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told me, but which Father didn't broach in the lecture, occurred about the time he learned there was a Christian church in Matsuyama. I understand it was very mystifying, the way he became obsessed with the church. The clan is deeply connected with Buddhism, and it even has its own temple. But Grandma feared he would go to the Christian church by himself, and so she didn't give him any money to make such a visit possible. Then early one morning he left thehouse without telling anybody. He walked the long trail through the mountains, and at night, when he reached some place near the city, a policeman stopped him. After this, he stopped talking about matters of the soul , as though nothing had ever happened. I hear he's even talked about what happened as though it were something to laugh about, telling people that when the policeman stopped him, he, the child that he was then, pleaded with the officer, as a last resort, to call up the church for him, and that when the policeman did call, whoever answered the phone told him the boy should be sent straight back home, which put a total damper on his spirits.”
    “The nuance of the story I heard from K is a little different,” Mr. Shigeto said. “He told me that the portals of churches even in rural Japan were like the gates of impenetrable castles, and the matter-of-fact way he had been denied admittance had come as a relief to him. He said it had assured him that in church there were men who dedicated their entire body and sold to their faith, and that these men were piously engaged in matters of the soul . He realized then that it was only natural for them to refuse him, for he was not yet able to abandon everything in order to devote himself to matters of the soul . And he was relieved. Evidently, ever since he had furtively read a magazine article on St. Francis of Assisi, at the water mill he spoke of in the lecture, the one deep in the forest where he said the family had their wheat ground, he got to believing that, in order to dedicate himself to matters of the soul , he needed to first abandon everything and experience religion. You know, don't you, that St. Francis himself founded three separate levels of monastic orders? But K was only a child then, and he got to thinking that, unless he completely gave up all worldly attachments, he couldn't do anything regarding matters of the soul . … He sometimes blurted out thateverything you did would be flagrant hypocrisy— mauvaise foi, he said, as the French students back in our college days used to put it—if you tried to do anything concerning matters of the soul without having discarded all attachments to the mundane world, all earthly desires.
    “Simplifying things, you could say that K's just added on years of survival without changing a bit, and after reaching his fifties he inadvertently ended up speaking his indiscreet thoughts on matters of the soul. So actually, some people with faith quite bluntly told him that they would sanction his faith at face value, no matter how hypocritical it was. Didn't this cause him to lose his cool? K knew he wasn't anywhere near matters of the soul. So he reflected upon himself and realized that, so long as Eeyore was by his side, he had a loophole through which he could easily get away with his hypocrisy—which may be exactly what he feared. And perhaps this is why he left for California, to detach himself from Eeyore: reason enough to leave Eeyore behind, however heartrending it would be for them both: and sufficient reason, at the same time, for Eeyore to feel abandoned.”
    “Eeyore has a mysteriously sensitive side to him, so that may be how he's perceived it. And perhaps because he couldn't express it in words, he let his music say it.”
    “Not perhaps, but undoubtedly. He's even put it very clearly in words: ‘Sutego.’ You can't pretend that you didn't see it, or that you didn't hear it.”
    “What exactly do you think Father's ‘pinch’ entails? From what you