunion with the girl he’d had such a strange encounter with fifteen years ago, an interest mixed with curiosity about the former religious leaders she was now working for. Ikuo’s comments after listening to Kizu made him sense both how strong his interest was in Patron and Guide and also that he was hiding something.
Kizu turned to slowly look at Ikuo; the latter’s face had lost its wine-induced flush and again looked like a statue with skin covering the indentations and protruding bones. Shake it a bit, and the heavy lump of a head looked like it would tip right over.
The next day, though, after modeling for Kizu in the morning, Ikuo himself brought up the subject of the girl, as if filling in all his previous silence.
“The girl met Patron and Guide after their Somersault, yet she believes in them totally. The world’s going to end, she said, and Patron and Guide will show us the way to deal with that. What they said and did during their Somersault doesn’t seem to faze her.”
“She puts more emphasis on their suffering over the past ten years,” Kizu said. “I wonder if that’s the basic approach the two of them will take as they start over. This new beginning means a great deal to her. That’s why she got so angry when you used the word game.”