Somersault (52 page)

Dancer’s shoulders shuddered slightly, and in a tearful voice she said, “I thought that was a
sign
, but all it was was them stealing the keys to this place and doing this. In the morning we weren’t likely to come over here, so they grew impatient and kicked up a racket. I can’t believe how cunning these people are who don’t want Patron’s church here.”

2

After Ogi made a call from the office beside the chapel, Asa-san got in touch with Mr. Matsuo, the head priest, and they both rushed over. They didn’t think the bones had anything to do with a crime, but they didn’t disturb them until finally Asa-san told Mr. Matsuo to gather them all up in a cardboard box. Ogi returned to the office where he’d made the phone call, and Asa-san told them about the
YOUNG FIREFLIES
.

“That’s a name found in legends from the Old Town, the section apart from Maki Town. The name and practice died out long ago, but when one of the elderly people in the main house of my family passed away, they revived the practice at his funeral because he put great stock in the old customs. I think I have a good idea where those bones came from.

“I’m sure you got this impression yesterday when you looked up from the road along the riverbed, but the land around here is shaped like the inside of an urn. Young Fireflies refers to a custom where the young people of the town light torches and climb up to the top of the forest at night. The young people here just liked the name, apart from the ceremony associated with it, and gave it to their young men’s association.

“Children are basically very conservative, you know. Your moving in here marks a change in the status quo, so they’re against it. I’d heard rumors that they were eager to do something to express their opposition. If this is what they came up with, I’d have to say it’s pretty scurrilous.
Scurrilous
is the word old people use here when something’s vulgar....

“Since it’s come to this, I’ll have my husband talk with the junior high principal.

“Be that as it may, I was in charge of the keys for this building. I thought if I let them make spare keys for the chapel, they might use it for their junior
high chorus practice. But they’ve repaid good with evil, you could say. It’s all quite scurrilous, and I’m ashamed and truly sorry you had to be upset this way.”

The next day, Patron, accompanied by Ms. Tachibana and Morio, arrived at the Matsuyama airport. Twenty or so former radical-faction members joined them there, having driven down from Tokyo in a caravan of sedans and a minivan. After linking up with Kizu, Ikuo, Dr. Koga, and Mr. Hanawa, who’d arrived at Matsuyama Station on the Yosan Line, the entire group arrived at the Hollow in force.

Apart from Dancer and Ogi, this was the first contingent of the new church to arrive in the area, and a few local people waited along the road by the riverbed to watch their arrival. In the lead car Morio sat next to Patron in the backseat, dressed quite stylishly in a long midnight-blue overcoat, gray chinos, and lightly tinted metal-frame glasses. Seeing him sitting there gazing up with his splendid forehead and strongly etched nose, someone reported later to Asa-san that he was sure Morio must be the founder of the church.

Having set up his residence in the Hollow, Patron decided to meet within the week with the widow of the founder of the defunct church who had transferred the chapel to them. With so many new people coming from the outside to live in the area, the question of securing enough food for all of them had become a pressing matter, and as one practical step toward solving this, Asa-san introduced the widow, Satchan, the owner of the Farm, to Patron.

Asa-san had been hoping that Patron would talk to Mr. Matsuo, herself, and others who had been connected with the Church of the Flaming Green Tree about the new church he planned to start here. The people of Maki Town, too, had expressed the same hope, and now that the church had actually begun moving in, they again proposed such a meeting to Asa-san, who was acting as intermediary between the church and the town government.

One practical issue soon arose. The group in Maki Town opposing Patron had already published a broadside revealing that the former radical faction would be participating in Patron’s restarted religious movement and that one of the leaders of this faction, Mr. Hanawa, would be living here with his colleagues to help Dr. Koga. What’s more—and this was the critical point—the town would be hiring Dr. Koga to run the clinic in the Old Town. As before, objections sprang up among the town leaders that the former radical faction, the one the newspapers had accused of the death of Guide, was going to be moving into the Hollow.

These issues would normally have been discussed by the mayor and Patron, but Patron was asked beforehand to talk in an informal town hall meeting with local citizens.

Asa-san, who had already convinced Ogi that she was a person who held considerable sway locally, as well as someone who didn’t beat around the bush when it came to formulating plans, proposed that Patron first meet with Satchan, and Patron agreed. Dancer took advantage of this opportunity to ask Ogi to seek a more detailed explanation than they’d heard before as to how the former radical faction was to be dealt with.

What worried Ogi most was that the widow of the founder of the Church of the Flaming Green Tree might not like it if internal affairs of the church were discussed with local people—especially in the chapel. But Satchan agreed to attend, as long as Asa-san and Mr. Matsuo were also there, and for the first time in a long while entered the chapel that her church had once owned. Town officials had also wanted to attend, but Asa-san had been able to limit their attendance to just a few of the more influential members.

“How do you feel about the religion you’ve created, leading people to salvation—and about your own salvation?” Satchan asked, to start off the meeting.

“Well,” replied Patron, recoiling somewhat, “didn’t you and your late husband also found a church?”

“Satchan merely wants to ask an honest question of someone who is involved in a similar movement—and in the same place, no less,” Asa-san explained encouragingly.

“I don’t feel so much that I’m continuing some teachings of the founder of our church,” Satchan explained in a softer tone. “I spend more time considering how my husband felt about things himself, as a flesh-and-blood human being. I believe he tried to lead his followers to salvation, but when I remember how he died I wonder whether he cared about his
own
salvation at all. I’ve been pondering this for quite some time.”

Patron clearly relaxed when he heard this. He also seemed to show interest in this earnest individualistic woman, well into her middle years.

“Before I did the now-infamous Somersault,” Patron said, “when I was quite involved in religious activities, I don’t think I really seriously considered my own salvation either. It was after I fell into hell that the question of my salvation became a pressing matter. When you lead a religious organization, you soon become terribly busy, rushing around like crazy all the time. I had no time to consider whether I was saved, or wasn’t saved, or even whether I would reach salvation in the end or not. What I wanted most was to lead
the suffering young people who came to us for salvation. I actually groped for ways to push them in that direction.

“What I know from my own experience—and this is the same both at the beginning of the church and when it was at its height—is that there was indeed a way for the suffering people who came to our church to find the salvation they sought. All of them were proceeding toward their own salvation. The greater their awareness that they were not yet saved, the greater their conviction that they were on the path to salvation, despite the difficulties they might encounter. In fact, it was the very awareness that they hadn’t yet reached salvation that accelerated their faith.

“As I’ve thought about my own salvation, or my image of salvation in the ten years since the Somersault, my ideas have become simplified—boiled down to a single mathematical formula, if you will. When a person thinks about death or is actually facing death, if he’s convinced that his life and death are fine the way they are, isn’t he saved?

“In my new church, my followers should be able to say, when they think about death or are actually staring down death,
Let’s go! Hallelujah!
is another way of putting it. The basic orientation of my movement is to lead people gently in that direction. In order to do that, though, one has to truly repent. As long as one has a true awareness that the end of the world is near, this can be accomplished.

“The new church’s religious movement I’ve been contemplating is that simple—that naive, even. What I want to convey to you is that in the ten years since the Somersault this is the kind of simplicity, naive, unadorned, and stripped of anything extraneous, that has occupied my mind.”

“The Savior of the Church of the Flaming Green Tree, that’s what we called my husband,” Satchan said, “if the Savior were alive now, I think he might not see what you’ve said as so simple or naive. Quite frankly, he wasn’t very educated when it came to religious ideas, yet he was possessed by spiritual matters and in that sense was an unfortunate person. He was still a sort of lackadaisical savior when his old enemies stoned him to death.

“He was called Savior like you were, but he wasn’t the
ultimate
Savior. He believed that until the advent of the ultimate Savior there would be countless saviors, that when the final Savior appeared all other saviors, being linked with him, would—in the end—become
real
saviors. He gave a sermon on this, here in this chapel....

“He recognized himself as a sort of lukewarm savior, one of those countless lackadaisical saviors.... That’s the sort of thinking he wanted to believe in. Fifteen years after his death, I’ve grown more sympathetic to that view.

“If I understand your remarks correctly, putting my own spin on them, since I believe my husband’s one of the ones who will be tied with the real Savior, I know that even when I’m on the verge of death I’ll feel saved. The details of my own personal history would surprise you, but I would like to second what you say, as far as my own life is concerned.
Let’s go!
Though I have the feeling that when I’m actually on my deathbed and say that, there won’t be anyone around to hear me.”

“There
is
a God,” Patron said, “a God who is the whole of nature, who encompasses everything, your spirit and body included. Even these ideas that have arisen from your unusual life were already included in the principles that God created for the world.”

From the moment that Satchan entered the chapel where Ogi and the others were waiting, and sat down in the row of chairs lined up beside the podium facing Patron, every church member was impressed. She was a beautiful woman, but something about her also gave the impression of a mild-featured
man
. She was also quite tall for a Japanese woman. Her curly hair, mixed with white, fell in a natural way on both sides of her prominent forehead. Her face had not the slightest trace of fat. In the way she looked straight at Patron as she spoke to him, you could sense an independent tough-minded spirit but also a clear open-mindedness brought about by her experience.

“I came here because I wanted to meet the people who are taking over the building used by the Church of the Flaming Green Tree,” Satchan went on, “and also because I feel responsible to the local people here for your activities. People in your group were involved in some major terrorist activities, so the mayor and members of the town council asked us to find out what sort of group was moving in here. We do recognize, mind you, that your Somersault put a stop to the radical faction’s plans.

“We had a group in our church, too, that began to make waves, and as we confronted this we began to steer the church back to the small gatherings with which it began. Right at that critical juncture we lost our leader, and our church fell apart. But your church is getting back on its feet, with this region as your stage. My main concern is that this radical faction might once again play a major role.”

“I quite understand your concern,” Patron said. “Our church started out much like yours, and until it reached a certain size it was basically just a prayer group. There was another person who made this group with me and helped me run it—Guide, the man whose terrible death I’m sure you’ve heard about. His idea was to gather together young people who’d been specially trained in the sciences, and he created the Izu Research Center for them.

“While living there communally, these young people continued research in their special fields, and as they began reflecting on their own faith they started debating the entire direction the church was taking. In the end they came up with their own unique course of action, which could be summarized like this: Their faith tells them the end of the world is near, which allows them to repent and prepare themselves as righteous people. As the righteous, then, they call on all mankind to repent. But how exactly do you go about preaching repentance to the masses? The church was pretty vague on this point, and the young people needed a clear-cut model, so they began concentrating on a concrete direction their ideas could take. In the end they went past the point of no return.

“At the time I was at the Tokyo headquarters, my role that of spiritual leader for the ordinary followers in their walk of faith. Guide was in charge of keeping contact with the Izu Research Institute. Which isn’t to say he was in charge of the movement that was starting there—he wasn’t. The institute was self-governing.

“Guide would take the funding that the Tokyo headquarters had allotted to the institute and hand it over to their accountant. But he refused to exert any direct influence on the management of the institute. He was more like their sponsor. When things were pretty much all set up the way they wanted, he took me there to deliver a sermon, but I’m sure he never spoke to them on his own about faith. The self-governing board of the institute selected board members whose job it was to oversee everything—from all the various research projects to matters of faith.