Somersault

by Kenzaburo Oe

  Some of the visitors ate a light lunch looking down on the nearby tents set up in the square below the dam. Even from a distance you could make out their Fruit of the Rain Tree lunch boxes and plastic bottles of Rain Tree Water, bottled from the spring behind the chapel—evidence that the visitors had gone to the Farm first and bought lunches and water bottles at the little store run by Satchan’s two adopted daughters.

  According to what Ms. Asuka had heard, the majority of these visitors were believers from the Kansai headquarters. They all had their own jobs but were taking a week’s vacation in order to visit this holy place and enjoy breathing the same air as Patron. Some of them had volunteered to work at the Farm in exchange for room and board. Others had booked rooms well in advance at the lodge where Kizu had put on his swimming demonstration, while others, unbeknownst to Kizu, who had any number of times walked along the path below it, were using the Mansion that now belonged to Mr. Soda of the Kansai headquarters. Through his long-term relationship with those in the Hollow as the builder of the chapel, Mr. Soda had purchased the Mansion, which had been slated for demolition, and rebuilt it so that it was once more livable.

  Kizu had been in charge of any number of symposiums at his research institute and knew firsthand the troubles involved, so he had a vague anxiety about the summer conference. But Ms. Asuka, who started to help out at the office after the middle of July, reported to him that the participants were extremely cooperative and the outlook for the conference was bright.

  The believers who came early to the Hollow didn’t make many demands on the church; indeed, they volunteered to help out, and at the dining hall they were allowed to use, they renewed old friendships—admittedly not very deep ones—with people they knew in the Quiet Women and were happy when they spotted faces they recognized among the Technicians.

  According to Ms. Asuka, the office’s efforts in organizing the conference were paying off. The grounds of the elementary and junior high schools in the Old Town were being used as parking lots from Friday to Monday. The Fireflies, organized as a security squad, were busy too, with preparations for their Spirit Festival, and didn’t have the energy left over to take charge of the parking lot, so the task fell to some older youths who were continuing the local Village Association group; they too were unpaid volunteers.

  The Kansai headquarters leader, Mr. Soda, arrived in the Hollow at the end of July. He invited Dr. Koga, Ms. Asuka, and Kizu for dinner at the Mansion, where he was staying during the conference. On the day of the dinner there were none of the city folk around the dam or on the flagstone path, and in the midst of the loud buzz of cicadas and the cries of wild birds, Dr. Koga and Asa-san appeared in the parking lot from the road leading to the prefectural highway. Rather than turn to wave to Kizu in his studio window, they looked out at the giant cypress tree, its leaves stirring with the faint breeze blowing in from the woods around the lake.

  When Kizu saw the well-bred city boy Dr. Koga with a linen sports coat on, he put on a lightweight jacket himself. As a present for Mr. Soda, he took a watercolor he’d done of the view of the chapel and monastery from the north shore, put it in a frame, and left the house.

  When Kizu got down to the dam, Dr. Koga and Asa-san—the latter all dressed up in a summer-weight wool skirt and navy blue blouse—were talking with one of the Technicians, who was setting up the microphones in the reviewing stands. Several of the Fireflies were sitting on the dam itself, undoing a huge coil of cable and threading it through plastic tubing to keep it waterproof. Apparently they were going to run an electric line underwater out to the island with the huge cypress.

  Kizu and the others walked down to the tents, crossed over the surging waterway, and took a flagstone path that ran all around from the traditional gate in the long wall to the main house. When they arrived at the main gate, shaded by the lush overhanging leaves of the camellias, a smaller side door in a corner of the main gate was open to the inside.

  With Asa-san leading the way, they ducked through the side door. On the broad concrete floor was something they’d heard about from Asa-san on the way over, a gold-and-copper alloy pipe—a fuigo, as they called it—to carry smoke from the sunken hearth that now was faintly glowing. Mr. Soda was standing on the wooden floor below that and led the three of them over to the natural stone flooring, where they removed their shoes. With his pinstripe dress shirt and gray vest, all Mr. Soda needed was a coat and jacket and he’d be ready for a business meeting, though his collar was casually open.

  “Hey, looks like your blood pressure’s not acting up,” Dr. Koga said, as if speaking to a good buddy. “So you prefer staying in the annex more than the main building? I guess this was originally a place for people to live in, wasn’t it. You have a large kitchen, too. This fuigo pipe running out of the oven is nice.

  “It’s like a pipe in a pipe organ, don’t you think? It was specially ordered, and since Former Gii named it, I’ve respected his wishes,” Mr. Soda responded, turning to greet Kizu and Asa-san. “I’m glad you could come. Koga and I were in the same class for our first two years of college. The guys who were going on to medical school were all kind of snobbish and someone like me in engineering found it hard to get along with most of them, but Koga was okay.”

  On the left-hand side, in the back of the concrete floor, set off at a gentle right angle, was a sink and a stove. A large man was working there, bathed in the reddish light coming in from the west window, but Mr. Soda didn’t introduce him, instead leading his guests to the side around the sunken hearth.

  Kizu passed the watercolor painting to Mr. Soda, who turned his stylishly crew-cut head and taut face toward it with a word of thanks. He didn’t give any opinion about the painting, though, which Kizu found totally refreshing.

  Mr. Soda told about how as a young man he and Dr. Koga were on the same rugby team at the Komaba campus of Tokyo University and how Koga was fast enough to break through his opponents easily but wasn’t brave enough to attempt a goal and would just keep running, all bent over.

  “The first one to make a touchdown in the church, though, was Koga, who was the one who invited me to join,” Soda went on. “He had those troubles with his mother, and went through a terrible time until his aunt took him to see Patron.”

  A complex expression showed on Dr. Koga’s face, but he said nothing.

  They could hear the sound of the cicadas that came out at twilight, and a twilight bird call Kizu was familiar with: a gray thrush, perhaps. The naked beams of the building loomed darkly above them; beyond the packed dirt floor of the proportionally large kitchen was a long window from which one could doubtless see the waterway they’d crossed on their way here. The wind blew in through the shutters. The air was moving enough to raise a sound from the gold-copper alloy fuigo.

  The man who’d been working in the kitchen preparing dinner brought over a series of small plates on a shallow wooden box, something Kizu knew was called in the local dialect a morobuta. The man, past middle age, wearing a white collared shirt and cotton khaki trousers, turned out to be the former principal of the junior high school who’d done the trimming around Kizu’s house. Asa-san hurriedly brought over the lacquer trays stacked up in back and lined up on them the dishes that her husband passed her.

  Mr. Soda stood up and went over to the kitchen to a bucket of water and lifted up one of two bottles of sake inside it, provided by the activist sake producer whom Kizu and the others knew. The four-go bottle appeared to have been frozen and then thawed out, and the label had come off, the only bit of decoration the wire cap that held down the pressure built up by the fermentation.

  “Tonight we have steamed chicken with a sesame sauce, chilled tofu with grilled eggplant, which we eat here with soy sauce, and then chopped bonito,” the former junior high principal said, sounding as if he was someone who liked to talk a lot but was purposely keeping his words to a minimum. “I’ll be preparing some salt-grilled fresh-water trout as well, and for the final dish a specialty of this regio
n, grilled sea bass in chilled miso paste. You eat this over rice, so I brought over mortars along with the rice.”

  “He’s been studying cooking shows on TV to prepare for tonight,” Asa-san explained as she laid several small dishes of condiments beside each of the trays.

  “Please have as many helpings of rice as you’d like,” her husband said. “The sake tastes really good when it’s like sherbet so we kept it in the freezer, but the mouth of the bottle sometimes gets stopped up—that’s why I’ve laid three chopsticks at each place setting, so you can use one to unstop the bottle if need be.”

  They watched his broad back as the former junior high principal went back to retrieve the trout.

  “My husband has some curious ideas,” Asa-san said. “Believe me, we don’t ordinarily put three chopsticks down for each person.”

  4

  What Kizu found interesting was that Mr. Soda and Dr. Koga, seated respectively on the north and east side of the sunken hearth, said a silent prayer before eating. Since he’d come here and had meals with church members, Kizu had never noticed this custom before. Perhaps the Kansai headquarters was actively preserving the way things were done in the church before the Somersault.

  Next Mr. Soda poured a good amount of sake, now melted into something less viscous than sherbet, into each of their matching cups, cups used for dipping sauce for soba noodles, a set he’d purchased as part of what came with the Mansion. After they’d downed this he filled each cup again, and everyone understood that was all they were going to get.

  Asa-san took away the two sake bottles and went over to her husband, seated in the western corner of the room eating the same meal as the others, and refilled the cup he was just draining. She didn’t, however, come back with any new bottles.

  “This is a lot different from the usual way people drink in the countryside in Japan, isn’t it—drinking themselves into a stupor,” Kizu said, impressed.

  “At the time he started the Base Movement in the Mansion, Former Brother Gii transformed the way drinking bouts are held among the young people,” Asa-san explained. “Tribes in Africa do the same, he told them, drinking till they pass out, but things aren’t so tough here that you need to do that.” Her eyes, with their dense layer of sunburned wrinkles, turned red as she said this.

  “The young local fellows I used to help in the construction of the chapel and monastery followed Brother Gii’s custom,” Soda put in, “and I’m trying to emulate that.”

  The former junior high principal brought over the rice, still in the rice cooker, and Kizu was amazed by the main dish in a large mortar. Asa-san scooped rice into each bowl, added some thick pieces of grilled sea bass and crumbled tofu, finally pouring over it the chilled miso paste the former principal had made, then passed a bowl to each of them, noting that they should add as much of the thinly sliced condiments—scallions, green shiso leaves, ginger buds—as they wanted. The former principal took his own large bowl back to his spot, and when Dr. Koga said in admiration, “This is fantastic!” he smiled happily and motioned to him to help himself to another serving.

  Mr. Soda was the first to finish, and, as if planned ahead of time, he launched into a long-winded but organized monologue about Guide. Kizu was surprised by his frankness.

  “I became a member of the church a little while after Dr. Koga, by which time the church was pretty well established. For me, though, the church was more Guide’s than Patron’s. Patron went into his trances, was able to open a corridor to the other side, and then related the visions he had there. This was the religious foundation we all relied on. As we stood on this foundation, though, it was Guide who urged us actually to go out and do something. Without Guide the church’s activities never would have gotten off the ground. I’m not saying there could have been a coup d’état with Guide as the chief instigator, because Guide really needed Patron. Without the two of them in partnership, neither Patron nor Guide alone would have been able to do a thing.

  “So both of them were our leaders, though in actual fact we looked to Guide. One time, when Patron wasn’t there, we all gathered around Guide and peppered him with questions. We were very earnest about this. ‘Why do you put Patron ahead of you when it comes to running the church?’ we asked. ‘What he says may be profound, but it’s equally vague, isn’t it? We need someone like you who has clear-headed ideas leading us if we’re actually going to do something. To borrow terminology from the Japanese Constitution about the Emperor, isn’t Patron better as a symbol of the church, a symbol of unity for the believers?’

  “Guide spoke quite openly to us then, and I thought it must be true. ‘I had strong feelings toward my father who disappeared,’ Guide said, ‘so ever since I was a child I wanted to participate in a religious organization. I was kicked out of a lot of churches, though, and with no clue as to how to proceed I reached adulthood, and when I was teaching in night school I happened to run across Patron. His habit of falling into these trances convinced me he was a unique fellow. I knew he was the one, and that’s how it all started.

  “‘Patron had nothing to do with ordinary people and eked out a living as a clairvoyant, but when I started living with him,’ Guide said, ‘his trances were on a different level from what I’d been led to believe. He’d come back from the other side more dead than alive and would mumble something incomprehensible. As soon as I started being his listener—not just a listener but his adviser—I started getting actively involved. I’d gather together all his rambling statements, contextualize them, and give them back to him, and this formed the basis for some of the mystical things he then said. Gradually a clear narrative developed out of this. I had no doubt that on the other side Patron had otherworldly visions, and I became a loyal follower. In short order I began to tell all the followers what Patron had communicated to me. That’s how I became Guide.’ But did Patron have the ability to lead these followers in the kind of organized activities you expect of a church? ‘Sometimes I had my doubts,’ Guide told us.

  “Once we heard this, those of us sitting around debating with him got all excited. Patron’s visions had led all of us into a deeper spiritual understanding, but there were bigger trends to consider. As repentant souls we wanted to actually do something. Unless we prepared for the end of the world that Patron envisioned, there would be no reason for us penitents to live. ‘These thoughts are making us suffer,’ we complained to Guide.

  “Our suffering boiled down to the same sort of frustrations that Guide had. ‘Just as you take Patron’s incomprehensible mutterings and convert them into intelligible language,’ we told him, ‘why don’t you set up a springboard and make him take a huge leap off it? Once he jumps, we’ll all leap off behind him!’ That’s as far as we took it that particular time, but this led to the creation of the Izu Research Institute. You were part of this, too, weren’t you, Dr. Koga—you who ran and ran but could never score!

  “As for me, I had a pretty responsible position in the company I was working in. Putting aside the question of whether I could score a touchdown, from the get-go I wasn’t the type to run full speed and break through the other team’s defense. Also, once the Izu Research Institute was launched and grew by leaps and bounds as an elite group, I became more involved with keeping the whole church organization up and running. Once I even went to speak to Guide to complain about how high the institute’s budget was. That was when we started to think about letting Kansai headquarters make independent financial decisions. I’m a conservative person, and quite persistent.

  “In the end the radical faction was completely betrayed by Patron and Guide’s Somersault. It wasn’t just the radical faction that suffered because of this, of course. The Quiet Women would be a typical example. As I indicated in my talk with Guide, we had a plan to keep going and decided to let the church survive centered on the Kansai headquarters.”

  “I can see you’re a person of vision, but at that stage did you think your plan would be the basis for building a new church someday?”
Dr. Koga said.

  “At the very least, we always thought Patron would return.”

  “And what we did was kill Guide for nothing,” Dr. Koga said.

  “But you’re not just some ordinary member of the radical faction,” Mr. Soda said soothingly, but Dr. Koga remained with head bowed.

  Kizu intervened bravely. “There’s something I don’t quite understand,” he said. “Something Ikuo doesn’t understand either. I know he’s talked with Patron about it a few times.… There’s always something missing from everything you’ve just been saying: namely, the actual strategies and tactics of the radical faction that were called off on account of the Somersault. There’ve got to be things that haven’t been publicly discussed yet. If these tactics really existed, what were they? That’s what I’d like to hear.”

  Mr. Soda hesitated. Once he began, though, he didn’t hold anything back.

  “What they had in mind was the same sort of terrorist assassinations the right wing carried out before the war, plus a postwar phenomenon: deliberately causing an accident at a nuclear power plant. And if they were to survive that, they planned to create a millennial reign of repentance.

  “After Chernobyl the Japanese government and the power companies announced that such a large-scale accident in a power plant could never happen in Japan. NHK and the major newspapers all agreed. A national consensus grew up, in other words, that a nuclear power plant accident could never be a likely scenario in Japan. The Japanese people had too much belief in the information and technology the system controls. I’m sure someone like yourself. Professor Kizu, who’s lived abroad, would tell us it’s the same in other countries as well.