Somersault (51 page)

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 different 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 happened 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.

“He’d go over to the
other side
, and make a connection with God quite smoothly, but those mystical experiences were, for Patron, such a trial that it
was painful to be beside him and see how much it took out of him. My role was to transmit the experiences he described in that condition, and I became his closest companion.

“Once he overcame his exhaustion, though, he’d begin to consider God on his own. This was the other extreme—the fact that he didn’t think of God in personified terms—which again led to suffering. I said to him, ‘But you’ve come face-to-face with God, haven’t you? You go over to the
other side
, and you receive your visions from something that can only be called God. Never once as I’ve worked as your translator have I doubted that.’ But Patron was unable to agree with my words of encouragement.

“Patron enters a deep trance where he’s swept away to the
other side
and, through this experience that’s completely out of his hands, he’s with God. But once he returns to this side and his mind and spirit are back under his control and he regains his identity, he insists that the personified God he’d pictured all these years is not the way things really are. And I think he suffers mightily because of it.

“Before long Patron began to think the following ideas, which formed his basic teachings before the Somersault. ‘God is in the world. If that weren’t true,’ he explained, ‘the whole world would be as scattered and pointless as the pain you feel tells you it is. Imagine another Earth existing on the outer reaches of the solar system,’ he said, ‘or maybe beyond the Milky Way. A world where God does not exist. Everything on that planet is in pieces, so much so that even if human beings appeared and evolved, they wouldn’t be able to maintain their civilization for many centuries. Human beings would be scattered and die out, and the world would be bereft of people. Whether this is a kind of wilderness-as-hell or a paradise for creatures other than man, I don’t know.…

“‘On our planet, mankind hasn’t self-destructed but somehow continues to cling precariously to life. Somehow or other order is maintained, and it’s hard to deny that this is because of God’s
presence
. Millions of people—Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists—have personified this God, but I don’t see God this way. Though I do want to construct a theory about this God who most definitely
does exist.’
This is what Patron said.

“‘Wide awake on this side,’ Patron continued, ‘I want to find out exactly what it is I confront when I go over to the
other side
. Once I get a clear picture of this, the world shouldn’t be in pieces for me anymore. Since this conviction that the world is not in pieces is something I’ve created on
this
side, with my eyes open, I can feel relieved about it. Once I can grasp that sense of relief, my awakened spirit can put in proper perspective the God I see in my visions—and this should lead to a deep and profound sense of spiritual peace I
can experience in
both
worlds. But if I die before I can attain that peace, then I’ll be torn between the two worlds and my disintegrated body and soul will flutter down into the abyss.’

“Patron was so open to me, I believed everything he said. And I was certain that someday, through this man who himself would be saved, I would reach salvation too. But I also considered at times what it would be like if I
didn’t
reach salvation through him, and intimations of that frightening thought made me shudder. Patron seemed to struggle with the idea of the need for salvation in an incomparably deeper way than I ever did. One thing I was sure of, though, was this: Apart from his intercession, I could never be saved.”

As these memories of what Guide had told him came back in snatches, Ogi once again had a sense of what had woken him up.
Ah
, he thought,
this
is what I felt earlier. He opened his eyes to the dark purplish gloom and turned on the hard flat bed to face the man-made lake.

Later on, when he reviewed the order of events in his mind, he was certain this is how it happened, but soon after he turned in the direction of what he sensed, in a sky that was so jet black he hadn’t closed the curtains before he went to bed, far off in the still-falling rain, he saw it happen. A large light lemon-yellow disc floated up, at the top of which were five shining hemispheres. The lower part was a giant black upright pillar in which were three shining rectangular doors. It was as if a UFO had flown though the vast darkness and suddenly come to a halt.

Ah!
Ogi heard a voice call out, something halfway between a sigh and a shriek.

The cry came from Dancer’s room . . . so this wasn’t just some illusion he alone was seeing! Ogi looked hard into the gloom and saw the glowing saucer and the pillar with its bright doors open soon shut in the rocklike darkness.

I believe God is in this world too, Ogi thought, half asleep, but not a personified God who has the facial features of any particular race—a God instead who would appear like this structure, built of light and darkness. Ogi knew, though, that in the morning he wouldn’t be able to regain this
total understanding
he now had, and that he wouldn’t speak of it to Dancer. And certainly not to Patron.

18: Acceptance and Rejection (I)

1

After it grew light out and Ogi had awakened again, he lay still in his wooden box of a bed, waiting for time to pass. The night before, he and Dancer had talked until late and had made do with just a light dinner of ham and lettuce sandwiches. They’d found the sandwiches at a local market, and though the place didn’t seem to have many customers Dancer declared the ham to be fantastic and showed a great deal of interest in the people who produced it locally. That was all they ate, washed down by some milk, so now, in the morning, Ogi didn’t feel any special need to use the toilet. He also hesitated to use the bathroom before Dancer had a chance to.

Ogi gazed up from his bed at the foliage of the stand of Japanese oaks that cut off his view of the broad sky. From the window on the lake side, there were overly luxuriant pomegranates and camellias bursting with leaves as far as the eye could see. The trees were covered with young leaves, bright green against the cloudless sky; only the places where the leaves overlapped were dark green, like a multilayered watercolor. A childhood memory came to him—from a school outing, perhaps, he couldn’t recall exactly—of lying down like this and gazing up at tree branches from this angle.

Soon the whole area was filled with a cloud of soft fist-sized little lumps descending from the sky and letting out high-pitched screeches: a flock of wild birds. Two or three of the birds, like puffy little white balls, hung upside down on the tips of the slender branches of the Japanese oaks. Before long, in search of bugs to eat, the flock flew off to another corner of the slope, and a profound silence returned.

After a while, the same shout he’d heard last night came from the next room. Ogi sat up in bed, ready to meet the intruder. Dancer came in. She had on green pajamas, and her mouth was open wider than usual.

“There’s fresh blood! Just below the window!” Dancer said to Ogi reproachfully.

Ogi had slept in his underwear. He wrapped the light bedcover around his waist before going over to the window and shoving open the heavy single pane. And as he looked out, he too was taken aback. From the western edge of the house a pellucid stream seemed to meander over the grass and flow into the lake. From the stone apron where the stream turned, a red belt seeped upward toward them. Ogi took a breath and, after realizing what he was seeing, said, “They’re lake crabs that’ve floated up because of all the rain last night.”

Dancer looked back at him with a look of disgust, then took her turn looking out the window.

“They’re pretty small crabs, and so many of them. They’re not even boiled, yet look how red they are. Anyone would think it’s blood flowing.”

Her slender taut calves emerged from under her pajama bottoms. Her whole body, from her thighs, butt, and waist—trained through her dancing—to her straight shoulders and thin neck, was a strange mix of firmness and fragility.

“You spent your childhood in Tokyo,” Ogi said, “and earlier in downtown Asahikawa, right? I imagine you’ve never seen crabs float up like this before.”

“So you know all about the flora and fauna in Hokkaido. But do you know the names of the birds that were just here? The Japanese great tit.”

Standing beside the window, Dancer turned toward Ogi, seated on his box bed, the color quickly returning to her face.

“I agree with Asa-san that this is a special place,” she said, trying to regain the upper hand. “I guess I jumped to conclusions. I find it amazing how the abandoned followers of Patron and Guide, while the two of them were in hell, laid the groundwork right here, in this land. You know something? In the middle of the night, I saw a sign that the land here accepts our church!”

Ogi recalled what he’d seen the night before. But he’d also been there when Dancer had been handed the complete set of keys to the chapel. It was hard to imagine that someone else had gotten into the chapel and turned on the lights in the middle of the night.

Leaving Ogi to his thoughts, Dancer disappeared toward the bathroom near the entrance, her pajamas swishing like a dance costume.

As they ate a repeat of last night’s supper, they heard a new disturbance from the far shore. Dancer was sitting at the dining table diagonally across from Ogi, her back to the east as they ate, and they both turned to look at the glistening trees and the building, newly washed in the rain. In the forest behind the chapel, people hidden by the stand of trees were rushing by. In the wind blowing up from the south there was the sound of feet, a line of people cutting through the forest.

“Lumberjacks, maybe?” she asked. “Heading toward jobs in the woods?”

“If that’s what it is, it’d just be a couple of them. And wouldn’t they use animal trails to go up the hill?”

“People hunting wild boars?”

“It sounds too orderly, like a troop of Boy Scouts out on a hike.”

“I thought this was a quiet place, but I guess not.”

“But at least we’re not being surrounded by people with placards opposing the arrival of the ‘fanatics,’” Ogi said.

Dancer said she wanted to go over that morning to see if the cottage Asa-san had suggested for Patron to use was suitable. Before she went down along the narrow path toward the dam she went out to look at the crabs close up, only to report back to Ogi that they must have slipped into new holes that had opened up in the soil because they’d disappeared. Her shoes were muddy, and in one hand she held a newly emerged brown cicada on a butterbur leaf. One of the cicada’s forelegs was missing its first joint, and as it tried to clamber up the higher edge of the butterbur leaf it tumbled down in a comical way.

“I imagine it must have been pretty surprised after spending a thousand days tucked away under the soil to emerge and find it doesn’t have enough legs to cling to the trees. Would you choose a branch where its cry can be heard easily and put it there? The reason they cry is in order to mate, right?”

Ogi took the cicada, leaf and all, and placed the poor little creature on the branch of an oak that faced the lake, the leaves heavy after the rain.

When they stood at the entrance to the house set aside for Patron, an entrance made up of round stones held together with cement, they remembered they had left all the keys for the other buildings on top of the lectern in the chapel. Dancer went back to retrieve them.

For the five minutes she was gone, the sound of the water coursing down the channel from the forest into the lake grew noticeably louder. Worried about Dancer, Ogi peeked in from the entrance of the chapel carved into the wall. In front of the space between the lined-up chairs and the far wall, Dancer was down on her knees, leaning against the lectern. Ogi removed his shoes, went inside, and found her gazing up at him like some young girl who’d been
beaten as she pointed in front of her. On the floor lay a small unblemished little skull facing in their direction. Thigh bones, ribs, and other large bones were laid out to form a complete skeleton, the finger bones and other smaller bones pushed over to one side. Next to this were fragments of bones, like small branches, laid out to spell
YOUNG FIREFLIES
.