"Events quickly moved toward the Somersault. I assume you saw the farce on television. Here I'll just touch on the how it came about and the plan we put together with the authorities.
"The idea for the Somersault was quite sudden. Already the relation- ship between Guide and me was strained. One evening he arrived unan- nounced. He stormed into my bedroom and yelled at me that the young people had decided to implement their own insurrection. They were going to occupy several nuclear power plants. This would mean not only their own deaths but the annihilation of the church. 'They have to be stoppedV Guide shouted. I don't have the power to do it, and neither do you, but we have to do something drastic!'
"I hesitated to hear the plan Guide had already formulated. I blamed him and asked him why the young people in the research institute decided to take action unilaterally. Guide said that since yesterday they'd been insisting they also could hear-all on their own-a voice from the other side.
"I was frantic. I'd fabricated a message to the young people to the effect that God was ordering them to start in a new direction. But hadn't this been God tricking me into an unconscious self-defensive maneuver because I didn't want to hear His actual frightening voice?
"And now, carrying things one step further, when both my conscious and unconscious were doing their utmost to reject this, wasn't I being tricked again by a different strategy-the young radical faction's own collective illu- sion-that made all resistance futile?
"Guide could see how shaken I was. He glared at me; he said, 'I won't let either you or the young people in Izu destroy our church. If I have to drag you around with a rope around your neck, I'm going to make sure you take responsibility for this! Those folks in Izu will learn their lesson!'
"As all of you saw on television, I had to do some things that were far more shameful than being dragged around with a rope around my neck. The ones who suffered even more directly because of the Somersault, though, were those members of the shock corps of the radical faction, especially those re- sponsible for the Threshold Crosser device. A hurried meeting was held between us and the police, the federal authorities, and executives of the power company. We decided that my Somersault announcement would avoid any mention of this device. Mr. Omuro, though taken into custody, not only avoided going to trial but vanished altogether. There are rumors he escaped to an American military base on Okinawa. Some say he was given a series of electroshock treatments and completely lost his memory. Others say they've seen him wandering among the homeless on the streets. Another rumor has it he was stabbed to death by the yakuza. This worried Guide most of all. This was the most base and cruel outcome that Guide feared would happen because of the Somersault.
"During that period I felt a great joy and at the same time a deep fear.
Because I was convinced that God existed, in a realm beyond my arbitrari- ness. Even if it was a useless bit of resistance, I wanted to betray and deny that God. I was resolved to do that."
19: ACCEPTANCE AND REJECTION (II)
1
Patron's talk was serving as an inaugural sermon for their new chapel.
Sitting nearby, Ogi could tell how deeply moved Ikuo was by what he heard, though he himself had a hard time following it all. At this point Dancer raised up her pale face and spoke.
"I'd like to hear from Ikuo too," she said. "You're a new member who had nothing to do with the church before the Somersault. But you'd been interested in Patron for a long time and got close to him very quickly."
"You'll have to take my background into consideration," Ikuo answered briefly, still under the spell of Patron's magnetism.
"Why don't you start there," Dancer said. "I don't fully understand the reasons why you were so attracted by Patron that you became an ardent mem- ber of the church almost immediately. I know you said you came to the office originally to see me, someone you'd come into contact with a long time ago who was now working for the founder of the church, but that's not the whole story. You knew quite a lot about the Somersault already, didn't you?"
Ikuo looked like he'd finally made up his mind to speak.
"It's true I was interested in Patron and Guide's Somersault," he began.
"I was interested, as well, in the fall of Aum Shinrikyo. When their headquar- ters at the foot of Mount Fuji was surrounded by the police, I was glued to the TV. It looked like a gunfight might erupt at any moment. I was on pins and needles, wondering whether Aum, with all those chemical weapons, was going to counterattack and start a real revolt. At the time there was another show on TV, a special retrospective on the Somersault. I remember seeing the actual broadcasts, though I was just a child then. Watching these old video- tapes they were showing as a kind of adjunct to the massive coverage of Aum made me interested in Patron and his church all over again.
"With Aum, of course, in the end nothing happened. Asahara, who should have given the order to attack, was arrested, discovered asleep next to a trunk full of money. I can't tell you how disappointed I was when I heard this!
"To tell the truth, when I saw Patron on TV, he looked insincere and aroused my antipathy. Guide, on the other hand, didn't say much and seemed more trustworthy.
"Patron explained in this singsong voice how the visions he'd had on the other side were all so much nonsense. 'The church's planned actions are just a joke,' he said. 'So I call on all members of the church throughout Japan to stop this farce!'
"What Guide said was a little different. He was asked whether the re- lationship between the two of them, Guide believing in Patron as the savior, Patron seeing him as the prophet, was also just a joke they'd come up with.
'It might very well be,' he said. 'I believe that the visions from the other side I've interpreted have, through our own mistakes, changed into something they shouldn't be. I hereby declare that all I've said till now is null and void. And I want each and every follower to accept this immediately.
"As for Patron, I thought that if a savior were to announce himself in this day and age he might very well be like this-a pitiful comic figure."
"I think your view of me applies before the Somersault too, Ikuo,"
Patron said. "Even after Guide forced me into the role of savior I didn't really have a strong sense of what it meant. At the time of the Somersault, I had to deny this idea completely, so this was probably the first time I ever really ex- amined the notion of myself as savior.
"Until I met Guide I was more of a mystical hermit. For a long time I had my trances but couldn't put my visions into words. And that's how things would have stayed if I hadn't met Guide. Not only would I have spent the rest of my life without calling on the world to repent, I might very well have died without ever noticing all those words stored up inside me. Even now all over this planet there must be lots of hermit mystics like that.
"But once this chubby little middle-aged man was told he was the sav- ior Guide was seeking, he was forcibly dragged out of his dark cave, redolent with his own odors. You're the savior I've been seeking, Guide told me, which may have been just a thought that occurred to him on the spur of the mo- ment. Once he voiced it, though, and once he added that he was my prophet, Guide really began to work actively on my behalf.
"We established a set relationship after this, that of speaker and listener.
I'd always treated my visions like a bout of fever, wanting only, after it was over, to escape from the aftereffects. But Guide took my random mutterings and returned them to me in the form of logically consistent statements. The words I'd mumbled, still dizzy from my trance, now came back to me, via Guide, in a very realistic outline. And reflected in the mirror of Guide's words I saw an image of myself bathed from head to foot in the light from the other side.