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In my father's eyes, my mother is stubborn and unwilling to live a stable life. In the eyes of my uncle, my mother had lowered her stature and had to leave home to study while working as a maid. Former classmates ridiculed her for being too tight, and her students bluntly said that no one could stand this teacher. Only he could remember his mother playing the violin and her expression when she strummed her rosary beads and prayed. This book collects seven novels written by Shusaku Endo in memory of his deceased mother, including unpublished works discovered in 2020. "Mother" is Endo's first gateway to thinking about faith. He plunged his pen into the gloomy and cold Dalian, the swaying sun in Tokyo, and the dark and foggy Kyushu. With grief and longing, he salvaged and pieced together a shadow of the overlap of reality and fiction - the image of a mother who was disciplined by society and bound by her family, but still broke through the shackles to implement the artist's personality and adhered to her faith in the gaps.

The so-called deep river is the Ganges, the holy river in India. On the banks of the Ganges, the corpses of the deceased are burned and the ashes are scattered into the river in the hope that the soul will be resurrected in the next life; countless devout people wash and bathe in the river water mixed with ashes or corpses to pray for happiness in the next life. The deep river, the river of God's love, will not be rejected no matter how ugly or dirty the person is. The story opens with a Japanese tour group heading to India. The members have different personalities: there is a staff member who is determined to pursue the possibility of his wife's reincarnation, a writer who wants to pin his heart on birds, a veteran who has experienced hell in the Burmese jungle, and a divorced woman who cannot fall in love with others... Each of them has their own life and secrets that cannot be told to others; they live with these burdens, and they have things in the deep river that must be purified...