Kizu complied right away. He picked from his notes one that he had already translated.
Grey waters, vast as an area of prayer that one enters. Daily over a period of years I have let the eye rest on them.
Was I waiting for something?
Nothing but that continuous waving that is without meaning occurred.
Ah, but a rare bird is rare. It is when one is not looking, at times one is not there that it comes.
You must wear your eyes out, as others their knees.
I became the hermit of the rocks, habited with the wind and the mist. There were days, so beautiful the emptiness it might have filled, its absence was as its presence; not to be told any more, so single my mind after its long fast, my watching from praying.
Kizu first read the original poem and then his translation, and after- ward Patron turned his eyes-no longer the tearful eyes of a child, but soft, the edges of the eyelids red-toward Kizu and spoke in a calm voice.
"How wonderful it would be if Guide continues to recover, his reha- bilitation goes well, and we could be like the hermit of the rock^s. But now that he's awakened, I don't imagine he'll want to live that way. Our tranquil days are over."
5: THE MOOSBRUGGER COMMITTEE
1
Ogi began organizing the name list from Patron the day after he got it.
He input all the information into the computer and then started writing each person individually, asking whether he or she would like to receive a letter of greetings from Patron now that he was on the verge of starting a new movement. (One of the reasons that Ikuo was asked to work at the office, not incidentally, was that Ogi was now spending all his time in this outreach task.)
Ogi informed the recipients that their names and addresses were in Patron's notebook and asked them to respond on an enclosed postcard. Nearly 30 per- cent wrote back to say they were looking forward to Patron's message.
Ogi crossed off the names of those who either didn't respond or said they weren't interested; when the names were those of celebrities he won- dered whether the name list might be Patron's own concoction. Still, those who responded were all ordinary people, people who, after the Somersault, had written to express sympathy and encouragement. Patron seemed to have cherished these expressions of goodwill in response to all his critics in the media.
Individual names on the list were no problem, but in cases involving the name of an organization, if the person who was listed as the head of the group didn't respond to the initial letter, Ogi, a perfectionist in such matters, called on the phone. In some cases, quite frankly, it was more curiosity that drove him than anything else.
In a new university town constructed in the outskirts of Tokyo, at the farthest end of a private railway line, there was one such organization in a multipurpose building rising among all the new housing subdivisions, a build- ing set aside, among other things, for various cultural and sporting activities.
The name of the organization was the Moosbrugger Committee. Ogi won- dered who in the world Moosbrugger might be. He'd sent the initial query to a man listed as the organization's contact person, but when he phoned the group it was a woman who answered. The woman sounded older than him- self, and her cheery, cartoony voice made Ogi suspect that this was merely a group of people who'd sent Patron a fan letter for fun. However, she turned out to be the officer in charge of overseeing the study groups who used the cultural center's facilities.
"I'd like to ask you about the Moosbrugger Committee," Ogi began, unsure of how to pronounce this Germanic-sounding name.
"Moosbrugger Committee? Aha! Yes, there was a group that went by that name here, but they're inactive now. Are you selling something?"
"No, I'm not a salesman, I'm working for a person we call Patron, and he received a letter from this committee."
"Patron? I see! They were a rather eccentric group, so I wouldn't put it beyond them. But that must have been several years ago. Why in the world would you be calling now?"
"I'm working for Patron, helping with his new movement. I apologize, but I don't know anything about the committee. Patron is now formulating new plans, and after a ten-year period of inactivity he's sending out greetings to individuals and groups who supported him ten years ago."
"You sound young, but you do seem to be on the ball," the woman said, in a voice quite different now from her earlier outrageously cheery laughter.
"Looking at our list of organizations, I see that the Moosbrugger Committee hasn't been active much, but since most of the members also belong to other study groups I imagine some of them are still coming to our center. I'll look into it, and if I run across some of them I'll give you a call. Would you tell me your telephone number please? My name is Nobuko Tsugane, and I work here at the center. The center itself receives funding from the Tokyo metro- politan government."
Ogi felt sure that after this phone call he could cross one more name off his list, but the next day the woman called him back and told him two mem- bers of the Moosbrugger Committee wanted to hear more about Patron's new plans. As they talked, Ogi decided to go visit them to discuss it, something he hadn't done before. So on the weekend, he took the Chuo Line train from Shinjuku and, after a couple of transfers, arrived at this university town an hour away from the city.
Ogi was born and raised in Tokyo during the Japanese economic boom and had graduated from college at the height of the Bubble Economy, but he still had no idea what scale this Culture and Sports Center-built jointly by Japanese Railway and a private railroad line-would be. As he climbed the stairs running between the two railroad stations, he was taken aback at the mammoth building rising in front of him. According to a pamphlet he picked up, the center contained a large concert hall boasting a pipe organ brought over from Germany, a medium-size theater and some smaller ones, and, in a separate building, a hotel with an international conference center with facili- ties for simultaneous interpreting. The two identical postmodern buildings were linked, and the connecting office, outfitted with a kitchen, was where he found the woman he'd talked with, Mrs. Tsugane.
Ogi proffered one of his old business cards, explaining that though he was working now for Patron, he had ties to the foundation on the card. Mrs.
Tsugane stared fixedly at him, a searching look on her face. Ogi felt a wave of nostalgia looking at this woman's narrow face, which despite its finely chis- eled features had a soft profile. Even more so, her dark, damp hair, falling in a gentle wave, sent a clear memory of something, he wasn't sure what, run- ning through him.
Mrs. Tsugane, noticing him looking at her hair, casually explained that she'd been for a swim during her lunch hour. She seemed a bit embarrassed at her own vitality, the lithe way she moved her body, clearly trained in high school or college sports-all of which fit perfectly her open laughter on the phone. Overall she seemed a well-brought-up intelligent woman.
Mrs. Tsugane said that the two women Ogi wanted to meet would be a little late, so she'd go ahead and tell him what she knew about the Moos- brugger Committee. "The committee began as a reading circle set up to dis- cuss Musil's A Man Without Qualities," she began, "and took its name from the name of a character in the novel, a strange person involved in sex crimes.
The members included people with backgrounds in sociology and psychol- ogy as well as housewives who loved literature.