Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “What about when he’s in a trance?” Kizu asked.

  “We couldn’t attach any measuring instruments,” Guide said. “His movements are so violent that after a deep trance he’s completely spent, physically and emotionally. After he’s come back, he says all sorts of complex things, as if he’s possessed. He says he’s standing in front of a kind of three-dimensional mesh, a display screen on which a blur of light is continuously changing, receiving information.

  “Patron seems to confront some kind of white glowing object. When you look at him when he’s like this, it’s as if his body is reacting to each bit of information he’s receiving, moving constantly, never static. It’s too much to bear. When I try to help him interpret all this, I realize the amount and quality of information he receives is amazing. That’s one of his real trances. His fate is to have this very rare ability. This might sound exaggerated, but Patron can freely view the entire course of human history and experience every last detail. He traces it all with his own body. He conveys to us what he’s learned about the history of mankind and even its future, speaking to us—in the present—of the end time.”

  “What is this blur of light you mentioned?”

  “As someone who’s listened to what Patron says after he returns from his trances, transmitting what that’s all about is my job.” Saying this, Guide, who’d been listening to some inner voice, now lifted his head as if to turn his ear to sounds from the world outside.

  Kizu heard a car pull up and stop in the road beyond the garden, and several people came quietly into the residence.

  “Dancer will take over now,” Guide said. “I’ll see you home, Professor. Ikuo will have to come back later, so I can ride with you and we can talk some more.”

  Guide turned once again to the thing, sitting there like a strangely twisted statue, and then faced Kizu. His eyes now adjusted to the dark, Kizu could read the strong emotions rising to the surface in Guide’s face. His expression held, at one and the same time, a fierce penetrating look and a look that could have been either pity or love.

  Kizu was about to stand up after Guide when a small, sunburned energetic old doctor came in—a minitank of a man, to use a phrase that Kizu and his friends had used when they were boys—together with Dancer. Ignoring their bows, the doctor strode right up to Patron, peered at him, and faced Dancer.

  “It’s exactly the same as in the past,” the doctor said, in a nostalgic tone. “If he’s been this way until now, he’ll be okay. But he might have one of his deep trances, so I’ll sleep here tonight in his bed. I’ll keep an eye on him, but I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

  3

  “About these deep trances again, you said that Patron sees a net that shows the entire history of the human race?” Kizu had had them park his Mustang in the garage and was now in the minivan, with Ikuo at the wheel and Guide alongside him. “No matter how big this white blur of light is, wouldn’t individual people, and the groups they form, be no bigger than a cell? Or is this just some kind of metaphor, a model for a certain historical perspective?”

  “It’s neither a metaphor nor a model,” Guide replied. (At that instant, Kizu caught an unexpected whiff of alcohol. Later, when asked, Ikuo said Guide only drank occasionally.) “No matter how minute something might be, Patron actually sees it. A cell can’t be seen by the naked eye, but can you use physical parameters to measure what the visionary eye detects? Patron sees the entire world, from the beginning of time to the very end, as one whole vision.

  “Inside that would be included, as one particle, you, on the verge of making an important decision about your life, and me, talking here with you. Both present as eternal moments.”

  “If I were counting on death to help me escape myself,” Kizu said, “that net would indeed be a kind of hell.”

  “I don’t believe Patron is viewing hell in his visions,” Guide replied seriously. “It’s not as if he chooses what to see, as if he’s purposefully interpreting a satellite photograph, but rather that he’s grasping the entire structure of this huge net of blurred white light. That’s the stance he takes, I think, when he’s in a trance.

  “After one of his major trances, Patron talked with me about that. It’s not like the blur of light is projected out in space but more like a bottomless hollow. The entire hollow is a kind of spinning and weaving net, and the net with its countless layers is a screen that reveals human existence in one fell swoop, from its beginning to its end, and each point on that net is moving forward. It covers everything from the origins of time—nothing other than the first signs of the Big Bang to come—to the time when everything flows back to the one ultimate being. That whole huge spinning hollow, Patron told me, you could call God. In other words, as he sits there with his head between his knees like a weighed-down fetus, he’s about to embark on a trance in which he’ll come face-to-face with that God.”

  “If that’s what God is, it’s just another way of saying there is no God.” Ikuo’s eyes looked straight forward as he drove, his taut shoulders, twice the size of Patron’s, filled with the tension of his remark.

  “What do you mean, there is no God?” Guide asked him back.

  “Saying that God is this hollow of the whole world is the same thing as saying there isn’t any God, right?”

  “But by saying that God is this hollow you’re admitting there is a God.”

  “That might be true of people who accept that huge hollow and think it’s enough,” Ikuo said, “but for people who don’t, it’s the same as saying there is no God.”

  “For you, in other words.”

  “That’s right. For me there is no God.”

  “I detect here something other than an abstract debate over the existence of God. What really concerns you is whether God is actively working in your life or not.”

  “That’s right, you got it,” Ikuo admitted candidly, still stubborn.

  Guide didn’t say anything. Kizu couldn’t intervene in their argument. For a while Ikuo drove on, the three of them silent. Kizu caught another whiff of alcohol and noticed that Guide was hiding a small flask of whiskey in his coat pocket. Guide cleared his throat lightly and spoke.

  “One sure thing, though, is that the white blur of light Patron confronts in his trances has decided the course of his life.”

  “If I confronted a God who’s some huge hollow,” Ikuo said, “well, I can tell you I wouldn’t accept his deciding my life.”

  “Isn’t this God that Patron senses in a holistic way, then, also the God you believe can speak to you directly?” Kizu asked. “Soon after I met you, Ikuo, I felt you were thinking about God as the power to grasp yourself. And I hoped that your notion of God would be like a passage enabling you to find an entrance to Patron’s vast deep vision: namely, the God he confronts in his trances. Is the God that Ikuo’s thinking of just one part of the all-embracing God that Patron sees?”

  “It wouldn’t fit Patron’s definition of God to say one part of God,” Guide said. “I spoke of a passage, but I think of it as a bundle of fiber-optic lines, with Ikuo on this side, at the terminus of one line, wondering if he can send a signal to the other side, the terminus of all the lines—in other words, to the enormous structure that is God.”

  “If there’s a terminus on the other side, and an infinite number of them on this side, is it really possible that God would send a message directly to me?” Ikuo asked.

  Guide was silent as he thought about it. The swaying of the speeding minivan made his head rock back and forth. Kizu could see he was fairly drunk by now, though he didn’t let his drunkenness take over when he spoke.

  “This might be a self-centered way of approaching it,” Ikuo said, “but I think the only way to experience God is when the signal comes from his side to ours. Once his voice came to me and I did what it said, but afterward, when there was no response, there was no other way to meet God but to wait for his signal.”

  Ikuo stared straight ahead as he drove, his voice no longer angry, as
it was a moment before, but filled with a sorrow that pierced Kizu to the quick. Guide might have felt the same way, for he spoke now in a more formal way. “Ikuo, have you spoken to Patron about this?”

  “No. I’ve only just started working as his driver, and I haven’t had a chance. Also, I think if I don’t prepare myself before I talk with him, he’ll end up having nothing more to do with me.”

  “But you came to work for Patron because you expected someday he might fulfill this longing you have toward God, right?”

  “That’s right. I met Dancer through a connection we had from before, but I felt Patron has the power to help us transcend our limits—something not unrelated to God.”

  Ikuo’s words were not entirely unexpected, yet as he listened to this earnest confession Kizu was surprised and sympathetic.

  “If that’s the case, you should tell Patron exactly how you feel,” Guide said to Ikuo, speaking the exact words of encouragement Kizu had been about to use. “Right now it would appear that Patron is laying the groundwork for a major vision, the kind that has eluded him for so long. At the next opportunity he may be able to interpret God’s message to you in that blurred net of light. I’ll call it your God for the time being, but there’s no contradiction between that and Patron’s all-inclusive God.”

  Kizu didn’t quite follow Guide’s final words. Ikuo went back to the first remarks, to make sure of what was most critical to him.

  “Why would that be significant for me? Is it okay for me to think that he’s interpreting a message from the God who once called out to me and was silent afterward?”

  “What’s wrong with that? With Patron trying to undergo a deep trance for the first time in so long, this may be an encouragement to him. Your questions to Patron may spur him on.”

  “But if that happened, would it be a good thing?”

  “If what happened?”

  “If I happened to give him a push that affected the way he’s living his life.”

  “You’re afraid as an outsider you may have an influence on Patron? Rather than an old person like me influencing him, it may very well need to be a young person who’s struggling, working beside him, searching for the way. The poor in spirit. That would be you, all right. Though I’ve always seen you as the opposite type.”

  Guide was clearly drunk by now, but Ikuo pressed on.

  “I don’t want to hear Patron telling me some story just to make me happy.”

  “Patron isn’t that clever,” Guide said. “It’s more likely the opposite. If you help him find his direction and give him a shove, that’ll be his way of putting his life back together. Right now Patron’s beginning a new movement. It’s actually been my hope that with his newfound desire to be active again, a young person like yourself who takes these things to heart would give him a shove in the right direction. Speaking from experience, though, once you get deeply involved with Patron, you won’t come out unscathed. There’s no way to avoid being influenced.”

  “So what should I do?” Ikuo asked. “If I were to sit down face-to-face with him, I wouldn’t be able to say a thing. Committing a terrorist act would be a whole lot easier.”

  “Summon up the courage to appeal to him,” Guide said. “Right now, Patron is awakening from his preparations for a vision, and the physical and emotional aftereffects will last for some time. But once he’s over that, let’s tell him your thoughts. Professor Kizu will help us too, won’t you?”

  Even though he was speeding along in the dark at eighty miles an hour, Ikuo turned around to Kizu and spoke in an urgent, almost pushy, tone.

  “Please write a letter for me, explaining why I need to talk with Patron. I haven’t revealed everything to you, Professor, but still I’d like you to write the letter.”

  7: A Sacred Wound

  1

  Patron had taken to his bed to recuperate and now, five days later, he was allowed to return to normal activities. In the evening, while Dancer was helping him take a bath, Ogi took a phone call from Guide in his annex.

  Patron’s bathroom was like a greenhouse, a brightly lit wing built onto the north side of his bedroom study. Patron liked to take long soaks in his roomy Western-style tub. Cordless phone in hand, Ogi called to him from just outside the changing room. There wasn’t any sound of running water, but no one seemed to have heard him, so he stepped inside the changing room and stood facing the open door to the bathroom, going too far to turn back.

  The first thing Ogi saw was Patron stretched out in the bottom of the nearly empty tub that lay at right angles to his line of sight. Dancer abruptly cut off his view as she slipped in from the side and leaned her nude body over the edge of the tub; she had a detachable shower hose in her right hand. Her head seemed bulky with her hair piled high, and she cast a piercing glare at Ogi from upside down. She didn’t try to hide anything; her legs were spread wide on the tiles. With her magnificent body, then, she was trying to hide Patron’s naked form. Ogi placed the phone down on the threshold and retreated. Guess even the changing room’s off limits to me! he thought, finding it comical and yet disturbing.

  Dancer soon appeared, neatly dressed, in front of Ogi’s desk.

  “I guess there’s nothing we can do now that you saw it,” she said, in a sort of affected calm, “but I would appreciate your not saying anything to Ikuo, Ms. Tachibana, or, of course, Professor Kizu.”

  She turned her back on him, her rump tightly sheathed in her skirt, and walked to the kitchen; after a time, she came back, her tongue visible between her slightly parted lips.

  “You saw the wound in Patron’s side, right? When I said you saw it a moment ago, what did you think I was talking about?”

  Dancer said this very quickly and then gazed at Ogi silently, her face flushed with anger.

  “When you wash a man’s body, you have to undress yourself, right? If you think I was reproaching you for looking between my legs, I don’t know what to say! When animals aren’t in heat, their genitals aren’t even genitals really, are they? Which goes double for humans! You’re no longer the innocent you once were. I thought you’d grown up a little!”

  Dancer twirled her high waist in an about-face to the right and set off again to the kitchen to prepare a late dinner for Patron, Guide, Ogi, and herself.

  Ogi felt numbed with a vague coldness as he rested his face in his hands. He lowered his eyes to some documents on his desk, but he couldn’t concentrate on the words. I saw it, he thought, and I did turn away as fast as I could, didn’t I? Didn’t I try to erase what I saw as much as I could? Despite what went on with Mrs. Tsugane, I set my gaze on Dancer’s fleshy genitals! But I did see it, and can see it still—that reddish dark thing on the upper part of Patron’s chubby white left side.

  Back when Patron was made the leader of the church, did he already have that red gouged-out pomegranate-shaped wound in his side? That wasn’t a scar but an open wound, with fresh blood oozing out. Ten years ago when he did his Somersault, was the wound like that? Or did it appear in the decade that followed? Or maybe it opened up only now that he’s starting a religious movement again? At any rate, Ogi thought, now I’ve seen something I never imagined I would—the strangest of wounds.

  2

  The following week was a busy one for Ogi. The reason lay in that phone call he’d answered from Guide to Patron, the urgent call that led to all those complications. Guide had told him over the phone that he wanted to have a chance to talk with Patron.

  The doctor had recommended, as part of his recovery, that Patron take a short trip for a change of scenery, so Patron decided to take the three young people, Ikuo, Dancer, and Ogi, on a trip outside Tokyo. Preparations fell to Ogi. He got in touch with his mother for the first time in a long while and had her send him the keys to their cottage in Nasu Plateau—the place where he first saw Mrs. Tsugane. Ms. Tachibana dropped by the office on a day off from work at the library—she was planning to quit the job someday—and Ogi decided their trip should take place on Saturday and Sunda
y, when Ms. Tachibana could take care of the office for them the whole day.

  They set off from Tokyo in the minivan, Ikuo at the wheel, late on Friday night. They’d chosen this late departure to avoid any traffic jams, but soon found themselves side by side with eighteen-wheelers that monopolized the highway. The minivan was comically puny compared to these mammoth trucks, but with Ikuo’s bold driving, not once did any trucker behind them blare his horn to hound them to let him by. Even when they left behind the satellite cities that ringed Tokyo, the highway was still lit by streetlights, the inside of the minivan darker than the outside. Patron was sitting directly behind Ikuo, Dancer beside him, with Ogi in the rear seat, which allowed him to view everyone else from the back.

  Ogi wanted to take a good long look at these three people, the core group of Patron’s new movement—minus Guide, of course—and as he looked at their shoulders and the backs of their heads, he was struck by emotions he’d never felt before, a combined sense of how strange it all was and how thrilling.

  Ogi was indeed drawn to this elderly man, fast asleep like a worn-out teddy bear, his large head fallen back; even though Ogi was working for him, he still didn’t understand the part of Patron that was on a quest for spiritual matters. Ten years ago, Patron had denied all the teachings he was working so hard to disseminate and had renounced his church. And now, even though he was starting a new movement, he still hadn’t shown them any new teachings to take the place of the old. And here was this unknown factor—Ikuo—seeking to talk about spiritual matters with Patron. What sort of fate could possibly have brought Ogi together with these people as fellow voyagers? That he was with them was a fact, but each day it was one unexpected thing after another. Add eccentric Dancer to the mix, and Ogi had a premonition that this group was about to take him on the ride of his life.

  The country house to which Ogi was taking Patron and the others was part of a large parcel of land his grandfather had originally obtained when the Nasu Plateau area was first developed, which had remained in their family ever since. When they arrived at dawn it was still dark, with low-lying clouds, and through a line of barren trees they could see two or three other villas. The Ogi family’s place, though, a large Western-style home, stood alone in a desolate spot. It seemed different from his memories of childhood summer vacations.…