Somersault (47 page)

The people who wrote these essays had crawled on all fours across their own individual wildernesses of suffering to arrive at a faith in Patron and Guide. And on their backs they struggled to carry the heavy social burden of being a member of the ostracized radical faction. As if this weren’t bad enough, their leaders abandoned them, ridiculing the doctrines they believed in as laughable and meaningless. Yet for ten years they had borne it all and never lost their faith. And among them now were those who had to carry the additional burden of Guide’s death.

When Kizu had seen these former radical-faction members at the memorial service—the very picture of late-thirties and forties vigor—he had already felt how soft, both physically and mentally, he was in comparison. Though he had yet to see the town in Shikoku where they’d be living together, he felt a tangible menace in the place. After they left Kyoto, the view from the train was filled with rows of houses and hills covered with thick growths of broad-leafed trees. Kizu wanted to lose himself in this familiar, nostalgic scene. He stirred and felt, deep down in his lower belly and near his back, the resistance of a hard foreign substance. So he wasn’t entirely
soft
, was he, with this hard intruder in his fifty-plus-year-old body? It made Kizu want to laugh as he simultaneously gave himself credit and put himself down.

Beside him, Ikuo lay back in his seat, eyes shut, but the movement behind his lids showed he wasn’t asleep but was reacting to the slightest movements from Kizu. From Kizu’s viewpoint, Ikuo was a great emotional and physical support for a soft late-fifties man with a serious illness; at the same time it was also clear that he had a great interest in, and was helping to support, a group Kizu wouldn’t want to get on the bad side of.

Soon after they left the New Osaka Station, Kizu stood up and Ikuo shifted his legs to let him pass, throwing him a questioning look. Kizu merely nodded and walked down the aisle to where Dr. Koga was seated. Both he and his companion were asleep. There was something about Dr. Koga’s posture
and expression in particular that pierced Kizu to the quick. He passed them and sat down in a vacant seat.

The window seat beside him was vacant as well, and Kizu tried to make his harsh breathing calm down. Standing or seated, Dr. Koga was clearly a person who’d done a lot of physical training, but now he looked like a strangely aged infant, his upper body collapsed diagonally across the seat, hands clutching his tucked-up knees. His broad eyelids were yellowish, his mouth open, teeth clenched. Beside him, Mr. Hanawa lay diagonally in the other direction, his dark face etched with tiredness. He too had had an extraordinary life and an accumulated exhaustion that in ordinary circumstances he willed into submission.

They arrived in Osaka much earlier than scheduled. Kizu continued to sit by himself until the announcement came that they had reached Okayama. As they changed trains, Kizu followed behind Ikuo as he carried their bulky luggage, trying not to catch Dr. Koga’s eye. When the new train crossed over the Seto Bridge, Kizu pretended to be absorbed in the sea and the small islands outside.

Once their train began to run along the Yosan Line, it was just the four of them in the Green Car in the middle of the train. Despite his short unsettled sleep, Dr. Koga looked refreshed, and when he invited him over, Kizu summoned up the courage to continue their earlier conversation. Ever since they entered Shikoku the hills had taken on a decided gentleness, the forests growing thicker, no doubt helping Kizu’s shift in mood, the scene outside the window growing closer to his mental picture of his homeland.

The four of them unwrapped the Matsuri Sushi box lunches Ikuo had purchased in Okayama, and when the cart came around selling drinks, Dr. Koga teasingly had Ikuo buy two cans of beer for each of them. The beer made Dr. Koga even more lively than one would expect of a man his age.

“I just want to be with Ikuo,” Kizu began, “which is what’s led me to participate in Patron’s new church, even if I don’t have much time left. I appreciate Patron’s generosity in allowing someone like me in. Though it does bother me sometimes how wishy-washy I am, a follower without faith.”

“I’m thankful you can be with Patron,” Dr. Koga said. “I know having you with us will liven things up. But more than that,
Ikuo
needs you. If you hadn’t come he never would have joined us. I’ve talked with him a lot recently, and one thing I can say with certainty is this: Your participation in the church is a great thing—not just for Ikuo but for Patron, and for the former radical faction too.”

“For better or worse,” Kizu said, “Ikuo and I
are
pretty tight. But truthfully I don’t know how useful I’ll be to Patron, or to you and the others.”

Gazing at the peaceful line of hills and the gentle green slopes, and with the beer taking effect, Dr. Koga’s expression softened, though soon a deep-seated tension returned.

“To respond to your comments in reverse order, it’s very important for us to have an outsider like yourself in our midst, to give us a fresh perspective on our faith in Patron. Ten years ago, not entirely at Guide’s instigation, the religious fervor of those of us at the Izu Institute reached a climax. This reached a peak with the Somersault, and of all Patron’s followers we’re the ones who feel the greatest gap between before and after. In terms of giving us room to maneuver, it’s much more helpful to have someone from outside the faith work with us rather than just be a monolithic church. And this should be even more true of Patron, I would think.”

“So I wonder,” Kizu said, steeling himself to ask, “if you would tell me, an outsider to the faith, how you came to know Patron and Guide?”

Dr. Koga bent his nicely shaped head, with its receding hairline, and gazed at his hands in his lap. When he spoke, it was more slowly and with more controlled emphasis than before.

“It’s always hard to tell another person about how your faith began, even to someone who shares it.… I think that’s especially true for me. My mother and I lived alone, just the two of us for a long time, and I let her take care of everything. After she died and we had to handle the inheritance, I didn’t even know where she kept her official seal or which documents were necessary. My aunt came to straighten everything out, but first we had to locate the seal and bankbook. My aunt scoured the house from top to bottom but came up empty-handed, so we ended up seeking the help of a psychic everyone said was quite good. This happened to be Patron, who at the time had a little church with some thirty followers.

“Patron and Guide were still running their fortune-telling venture on the side to make the money needed to run their church. I went to see them with my aunt, the first time in a long while I’d left the house. Patron’s church was in Kita-ku, near Asukayama.

“We’d gone out merely to have a psychic help us locate our lost items, but once we met Patron he began to ask us all sorts of detailed questions about my mother’s and my life together. I was pretty surprised but did my best to answer each question. It was not only painful for me to touch other people or to be touched, I said, but I also had trouble communicating, yet even though I’d just met Patron, surprisingly I had no problem at all talking with him.

“After I finished speaking, Patron said there was something my mother’s great-grandfather had had when he was a student at Tekijuku, something
packed away inside a large wooden trunk. Actually among our family heirlooms my mother did talk about a Dutch-Japanese dictionary, kept in a large wooden trunk. When I told him this, Patron told me that the seal, bankbook, and other important documents were all in there as well. The lost is found, he said, a cheerful look on his face. And indeed my aunt, who had gone home ahead of me, phoned to say that the psychic had been right on the money.

“So I accomplished all I’d set out to do in visiting Patron’s church. I felt more relieved than I had in a long time, and should have left at that point. But I found the chair facing Patron’s low armchair more comfortable than any other chair I’d ever sat in, and I sank down into it. And I thought I’d like to have him hear what’s
really
important. Patron seemed willing, and at his insistence I removed my dark-colored swimming goggles and began speaking.”

5

“So that’s how I came to talk, with an enthusiasm I hadn’t known for ages, about the predicament I’d found myself in to this plump little middle-aged man who gazed at me with this engrossed look on his face. As I talked I had an increasingly objective feeling toward what I was saying, the contents becoming so concrete I could almost reach out and touch them. By this point Patron was already healing me—in fact he was halfway there. When I was about half finished I got up to use the toilet, and when I looked in the mirror, I thought miserably that my eyes in my unshaven face had the impassioned, feverish look of some young kid in love.

“After washing my face I calmed down a bit, and now it was Patron’s turn to do the talking. This was the first of many sermons.

“‘We live in a fallen world,’ he began. ‘Everything in the world is fallen—from the earth, to the oceans, to the air itself. The same holds true for human beings, who are perhaps the most fallen of all. So isn’t it natural, then, for someone who realizes this to feel it’s disgusting and dirty to touch other bodies as well as his own? Even myself, for a few days after I’ve gone over to the spirit world through a trance, I hate touching things and people in this fallen world of ours. I even can’t stand the smell of the air and can barely breathe. Since I wouldn’t survive that way, I train myself to be thick-skinned.

“‘Isn’t the predicament you’re in a lot like the one I’m in right after I return from the realm of the spirits? You’re not suffering from some nervous condition, you’re expressing a purifying awakening of the soul. In order to survive in a fallen world, though, you have to acclimatize yourself, which is
not an impossible task. Think about it. If your own body is dirty and fallen, touching other people’s bodies, still less your own, isn’t going to intensify the overall level of filth, now, is it?

“‘What you need to be aware of is that your soul is alive inside this fallen world, inside your fallen body. You’re suffering because your soul is oppressed, because your soul is awakening. Your soul is not fallen, but as long as it’s in this fallen world, because the temporary container your soul is in, your body, is dirty, and the world that surrounds that body is dirty, your soul will indeed suffer. You must not annihilate the purity of your suffering soul. It’s hard work to survive as a pure soul in this fallen world.’

“I listened to Patron with an openness I’d never had before and suddenly felt liberated from the pride and arrogance that had always kept me tied down and hopeless. The world is fallen, and my body is polluted—this struck me as it never had before. Was
that
why I’d been suffering, why I drove my mother to a desperate death? That being said, how could I snuff out my fallen body from this polluted world as quickly as possible? Why was I following an animal survival instinct that kept me from doing that? I didn’t think what my mother did was wrong, and on a conscious level at least I don’t fear death.

“‘That’s because you’re listening to the voice of your soul,’ Patron told me. ‘Extinguishing your polluted body in this polluted world does not mean your soul will break all ties with the world and return to a world before the Fall. And if that’s the case, this fallen world itself has a certain significance, doesn’t it?

“‘As long as you don’t find a solution here, in this fallen world, no matter where you run your soul will be in the same predicament. Escaping this world is not a guarantee of salvation. So you’re outfitted with flesh and your soul is calling out to you. It’s a tragic thing, but your mother was mistaken in refusing to listen to that voice.

“‘People who hear the voice of the soul must do this: Wake up to the fact that our world is a fallen world, that humans are polluted beings, repent, and await the end of the world. Many people have heard the voice of the soul, which means the end time must not be far off. In fact, it is almost upon us. Anyone who hears the soul’s voice must, as a penitent person, prepare for that coming and take the initiative to welcome it. You’re not the only one who has awakened in this way, though not many have suffered as much as you. The church I am organizing is for people just like yourself.’

“And that’s how I became a member of Patron’s church. This might sound too simple, almost melodramatic, but from the moment I laid eyes on Patron I wanted to follow him. Patron encouraged me, so I joined his church.
This doesn’t mean I was confident I’d truly awakened and become a repentant person. Once I had a chance to mull it over by myself I came to the conclusion that there is a huge gap separating an awakened person from a penitent one, and you have to leap across it. I’d been so thoroughly steeped in the notion that my body and other people’s bodies were polluted that what Patron had said about the connection between this and my suffering struck me as entirely reasonable.

“Deep down a person knows that human beings are fallen creatures in a fallen world. In this sense he is an awakened person. But that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily repentant. So this was the goal I set for myself after I joined the church: to focus my activities in the church on making that leap from being awakened to being truly repentant.

“I set out with this resolution in mind, and from the time I worked with Guide to help set up the Izu workshop and began living with my young colleagues, I realized that all of them, too, were at the same stage—ready to make that leap. From the start it was clear this was their intention, but, being young and full of energy, their focus started to change.

“Awaiting the end time and transforming oneself from an awakened person to a repentant one is no easy task, but is that really all one should do? Shouldn’t we go beyond that and actually help
bring about
the end of the world? Isn’t that what’s necessary to make the great leap? And didn’t Patron and Guide entrust my young colleagues with the Izu Research Center in hopes that they would do exactly this—come up with a plan to bring about Armageddon? All it took was someone to put it into words, and this became the radical faction’s point of departure.”