Will we ever see the endo silence?

Endo presents a compelling image: as Rodrigues flees, he sees a "remnant of fire" (70), left over by the man he is pursuing.  The image is a reflection of his own situation as it relates to God and faith.  The wood of the fire is still smoldering, which indicates that the man is close, or has just recently left.  It is that God has left things as an indication of his presence, like the man (who, we discover, is Kichijiro), but is altogether evasive, at least for a time.

The importance of material reality establishes itself as a forgoing theme, as we see over and over with apostasies, and particularly with Kichijiro.  Spiritual realities are of course real to the apostates, but their desire to live is much more immediate.  This paradigm of material and spiritual realities is so well represented in Silence because Endo uses the most extreme cases, with the most extreme consequences.