They decided that Ogi would go up to the villa alone to open it, while Patron and the others stayed in the minivan they’d parked on the road below; the ground rose up on either side of the road, which lay below a dried-up grassy slope. After checking the lights and the water and switching on the propane gas heater next to the stove, Ogi looked down through the cloudy window. The barren forest surrounding the building was an old one, with huge gnarled trees; some trunks that had been cruelly felled by a typhoon were scattered about. Ogi began to regret bringing Patron to such a cold, forbidding place.
Before long Dancer ran up to the house to get it ready and told him she’d give a signal when the house was warm, so Ogi walked back down to the minivan. For the first time ever, he found Patron and Ikuo engaged in a friendly conversation. Ogi boarded the warm minivan in time to hear Patron say, “It’s not exactly a desolate wilderness, but with the woods like this, after the leaves have fallen and before the snows, it does have that feeling. The place I went to in my visions was like this.”
Ikuo seemed surprised. “Guide told me it was more like a dreamy atmosphere.”
“Guide was almost always the first person I talked to when my visions were finished and I returned to this side, so his impression of what it was like may very well be just as accurate. The sense I had of it, though, was like being in a desolate place like this, confronting that blurred white light. Since it was painful to go from the other side back to this side, as painful as dying, I imagine, I suppose it’s a bit of a contradiction to say that the other side is a more bitter, desolate place than this side.”
“I had the impression that Guide always spoke of your visionary world in bright, cheery terms.”
“Whenever I come back from the other side I talk about what I saw there in a kind of delirious way, and Guide listens and explains it all in a logical way. What he says stuns me.”
“How could that be possible? You’re stunned by hearing your own experiences told back to you?”
“It’s entirely possible,” Patron replied spiritedly, turning an amused look first at Ikuo, then at Ogi.
“You take leave of reality, go over to the other side, and accept the spiritual, right?” Ikuo said. “How can you be stunned by hearing about what you yourself saw?”
“Maybe that’s the fate involved in using language to speak and to listen, especially when you’re dealing with transcendental matters. There’s no direct connection between the visions I see in my trances and our language on this side. If I wanted to go over to the other side permanently, all I’d have to do would be to immerse myself in experiences that have nothing to do with language on this side. Being immersed like that is how God reveals Himself; it’s everything to me.
“Still, I suffer tremendously to return to this side. There wouldn’t be any problems if I stayed silent after I came back, but that would be as if what I experienced on the other side never took place. Guide’s the one who told me I couldn’t leave it at that and encouraged me to put my experiences into words. Often when I listen to Guide retelling my experiences, though, I feel he’s unearthed deeper meaning to them than I ever realized. He definitely is my guide when it comes to making this mystical world clear to me. But I do sometimes feel uncomfortable with it. That’s what I mean by saying I feel stunned.”
There was more they seemed to want to say, but they fell silent for a time. Ogi sensed a movement out the van window and discovered Dancer out on the porch, doing a pirouette leap—her signal that the villa had warmed up enough to come inside.
3
The living room had the very latest propane heater—a device with self-regulating temperature and a gas leak detector—as well as a wood-burning fireplace, and it was there the three young people had a breakfast of ham, bacon, eggs, and vegetable salad the next morning. Dancer put away as much as the two young men. Patron’s breakfast consisted of liquid food, appropriate to an elderly convalescent, that Dancer had brought along from Tokyo in a thermos. Once they were free of the day-to-day routine of the office, Ogi was struck by how very simple a matter it was to satisfy Patron’s worldly desires. The same, of course, could be said of Guide.
After eating, they all went out for a walk. Before they left the villa, Dancer made Patron prepare for the winter cold by wearing an overcoat over his sweater and a long muffler that trailed down to his knees. The clouds hung lower than one would expect on a high plain, and it felt like the first snow of the season was just around the corner. Ogi took Patron’s arm to help him along, but Patron soon said he needed time alone to think and strode aloofly off ahead of them.
The three young people walked behind Patron, keeping their distance, Ogi first, with Ikuo and Dancer side by side after him. Ikuo had taken out a folding wheelchair from the minivan and, with the chair still folded up, pushed it along, Dancer helping him.
Dancer had recommended that they buy the wheelchair after Guide had collapsed and it looked like he wouldn’t soon recover. After he left the hospital, though, Guide had no need of it, and it had been stored in the outbuilding and then loaded into the minivan. Patron was descending the gentle slope now with a healthy stride, but coming back he’d have the uphill slope to face and might be glad to use the chair. Dancer took all possible precautions when it came to Patron’s health.
“I felt closer to Guide at first, but there was something I couldn’t quite grasp about him,” Dancer said to Ikuo, loud enough for Ogi, two or three paces ahead, to hear. “I don’t know anything about what happened more than ten years ago. I’ve been thinking about this since I came to live with Patron and Guide and observe them up close. Guide always seems to be urging Patron to do things, but once it seems that his words and actions are actually influencing Patron’s judgment and actions, he immediately pulls back. I find his hesitation hard to fathom.
“I don’t have anything to base this on, but I came up with a guess. I’m not saying that Patron was led into doing the Somersault by Guide, but maybe Guide did have an influence on Patron’s decision. With this talk you’re planning to have with Patron, didn’t you say you wanted to talk without Professor Kizu and Guide around? Even if Professor Kizu couldn’t make the trip because of his health, I wonder if Guide didn’t think it better that he not be there since you and Patron had some important things to discuss. That must be the reason he didn’t come, despite that long phone call and the fact that he urged you to go ahead and talk with Patron.”
“It was Guide who encouraged me to bring my main concerns directly to Patron,” said Ikuo, who had been silent up to this point.
Ogi sensed something, turned around, and saw Dancer twist to turn around to face Ikuo, who was a head taller than she was. In a very sharp tone of voice she said, “You’re free to voice your own concerns, but whatever Patron tells you should be shared with all of us. Patron isn’t going to give you a hint for you alone; he will indicate the direction all of us should be taking. Don’t forget that!”
Dancer had clearly had her say; she began to walk more quickly in order to shorten the distance between herself and Patron. Urged on, Ogi and Ikuo picked up the pace. It was a simple matter for the young men and Dancer, with her gymnastic training, to catch up with Patron. He had stopped at the side of the road where raised earth marked the boundary of the older residential section of the area; across from him was a paved road and a slope running downhill and, even farther down the slope, a newer residential area that he was now gazing at. Dancer may have cut her conversation with Ikuo short because she noticed where Patron was standing.
A broad deep expanse of snow-covered mountains lay before them. On this side ran the line of woods that this morning had seemed desolate; bathed in the faint sunlight, the woods now had a gentle reddish-yellow tinge. The whole scene gave the impression that both people and trees had finished their preparations for the day, fast approaching, when snow would blanket ground and woods, and the far-off mountains would become one continuous stretch of white.
As the three of them reached
the bundled-up Patron, he turned gracefully toward them in his expensive boots at the sound of Dancer’s voice and she briskly helped him into the wheelchair. Standing at the tip of that old road sloping down, their backs to it, they could feel the wind whipping up the slope, carrying with it a hint of cold air from the snow-covered mountains in the distance. At this season this was an appropriate spot to end their walk, and all of them understood it was the proper time to begin pushing Patron back up the hill. With her quick, unsparing way of working, Dancer was the perfect attendant.
4
By six it was already dark. Patron had slept during the day and then eaten dinner in bed, and Dancer urged him to stay in bed for the time being. Their group discussion, then, began at little after seven. The young people lit the wood in the fireplace, set an armchair in front of it for Patron, and settled down directly on an electric blanket they placed on the rug. They didn’t face Patron directly, and as he stared into the fireplace, they followed suit, listening intently and gazing at the flames. Ikuo had used a saw to cut up some of the pine, light brown birches, and cherry trees that had toppled over in the typhoon into six-foot-long logs, but couldn’t find a hatchet to chop them into smaller pieces.
“I understand Guide suggested that you talk directly with me, Ikuo,” Patron began. “He phoned me from his annex to tell me this. The fact that he didn’t come to see me directly is a sign that he has something in mind. Professor Kizu, too, sent me a letter outlining the background to your questions, that your motivation for getting close to Guide and me can be traced to a desire you’ve had ever since you were a young boy. He wrote that you’re a young man with something very special inside, and that if talking with me is needed to bring that to the surface, he wants to do what he can to help out.
“So it’s obvious that Professor Kizu thinks you’re a pretty special person. Dancer tells me that my answers to you shouldn’t be for you alone, but for all of you, Dancer and Ogi included. In other words, whatever I say is connected to the movement I’m about to launch. In Guide’s case, however, there’s a separate issue at stake. Guide sympathizes with you, Ikuo, and the difficult questions you have, which is why he’s advising you. I know him very well, though, and I know that can’t be all there is to it.
“Guide is making the following proposal to me through you, Ikuo: In the past, God called to this young man. And I want you, for the sake of this young man, to act as intermediary to revive God’s call to him.
“Guide is throwing up a challenge to me. He’s also proposing that we try once more to do an important job that he and I weren’t able to complete in the past. How this will come about, he’s leaving up to me. According to Professor Kizu’s letter, the God that appeared to you, Ikuo, told you to do something, and though you were still a child then, you waited with all your might to see what God wanted you to do. But you waited in vain.
“This is similar to the time before our Somersault, when Guide wanted me to act as intermediary between God and the radical sect he created. Around the time our church was getting established and really beginning to grow, he gathered a group of elite young people and created a place where they could freely conduct their research—his own special vanguard, in other words. Doesn’t it seem now as if he’s singling you out, hoping to raise you up as a firm believer, as a kind of replacement for the sect? What I need to know is what fundamental difference Guide sees between then and now, between you and the radical faction in Izu.
“In the past we used to have these kinds of heavy discussions as he tried to grasp the vision I saw in my trance. Right now I’ve come back from an unsuccessful attempt to enter into a deep trance—my first in a decade. Guide tells me this is a preliminary to the return of those trances of old.
“I don’t know yet what form it will take, but I’ve taken the first steps toward starting a new movement. Guide is essential to this, but you young people are also crucial. This is why I responded to Ikuo’s appeal and asked you three to travel with me.
“I’d like to tell you young people about what Guide and I used to do in the old days and how our Somersault came about. Until we abandoned our movement, what was it I preached to our followers? In a nutshell, it was my hope that the world be filled with people who repent what’s happened to our world, because that is the only way for life to be restored to our planet. In the visions I had in my trances, I grasped how to do this. The sect that Guide created came up with tactics for accomplishing this, tactics that would forcibly drag people with us until everyone realized the kind of future mankind was facing.
“I can’t deny that that’s the direction in which I led the church. Those who can envision the end of the world, the end time, will, in the near future, create an actual crisis that will be a productive opportunity for repentance; those people are out there, I said in my sermons. This is the point at which the sect Guide created rose to prominence within the church—working to bring about a crisis that would lead everyone to immediate repentance and preparing the methods and shock troops to carry it out.
“Up till the stage where the ideology behind this young elite sect in Izu was set, Guide and I worked in harmony. Once the whole body of believers accepted the Izu sect’s ideas, and the shock troops that would initiate a crisis grew until they had the power to destroy an entire city, then my sermons anticipating a crisis would take on a real sense of power. Guide wasn’t the only one who believed this; I did too.
“The reason I preached about making my visions of the end of the world a reality is that I wanted the people who live on this planet to have the courage to face that crisis, while they still had the energy to be restored to life out of the ruins that, even then, were already appearing. What would be the point of having the human race repent en masse if they didn’t have the courage or energy to do anything about it? That was my doctrine, and this was supposed to be the source of the orders for whatever actions the church was about to take.”
This is a sermon in itself, Ogi thought. The sense of emotional tension that came across struck him as incongruous, so much so that he felt like interrupting Patron to say, Hey! I’m not one of your believers, I just work here! Though he was, of course, up to his ears in helping Patron restart his religious activities. What did Dancer think about all this? Just as this thought occurred to Ogi, Dancer interrupted Patron, though what she said didn’t answer Ogi’s unspoken question.
“Ogi and I have heard all this before from Guide,” she said. “He painted a vivid picture of what the end of the world looks like in visions. Isn’t that right?” Ogi, suddenly urged to agree, nodded but felt uneasy about how Patron would interpret his assent. “We’ve all read newspaper articles about overpopulation, our lack of resources, and the destruction of the environment, but the images that Guide painted for us really struck us to the core. They were heartrending. Guide told us you have profound visions, which you describe in a torrent of words. He also told us he feels a great anxiety as he interprets these visions, anxiety about whether or not he’s getting them right.”
“It’s not that I see visions,” Patron said, “but rather that I’m assaulted by them, and the question then is how to convey this to people. The only way I could put them into some sort of logical language was through Guide’s help. He’s the one who understands better than I—at the linguistic level—what my visions are all about.”
“But it seems to me you’re the one who established the basic system of the church,” Dancer said. “Guide told me, too, that it might be impossible to convey the whole of your visions in language people can understand. Mankind faces a cruel future, is at a dead end, staring at a wall; as long as people don’t have a way to scale that wall, they’ll never understand the depths of the crisis they’re in. People are really good at ignoring danger. The task for your church was to bring the end of the world closer, to let people actually see it. How was this supposed to happen? The only alternative was to present a model of this crisis to force people to repent. The tactics of the Izu radical facti
on were to precipitate this crisis, radically and concretely. That’s what Guide said. Patron has just spoken of this, but the point I’m trying to make is that the two of them were in agreement at that time.”
Ogi decided that Dancer’s long interruption was a tactic of her own to give Patron a break from doing all the talking. But it also worked to encourage the others to speak up, and now Ikuo raised a question.
“Setting aside the issue of the Izu radical faction and their gaining power in the church, if Patron’s visions were the basis for the church’s teachings, wasn’t that doctrine correct and isn’t it still correct? I mean, during the past ten years this crisis hasn’t been resolved, has it? So why was it necessary at the time of the Somersault to deny these teachings? You and Guide announced that it was all nonsense, right?”
Sitting in a faded purple chair that Ogi remembered from childhood, Patron shifted to face Ikuo. As if to put a stop to this, Dancer spoke up.
“If you’re going to talk about Patron’s state of mind at the time of the Somersault, then all of us—since we weren’t present at the time—need to consider the background. Don’t you agree, Ikuo? The elite group that Guide created was already acting on its own, trying to bring ordinary people face-to-face with what Patron envisioned in his trances. When they got the idea to move the whole church body in that direction, the radical sect went ahead and took action, attempting to get the entire church implicated. Although the church’s attitude wasn’t yet set, the radical faction went ahead with its adventurist schemes.”