Somersault (64 page)

“My father founded the church,” Gii said, “but since I was born after the church was gone, all I know is what I’ve heard from my mother.”

“What was Patron interested in about your father’s church?” Kizu asked.

“Anti
and
ante,”
Gii answered seriously.

“Patron’s talking about the antichrist,” Ikuo explained. “Patron is clearly an
antichrist
, while the leader of the Church of the Flaming Green Tree, whom his followers called
savior
, insisted that he was an
ante
christ. He preached that before the real Christ returns there will be countless
ante
christs,
ante
in the sense of
coming before
, and that he was one of them. After he graduated from high school in America, he went to Tokyo University, so he had some grounding in classical languages. Maybe he came across the term
antechrist
in some reference work? I don’t know. Patron was quite interested when he heard this story from Asa-san, and he asked Gii to tell him more.”

“But I don’t know anything more than that,” Gii insisted. “When Patron asked me whether it was possible for him to be both an antichrist and an
antechrist
in the sense that my father used the term, I remembered something my mother had said and told him that that didn’t jibe with what my father taught. And Patron said, ‘I guess that’s right,’ in a such a moving way I was quite surprised.”

“I think that was a very valuable meeting for Patron,” Kizu remarked. Ikuo, too, considered this, and the three of them were silent for a while until Gii, youngster that he was, couldn’t stand the silence anymore and raised a new topic.

“Patron asked me why my mother and I hadn’t kept the Church of the Flaming Green Tree going,” Gii said. “‘Don’t they even call you the new Gii?’
he asked. I was kind of annoyed. I felt almost like picking a quarrel with him, coming back with something like,
What if I am? If I asked you to return Brother Gii’s chapel to me, would you do it?
But I kept my cool and talked about what’s always been on my mind. You’re asking me why I distanced myself from both the Church of the Flaming Green Tree and the Base Movement and why I had to create the Young Fireflies? Well, the reason is that I have some problems with the leaders of both those movements. I may not be using the term correctly, but I think both leaders were
defeatists
. That’s what I told Patron.”

Gii stopped speaking, his pale face quite excited. Ikuo, too, was silent, pondering all this.

“What do you mean by defeatists?” Kizu asked.

Gii’s pale cheeks suddenly revived. He’d been afraid they’d point out he’d used the word incorrectly.

“What I mean is from the very beginning neither Former Gii of the Base Movement nor Brother Gii of the Church of the Flaming Green Tree thought their movements would be successful.”

Gii pursed his lips tight and turned pale again, so Ikuo explained things to Kizu.

“You know how the Former Gii threatened the people who lived downstream, saying he was going to blow up the dam and flood them? If he’d really wanted to, he could have done it, but he didn’t. When he was murdered and his body dumped in the Hollow, his own tale was finished. Hadn’t he known this? He created his movement resigned from the start that it would end up this way, which is why he’s a defeatist.

“Brother Gii attracted a lot of followers and got production up and running at the farm, and things would have gone well if only he’d stuck it out. But suddenly he announced that the church was over, and a handful of followers would go out as missionaries, and that’s when he was killed. I suspect he had a premonition at the beginning of his missionary trip that his story was over too. Gii thinks this is defeatist, and that putting that kind of person in charge is a big mistake.”

As Ikuo spoke, Gii looked at him again with trusting eyes, blushing. But a moment later Ikuo turned on him.

“I haven’t asked this before, but do you think that Patron, who did the Somersault, is a defeatist too? Are you saying that Patron, without doing a proper self-critique, has come here to this region to restart his church, but he’s still a defeatist? And that before anything concrete gets done he’s going to be murdered or something? In other words, you guys aren’t taking him seriously; you think that if you just bide your time the Fireflies will come out on top?”

Far from flinching, Gii held Ikuo’s gaze calmly. To Kizu, Gii’s features—the outline of his ears and nostrils, as well as his clear eyes—looked fresh and soft, like some newly budding plant. Gii chose his words carefully as he replied.

“I haven’t given the term
defeatist
a lot of thought, so there may be contradictions in what I said. But I find it interesting that Patron would start his own church and religious movement and then, at a certain point, do a Somersault and announce that everything he’s preached till then was nonsense. The defeatists I’m talking about never had the guts to do that.

“No, I’m not some optimist sitting just around waiting for Patron’s church to self-destruct. We Young Fireflies are planning to make this region independent, and now a formidable opponent has entered the picture—your church. I don’t think either Patron or Ikuo are defeatists. The Hollow’s legally occupied, as are these large buildings; that’s a given. What we have to do is build up our forces so we can compete with you. Anyway, that’s the second thing I wanted to tell you.”

Later that day, Kizu recalled their conversation and felt quite keenly that Gii was, as Ikuo had told him, an outstanding young man, the main reason being the skillful way he’d wrapped up their conversation.

“Patron told me you have cancer, Professor,” Gii had said suddenly, throwing Kizu a challenging look. “The church hasn’t begun any new activities, he said, but he’d like to concentrate his spiritual strength in trying to control your disease.”

Looking over Kizu from top to bottom, Ikuo asked, “So has Patron’s spiritual concentration had any effect?”

“The exhaustion I felt when I lived in Tokyo doesn’t seem to be as bad as it was before,” Kizu replied. “And I’m not as depressed.”

“Yeah, but having a person’s spirit soar when the founder of his religion concentrates his spiritual power for his sake does seem a
bit
predictable, doesn’t it?” Ikuo said, as Gii let out a happy laugh.

23: The Technicians

1

“I heard from Gii,” Dr. Koga said, “that Patron’s trying to use his spiritual powers to control your cancer. Who knows but what it might be slowing down the spread of the disease.”

He said this as he handed over two weeks’ worth of the various medicines Kizu was taking.

Putting the question of how he was feeling on hold, Kizu looked at the painting he’d done that was hanging in a frame on the wall of the clinic, the one showing Ikuo from behind, naked down to below his waist. Ikuo’s broad back was so muscular it looked like he was carrying a soft shell on his back. His overall build, with its bulging muscles, looked entirely natural, not like the localized protuberances one expects from weight trainers. Dr. Koga, putting all the medications in a paper bag, followed Kizu’s gaze.

“Ikuo seems to fit right in with the kids here,” he said. “The parents who use my clinic used to consider the Young Fireflies as some reserve youth corps of the
yakuza
, but with Ikuo in the picture they changed their tune.”

“The art class project was turned down, though, thanks to my affiliation with the church,” Kizu said. “Well, with Ikuo and the Fireflies doing so well, Dancer and Ogi wanted me to ask you something, an internal matter of the church actually.”

“About the Technicians?”

“That’s right. Ikuo seems to have a good relationship with them too, but there doesn’t seem to be much communication between them and Patron.”

Dr. Koga fixed his dark deep-set eyes on Kizu and then gave a practical suggestion, hoping to lighten the mood.

“The clinic’s closed today, and it’s raining a little, so what do you say we take a drive and talk? Patron’s spiritual concentration aside, a drive shouldn’t be bad for you. In the afternoon I’ll drive over down below the dam and honk my horn.”

Every two weeks, on days when the clinic was closed in the morning, Kizu went to get a thorough examination from Dr. Koga and refill his prescriptions. He’d heard that Dr. Koga had been taking drives here and there in the area, using copies of maps from the town hall, since with all the new logging roads that had been built the standard maps were of little use.

Dr. Koga showed up after lunch, early, and Kizu climbed into his car. The rain had ended but, instead of a uniformly overcast sky, clumps of dark-gray clouds scuttled across overhead. They drove up the slope toward the forest, which was chockful of lustrous leaves after the morning’s rain. The slope was steep, but as long as one paid attention to the shoulder it wasn’t dangerous. When they passed the T-shaped intersection below the farm that Ikuo and the Technicians had taken over, they saw a small truck that was going to pick up some materials that had come down and was waiting for them to pass when the rain had let up; some of the Technicians were aboard. Mr. Hanawa, seated at the wheel, bowed politely to them as they went by.

“As Dancer says, it’s true the Technicians haven’t made an opportunity to talk with Patron,” Dr. Koga said, “but you have to remember their work has kept them busy. That kind of hard physical labor is good for their outlook on things, I’m sure.

“After Patron and Guide’s Somersault—and this is actually something they brought on themselves, since as members of the Izu Research Institute they made it all inevitable—the Technicians suffered a lot, though not as much as their colleagues who were dragged off by the police and not taken to court.

“I was able to resume my medical practice, but the other Technicians had to hide their research and use their technical skills somehow to earn a living. With automation taking over factories, these skills were less in demand, but once they took a job at some small subcontracting factory they quickly rose to the top and could show what they were capable of.

“Some of them worked in university and business research labs, doing experiments under the supervision of people who used to be their colleagues, making one-micron incisions in the brain and so on. Universities and industries on the cutting edge needed high-caliber technicians like them.

“I think my colleagues are valuable in that they’re hard workers who don’t have any academic ambition. Working for ten years at the bottom of the heap has made them tougher. After I met them again, I thought that the self-ridiculing name Technicians they’d given themselves was actually a good choice.”

Dr. Koga wound his blue Saab, a car that suited him perfectly, through the sprinkle of hamlets in the area that went by the overall name of the outskirts—an area along the river that stood in contrast to the highway on the opposite shore. As they drove up the rough ancient-looking road, he explained that the name outskirts wasn’t a proper noun.

Kizu was impressed by Dr. Koga’s explanation about the Technicians. Somewhat inadvertently, he said, “Doctor, I guess after all you’re the Technicians’ highest adviser, aren’t you?”

“I’m not even a
low
-level adviser,” Dr. Koga said. “Rather, I feel they’ve cut me off. They don’t even let me into the rooms they share in the dormitory.”

Kizu was surprised to hear this, though it did fit with what he’d heard from Dancer.

“Ogi and Dancer told me,” he said, “that the Technicians won’t let them into the five rooms they’ve taken over either. Of course Ogi doesn’t go into the Quiet Women’s rooms, but Dancer, too, has refrained from doing so. Ms. Tachibana and her brother are the only ones from outside whom the Quiet Women allow in, and sometimes they participate in their prayer sessions.

“So the problem the office staff has at present is this: After the first wave of people have settled in here, they have to help out the second and third waves. It wasn’t the original plan to have these two sects be the first groups here; Patron was hoping that people who’d gotten in touch with him individually would make up the first group, which is why he had Ogi contact all of them. The two sects that made up the first group keep to themselves and have no interest in other followers who’ve moved here. The Technicians especially are like that. What can be done? Dancer asked me about this.”

Eyes on the seething water rushing down the edge of the ditch beside the road, Dr. Koga managed a warm smile.

“I imagine the office staff wants the Quiet Women to open up their quarters to others—women only, of course—and want to assign beds in the housing at the Farm on an individual basis. In the beginning, though, there’s nothing we can do but accept these two subgroups as the first residents.

“After this base is settled, and the second and third waves of individual believers move in, hopefully these subgroups will eventually disappear of their own accord. But this can’t be done overnight, Professor. Patron has finally publicly begun his new church movement, and we can expect his influence will be felt on each and every individual here. As this starts to happen—or as it happens
once more
, I should say—won’t it be possible to keep the Technicians from becoming a fixed sect within the church? The Technicians have returned to Patron’s church and found a new raison d’être, so to speak, so it’s not a good idea to fall over oneself trying to control them.

“This might not be the answer you’re looking for, and you might be upset that you’re being treated like some kid running an errand, but that’s all I can say right now. I’d appreciate it if you’d convey my thoughts to Dancer.”

They drove up over the ridge of the mountain chain, coming out on a gentle slope of neat harvested fields. Dr. Koga parked the car at a spot where there was a pull-off that protruded from the low point of the slope. A farmhouse sat above the stone wall high on the opposite slope, and an old man who had come out to the edge of the garden bowed politely to them. Dr. Koga gave a friendly bow back.