(1) Mr. Hirota says to Sanshiro, "Don't be in bonds," meaning that he should be mentally free from the conventional ideas but at the same time he should refrain from indulging himself in the freedom of sex. This world of Hirota's, however, is not successfully realized because he forgets to count the sense and un- successfully tries to force Sanshiro to accept his ideas about death. (2) Sanshiro's mother restricts his future life by sending him letters. "The Stray Sheep", which is fitly applied to Sanshiro and Mineko, doesn't mean the same thing to both of them. To Sanshiro it is to express an illusion of freedom of a young man whose future is already planned, but to Mineko it is to express her pursuit of the freedom to belong to someone. (3) In the later half of the novel the subjects such as "Sanshiro" and "Mineko" are replaced by "the man" and "the woman". They seem to represent the sex of their own. And then the man comes to hold the image of the woman only in his memory and continues to ask himelf, "Why has she gone?" And this pursuit of his becomes the main theme of Soseki's works afterwards.
