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it for now, but I will say this: If only we had insisted from the beginning that our church was trying to accomplish something a hundred years in the future—in other words, that we were preparing for events that would occur at the end of the twenty-first century—we wouldn’t have had to go through that unfortunate confrontation with the radical faction. Anybody can see that a hundred years from now all mankind will be forced to repent. It’s obvious that mankind won’t be able to avoid a total deadlock. And yet here we are, the advanced countries with their booming consumer culture and third-world countries lusting after the same, like something straight out of the Old Testament—pleasure-seeking cities like Sodom and Gomorrah on the eve of destruction.
    “What we should have done was emphasize the need for mankind to repent in the face of this ultimate trial awaiting us a hundred years from now. That’s the foundation on which we should have built our church and prepared for the battles ahead. We should have preached that people should prepare over the next hundred years for the total repentance and salvation of mankind. ‘When you consider the two thousand years since Jesus, a hundred years isn’t such a long time. During the next hundred years we’ll see new technology that will dominate over the next millennium. We have to begin now, not slack off; we have to continue our efforts.’ That’s what we should have said.”
    Guide impressed Dancer as a decisive person, but she’d never seen him speak his mind clearly, and though he was always kind to her she found him taciturn and hard to approach. But now he responded promptly, and Dancer could understand how very apt his name was.
    “A hundred years, though, is a long time,” Guide said. “I agree we should preach that a mere century separates us from inevitable destruction; nevertheless, if you actually live through a hundred years, it is a long time. I’m always reminded of the group of women who viewed our Somersault as a descent into hell. They will face the next hundred years ever mindful of our fall. In the commune they live in, they’re keeping the faith, patiently striving to make it through one year after another toward the hundred. But how do they instill this in their members—a way of living a hundred years one year at a time? How to keep the faith and not be taken advantage of by the radical faction?”
    After this, Dancer began to pay close attention to Patron and Guide’s conversations, she told Ogi, and even now, when they weren’t engaged in religious activities, just working in their office helped her find the kind of happiness a true believer must feel. But now, just when she sensed that Patron was about to revive his religious activities for the first time in a decade, Guide collapses with a brain aneurysm and loses consciousness, and Patron goes into shock. Other than myself and Guide, who’s ill, she told him, you’re the one person who’s closest to Patron. How can you abandon him and go back to your job?
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Ogi would never forget the strange event that took place when he had introduced Patron to the chairman of the board of directors of the foundation he worked for. As the two men exchanged business cards, Patron hit the Chairman sharply on top of the head. The Chairman had Caucasian-like skin, and after receiving this blow to his right temple, most likely the first time in his more than seventy years that someone had hit him on the head, his large, oxen eyes looked on the verge of tears. As for the perpetrator of this blow, he himself maintained a stolid wooden expression.
    On this particular day, Ogi had accompanied Patron to the Kansai area factory of the pharmaceutical company that was the Chairman’s main business. It was autumn, and as they left the Osaka Station and headed out of the city, they followed a course that took them through a tunnel dug out at the base of the mountain pass that formed a shortcut connecting