Wonderful Fool features as protagonist the bumbling Gaston “Gas” Bonaparte, who is far from the debonair, suave Frenchman Tomoe had imagined him to be while reading his correspondence. Physically awkward and culturally naive, he quickly becomes a burden for the sophisticated Japanese. As the story progresses, however, he evolves into a classic “fool for Christ’s sake,” whose selflessness and genuine love for his fellowman—and even for a mongrel pet—reflect the Christian attributes Shsaku End wants his reader to recognize and embrace. Like Christ, Gas has “no place to stay” and finds his greatest joy in the company of children and the “unrighteous,” those who recognize their unredeemed state and lack a smug pretense of goodness. Gaston Bonaparte is thus a “fool” in a Shakespearean sense, one who may unexpectedly speak as well as dramatize the truth in a most poignant way with his own life.

Takamori and Tomoe emerge as “typical Japanese” in End’s view, oblivious to the “good news” of the self-giving love which Gas wishes to impart. It is only after Gas disappears that his redemptive personality and mission are revealed to Takamori and Tomoe and they are enabled to act in humanitarian compassion toward their fellows within their own land. Takamori, a young office worker with no particular ambition, comes to see his rejection of Gas as “abandoning the best part of myself.” Tomoe is herself a pragmatic career woman, lacking in personal commitment or sentiment and unable to recognize until the very end that while Gas may have been a fool, “he is a wonderful fool.”

In the long run, neither Takamori nor Tomoe is as well developed or as personalized as Gas; by contrast, End, the hardened criminal whom Gas lovingly confronts, is precisely drawn, an underworld character worthy of any Dickens novel. End becomes symbolic of the despondency and regret, deep-seated in Japanese society, that only a transcendent, divine love can penetrate and transform. That the novelist named this gangster after himself seems too much of a coincidence not to reflect the extent to which he himself has struggled with his identity as a Christian in a society whose Christian population numbers less than 2 percent.