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Shusaku Endo. Deep River. Van C. Gessel, tr. New York. New Directions. 1995. ((C) 1994). 216 pages. $19.95. ISBN 0-8112-1289-0.
Endo Shusaku is considered by many Japanese to be the last of his generation's great novelists, and indeed some expected him to be his nation's next Nobel Prize winner. Whether any Japanese critics or common readers entertain doubts about Endo's pseudophilosophic religiosity we shall never know, for Japanese critics are not there to criticize but to praise; anything less would be shitsurei or impolite. The fact remains that Endo is a Roman Catholic writer in a nominally Buddhist country. Up till now, his distinguished career has been entirely consecrated to the study of "the extraordinary difficulty that Christianity has had in taking root in Japan" (Cambridge Encyclopedia of Japan).
In Deep River Endo tackles various faiths--Christianity, Buddhism, Shinto, Hinduism, and whatever it is that Shirley MacLaine believes in--omitting Islam. The question surely must arise in some minds whether the novel is the appropriate forum for such exposition and development, but the novel is Endo's medium and he sticks to it. Endo really is a great novelist--he knows how to set up a scene, differentiate his characters, make the reader care what happens next, handle dialogue, et cetera--but alas, in Deep River at least, his characters become little more than bearers of their...