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had caused the drainpipe to become mercilessly clogged, but the problem was solved once all the globs blocking the waterway were scooped out-Then the sewer service owner, who at first seemed to have no confidence, began to lecture Father to clean everything regularly.Father became despondent, for he had to admit failure. What he had believed to be cover number n was in fact n–1. From the start, he should have realized it was strange when his tool hit something at the far end of the pipe. After all. it would have been a simple matter of checking to see if there was another cover hidden under the dirt.
    “After the sewer-cleaning incident,” Mother wrote, “Papa kept grumbling his remorse for quite some time. ‘When the tool hit the end, I should have pulled it out of the pipe and stretched it out on the ground, and then poked along the pipe's perimeters with a metal bar. And why didn't it occur to me that there could have been another cover…?’ Inadvertently, I told him rather brusquely to brood over the matter no more, since practiced hands had already taken care of it. Then Papa moaned out loud. ‘What better chance was there for a family patriarch to prove himself! And I blew it.’ This startled me.
    “This time, too, I don't think I can do anything to turn Papa's mind away from what he believes is his ‘pinch.’ All I can do is stay by his side. Even though, as he admits, his lecturing on faith was the trigger, I don't think he himself knows exactly why everything is piling up on him now and causing him to be so despondent. Nothing about his present ‘pinch’ is as simple as the sewer-cleaning incident. He has even gone so far as to say that his accumulated evils have caused it. So, Ma-chan, while I know we're causing you a lot of trouble, I'd like to stay at Papa's side and look after him.”
    I often dream about things that adhere to day-to-day affairs, with only slight distortions. I'm not the kind of person who dreams truly dreamlike dreams: yet the night I read Mother's letter, I did have an elaborate one, though I can't say whether the letter had anything to do with it. Anyway, in thedream, not only had Father written a play—something he has never ventured to do in real life—but he was also on the stage where all this was taking place! Even Mother was there! While doubting that any of this was possible, since neither of them has had any training in acting, and while wondering when they had returned from California. I depart for the theater with Eeyore. …
    Both Mother and Father are actually on stage, but I can't hear them well. The play has just begun, so Eeyore and I try to move up to a front seat, when a man with a PRESS armband appears and tries to exclude us, saying, “You belong in the cheapest seats, so you can't come here!” That's the dream I had. I had never encountered this man with the PRESS band in real life, and even if I had, we had probably just passed by each other once or twice. Even so, I thought I definitely knew the man, but when I awoke, I just couldn't remember who he was. …
    At breakfast I told O-chan about the dream, and he said, “Well, I could call this a form of amateur psychology, but it's really only a level of discourse that could reveal as much about me as it does about anything else. But when you see a discomforting, disgusting dream, the guy who appears in such a dream and does something terrible to you is different from the person you regard as the most vicious guy. It's Number Two, so to speak, who appears. Since even in a dream you wouldn't want to encounter the guy you consider the most malicious in real life, wouldn't you make Number Two the executor of the dream? So wouldn't it be simpler to start with the person you now regard as the most vicious in real life, and then consider his proxy?”
    When in kindergarten, O-chan was always either putting together Legos or reading science picture books. When talking to my parents, even to me, he spoke as though