Somersault by Kenzaburo Oe & Philip Gabriel

Author:Kenzaburo Oe & Philip Gabriel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 1999-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

4

When Ogi woke up in the middle of the night, the first thought that came to him was the naive notion that hell must be as pitch black as this. An utterly gentle, quiet hell. Not completely without sound, though, for the lake and the hills were still enveloped in rain, but it was weaker than before. At first Ogi thought his bed was narrow, but when he stretched out it supported his back nicely and made him feel secure. As he lay on this wooden box and listened to the rain, it was as if the rain had cut off all his surroundings and was slicing through his body and into an abyss below his bed.

There must have been some reason why he woke up in the middle of the night, but he couldn’t figure out what it was or get back to sleep. He recalled an experience similar to Dancer’s that he had soon after meeting Patron and Guide. When Ogi first started visiting Patron’s head office as part of his work with the foundation, Dancer had already been working for them for three years. Even then, Patron had impressed him as being quite extraordinary.

At first Patron didn’t talk directly to Ogi, so it fell to Guide to explain religious matters to him whenever he had questions. Ogi’s questions weren’t ones he’d been musing over for a long time, just things he burst out with. Later he found it strange that he’d even said such things. And even stranger was the way Guide answered his questions so painstakingly. At any rate, their talks were less dialogues than lectures.

They began like this. One day Guide appeared in the main house carrying two LP records, explaining that the new sound system in the annex only handled CDs. Dancer had gone out with Patron to the barbershop, and Ogi was to watch things at home while they were away. Guide listened to his two records, one after another, both performances of the same Mozart symphony—number 40 with Bruno Walter conducting—in one case the Berlin Philharmonic, the other the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. Ogi asked him if the two performances were very different, to which Guide replied in a rather curt way that they were both recordings of Walter in his final years and of course they weren’t the same, but you couldn’t say they were all that different, either.

Ogi suddenly felt like asking a question that had popped into his mind many times after he’d begun his regular visits to Patron’s office. Guide was sitting silently at a right angle to him, and Ogi was distinctly uncomfortable at his sitting there right in front of him. He may well have been influenced by hearing the subtle shades of difference in the two versions of the Mozart symphony by the same conductor, though he couldn’t exactly put into words how this affected him.

“In your faith,” he finally managed to ask, “what is salvation?”

Guide’s response was no longer abrupt; he weighed each word carefully.

“When I’m asked whether I have a clear notion of salvation, I can’t say that I do.

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