1950. 27 year-old Shusaku Endo leaves Japan for France as one of the first Japanese students to go there after the WW II. Africa gives him a strong impression after a long, stressful sea voyage, then comes France, la douce, with its mild and beautiful landscape. There begins his solitary struggle of two and a half years.
Those days the phrase STUDYING ABROAD had a far greater meaning than today. Leaving his home country still suffering from a great defeat, with an ardent soul impatiently seeking after a fulfillment, he conducts his own inner dialogues with mostly Catholic French writers (bien que Gide était un écrivain protestant) day in, day out. It is interesting to note that his unusual ernestness, without a room for any frivolity, was the immediate matrix to later generate his immense sense of good-natured humor.
Judging from his records of reading, his reading skill in French was awesome! It is only natural that he occasionally slips into French when his favourite mental interlocutors are people like Gide, Charles du Bos and Julien Green, who are known for their very literary and spiritual "journals."
At this stage (in his late twenties) we already encounter his basic attitude toward life. "I am utterly against the idea of reducing mysticism to psychoanalysis. To the contrary, I would rather see everything around from the mystical point of view." Then on the occasion of Gide's death: "André Gide is dead. When I was ill in bed, he too was ill. When I recovered, he died. During my illness I often thought of the parallelism between Gide's world and mine. Then he died."
This is an aspect of a writer who to his end was obcessed with the phenomenon of synchronicity.
