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Deep River

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Reading this novel by Shusaku Endo was a great experience, a spiritual experience to be precise. It is like a pilgrimage to the holy river Ganges which Christians should consider pagan and unchristian. Besides, the filth, pollution and the unhygienic surroundings are all there. But there is a surrounding aura of love, peace and regeneration. Ganges, the Mother of India despite all filth, is a mother with plenitude and gentleness. This novel is the story of a group of Japanese tourists to India. The various characters are brought to light in the background of the teeming life and activity around Ganges in the city of Varanasi. Each character has a past that is heavy on the person. The river Ganges called 'the river of humanity' and 'the river of love' has a great depth of meaning for each one of them. It is indeed a deep river from which they all gain consolation, liberation and a new birth. The characters like Isobe, Kiguchi, Numanda, Mitsuko and Otsu vary in their backgrounds and interests. Most of them do not have much in common except for Mitsuko and Otsu. Each of them has a story and their lives do not cross much. The plot of the novel in this respect is most unusual. All of them converge on the banks of river Ganges in pursuit of rejuvenation.

India, where the ancient civilization flowered on the banks of the great river Indus, serves as the backdrop for the novel. Most of the events take place in Varanasi, on the banks of the river Ganges in the months of October-November 1984. The dark forests, the natural environment, the peaceful temples with their gods and godesses, the lively idols of Kali and Chamunda, the crowded city of Varanasi, the various river ghats of Ganges with all the droppings of dogs and cows and the filth, the cremation ground with the smell of burning flesh, the river itself with milky tea-colored water, and the dusty isolated villages with communal wells become very lively to the reader. The band of scrawny children crying out for Bakshish, the snake charmer with the cobra and the mongoose, the sadhoos and godmen giving blessings to the devotees, the wedding procession of the rich couple in the holy city are fit to create strong impressions in the mind. The political background of the time, such as the assassination of Indira Gandhi the prime minister and the subsequent riots in New Delhi, the funeral and the immersion of her ashes in the river Yamuna are clearly brought out. Endo has a deep knowledge of India, its people and their ways of thinking.

Shusaku Endo is known as the Graham Greene of the East. But, though his novels can be considered Catholic, they are controversial. His deep knowledge of Christianity in the West and in the East makes it easy for him to write very powerfully. His earlier novels dealt with problems of faith and God, of sin and betrayal, of martyrdom and apostacy in Japan. The present novel seems to focus mainly on the depth of the spirituality of the East which the western mind fails to comprehend. The pictures he paints of the gods and goddesses and the river are often disgusting and disturbing. It is these that offer consolation to the seminarian who is disappointed with the western Christianity, to the non believer like Mitsuko and to a host of others tormented by their own personal problems.

This is a beautiful story of 5 people searching for the inner peace that has eluded them throughout much, if not all, of their lives. The cause of their inner turmoil comes from a variety of sources but their emptiness and incompleteness is very real. Shusaku Endo introduces us to each of them seperately and then has them all, for seperate reasons, journey to India. They are in a guided tour that will supposedly show them a number of Buddhist shrines and historical sites. Their trip leads them to the Ganges River where they initially off at and then are all drawn to its' sacredness. The author gives us a serene glimpse of a sort of peace descending upon the 5 pilgrims. It may not be the peace they sought or would recognize, but it seems to be the peace they needed.

Shusaku Endo is a Japanese Christian who writes challengely about his own faith. To me, the core of his message in "Deep River" is the universal nature of faith and the universal nature of God. He exists for all of us but we come to know Him through the religion of our culture. Thus the Hindus, Christians, Moslems, Buddhists, etc are all seeking the same ultimate oneness with God (i.e.; peace) but they are each traveling different paths outlined through them in a theology passed along through the millennia. To illustrate his point, Endu shows us the five seperate tales of redemption and has them all come to salvation at a Hindu holy site. God DOES work in mysterious ways.

Endo takes leads you into to the lives and hearts of 5 Japanese tourists. Their journeys will amaze and intrigue you, and when you come out on the other side, you will realize that he has led you on a journey through your own soul; a masterpiece. Prerequisite: SILENCE

This novel is nothing short of remarkable. The dowdy, uneducated, and banal Mitsu comes to embody the only thing that can elevate every one of us beyond the base and undignified morass we all seemingly inhabit. That thing, of course, is selfless love or in a word, compassion. This book wasn't a "good read". No. It was more than that. It actually enabled something in me that I believed had long ago disappeared to reemerge. It was there lying latent within me; I think that might be the case with a good number of people.

During a tour in India, five very different Japanese characters meet near the holy Ganges river: a man who grieves the death of a wife he had neglected; a woman bitten by her own cynicism and growing sense of inner void; a Japanese man who disaffection for the Christian life he adopted leads him to seek spiritual renewal elsewhere; and a former Japanese solider still haunted by the memories of atrocities in war-time Japanese-occupied Burma. Shusaku Endo masterfully builds up these full bodied characters through deft brushstrokes of key passages in their lives. Individual chapters show the inner turmoil and personal changes which lead these characters to their encounter (or re-encounter) in India, including a young Japanese who becomes disatisfied with the Christian life to which he had converted in his early youth and later followed in France; a widower in quest of the soul of her husband; and others.

Looking at a few quotes extracted from a dialogue between two Japanese characters in the novel will give you a sense of the encounters and re-encounters between individuals and the cross-cultural encounters, all of which are a strong feature of the play. In this dialogue which takes place in Paris, a Japanese woman talks to Otsu, one of the main characters who became a Christian early in his life in Japan.

The woman declares: "...It makes my teeth stand on edge just to think of you as a Japanese believing in this European Christianity nonsense." Otsu replies: "I've been here three years. For three years I have lived here and I have tired of the way people think. The ways of thinking that they've kneaded with their own hands and fashioend to meet the workings of their hearts..they're ponderous to an Asian like me. I can't blend in with them. And so everyday is hell for me..."

The reader of this novel who is not Japanese will gain some interesting insights into how Japanese might react to these different cultural settings, as characters move from Japan to France to the United States, and finally meet in India. Endo delivers a very personal sense of cross-cultural encounters, recognizable to those of us who have gone through similar journeys in different parts of the world.

Since I have only read Japanese novels in translation into either English or French, I cannot fairly judge Endo's style against other Japanese writers who are also well known to foreign readers, like Mishima and Kawabata. But while Endo may not share the grace and delicacy of these writers, his novels, including this one, are very human, and bring us very close to the inner lives of his characters.

If you want to better understand how Japanese come to view the rest of the world, or more generally how different cultures can collide, Endo's novels and his characters are a good place to start, or to continue, your journey.

Life is but a continuous struggle and battle to find our true identities. This is Endo's work of art, which draws us deep into the river. Sometimes, your life is destroyed because you are honest; you try in vain to find the meaning of life. How difficult it often is to live a life so passinately. Otsu never throws his faith in God even though it leads him to destroy his life. The way he lives is the way his will has chosen.

This novel is incredible, fascinating, and even destructive. What a fine writer Shusaku Endo is!

"... in every companionship there remains a mutually insoluble loneliness." This quote from 'Deep River' decribes the void within all 5 of Endo's protagonists. All 5 Japanese end up in India after a life of loss and suffering has led them there, 4 of them on a tour (each seeking their own form of closure) and the fifth, Otsu, a failed seminarian, is there, for it was the endpoint of his own spiritual struggle and reconciliation with modernity. Endo's writing is crisp and effortless and defies you to put it down. Endo is known as a 'Catholic' writer, but in the end I think it's fair to say that he takes all (organized) religions to task in this novel - and rightly so. Everyone's struggle is personal, w/ life and death, and it's our aggregate struggle with our 'insoluble loneliness' that leads to the strife and suffering in this world. This is a powerful novel, a masterpiece.

At $10 to $14 million, it was the most expensive television pilot ever made by a network --- so expensive that ABC fired the executive who authorized it before the premiere was broadcast. O ye of little faith! Lost was an immediate hit in 2004, attracting 16 million viewers.

Five seasons later, it's faded a bit. There are 11 million viewers now, but they're even more rabid --- the White House wisely decided not to schedule President Obama's State of the Union address on the same night as the show's two-hour season debut.

We begin the sixth and last season without so much as a preview --- the creators say these episodes are so tightly plotted that they can't give viewers any clues without handing them a key that would unlock important clues to the final mystery. But intrepid bloggers say that something has been revealed.

In the sixth episode, a novel --- Deep River, by Shusaku Endo --- figures in the plot.

Why this book?

We won't really know until week six, but I thought if I read this novel --- by a writer much loved in Japan, virtually unknown in the West --- I might be able to advance the conversation.

What I didn't anticipate: that I'd be knocked out by the book.

First, a snapshot of the author. Shusaku Endo (1923-1996) was raised as a Catholic in Japan. Talk about minority status --- only one per cent of the Japanese are members of the Church. And Endo was far from a traditional Catholic. After the war, he traveled to France to study French Catholic writers. But in France, he encountered racial slurs --- from fellow Christians. He became depressed and developed tuberculosis so severe that he needed to have a lung removed. Unsurprisingly, he felt his faith was being tested. Then, on a visit to Palestine, Endo had a flash of insight: The rejection he felt was a pale version of the rejection Christ experienced. And that gave him direction. As a writer, he'd go where Christ did: to the poor, the sick, the despised.

Endo's novels --- like "Lost" --- not only explore extreme situations, they're shot through with questions of faith, and especially this one: Is there free will or do we surrender to our fate? But they don't read like spiritual tracts; his prose is clean, worldly. His plots move. If Endo is considered the Graham Greene of Japan, it's because he worked at it. "Before I write a book, I always read The End of the Affair," he said. Greene noticed --- he called Endo one of his favorite novelists.

"Deep River" begins in a hospital room, where Isobe's cancer-ridden wife is preparing herself for death. It's a bitter moment --- Isobe never really noticed her while she was alive, and revealing his feelings now is impossible for him. Approaching death, though, the bland woman who obediently made his dinner and cleaned his clothes finds her voice. And her pronouncements are stunning. "The tree [outside her hospital room] spoke," she tells her husband. "It said that life never ends." And more: "I'll be reborn somewhere in the this world. Look for me.... promise...."

She dies. He's lost. To create some activity, Isobe attends a meeting of Japanese interested in traveling to the holy sites of India. Mitsuko Naruse, one of his wife's nurses, is there --- but as we quickly learn, she's not the serene saint he recalls from the hospital. As a college student, she was a French lit major, and a clichéd one at that; she drank, had meaningless sex, mocked religion. As a joke, she seduced Otsu, a devout Catholic. Then she made such a conventional marriage that, during her honeymoon in Paris, she fled to the provinces to see Otsu, now living in a monastery in rural France. Years later, divorced and empty, she's drawn to India. (Also on the trip: a children's book writer who loves animals and a World War II veteran plagued by terrible memories of the Japanese retreat through the Burmese jungle.)

Each character is presented as a "case," and these case studies are so vivid you'll be in no rush to get to India. But suddenly we're in Varanasi --- "the city where people gather in order to die" --- and you're either dazzled or disgusted. All those people! The stench! The poverty! The terrifying images of Hindu goddesses! And the Ganges! They call the river holy, but how can pilgrims bathe in water that has the floating ashes of the recently dead swirling by?

And wouldn't you know it --- here is Otsu, still a Catholic but shunned by the Church, giving Christ-like service to the poor by carrying bodies to the funeral pyre. Will the Christ he now sees in every religion bring him final comfort? Will he be able to open Mitsuko's heart to the love of God? Will Isobe find the reincarnation of his wife?

Then Indira Gandhi is assassinated, and what these people believe suddenly has unforeseen consequences.

For a novel about large philosophical and spiritual questions, "Deep River" is remarkably accessible. I'll remember the universal search for God in these pages, but what I'll recall more vividly are the sharply drawn scenes of cannibalism in Burma, drunken sex in Tokyo, death rites in Varanasi.

In the very first episode of "Lost", Locke explains how to play backgammon --- and maybe more. "Two players, two sides," he says. "One is light, one is dark." Maybe that duality is the connection to the moral codes of Endo's novel. But that's just throwing a dart. What I do know, when I put the book down, is that I was plagued for hours by the images of the Hindu goddesses that the travelers see in a subterranean temple. For these images gave me "an unobstructed view of the writhing elements concealed beneath the level of their own conscious minds."

It says a lot about the underlying seriousness of the creators of "Lost" that, when they reached for a book, they chose a novel as disturbing and powerful as "Deep River."

According to Endo "I became a Catholic against my will." He embraced the faith reluctantly under pressure from his mother, who found solace in religion after a painful divorce. In 1933 she and her son had returned to Japan from Manchuria, where she had lived with Endo's father. The young boy felt alienated and rejected, feelings that were only exacerbated by his conversion to a foreign religion.

In Lyon, where Endo went in 1950 to study French literature, he was again rejected, this time on racial grounds as wartime sentiments still colored French perceptions towards the Japanese. Endo specialized in Catholic writers such as François Mauriac, whose novel Thérèse Desqueyroux provides a subtext for Deep River.

For this story of spiritual journey, Endo has assembled a cast of four main characters. He relates the stories of these four and then brings them together on a tour of India, where we meet a fifth Japanese, Enami, the cynical tour guide, who came to India to seek spiritual truth and is disgusted by the crass tourists he meets in his work. There is also another Japanese couple, the Sanjos. She continually bitches because she would have preferred to go to Europe, while he spends his time dreaming about making a name for himself as a photographer.

There is a lot of description of Benares, cremation rituals, and the hindu practice of bathing in the Ganges to purify one's sins. A visit to statues of Hindu deities provides Endo with an opportunity to expound on the differences between the Virgin Mary and Hindu goddesses: the latter embody not just beauty and purity but all that is vile in mankind. Endo's point seems to be that to be truly godlike is to embrace both beauty and ugliness. Special attention is paid to the goddess Chamunda who lives in graveyards, afflicted by starvation and leprosy, and yet "Enduring all these ills and pains, she offers milk from her sagging breasts to mankind."

The last third or so of the book relates the different reactions of the Japanese when confronted with the reality of India. Mitsuko Naruse has gone in search of an old acquaintance, Otsu, whom she ridiculed and abused when they were students because of Otsu's Catholic faith. Mitsuko has learned that Otsu is now in India. She finds him dressed in beggar's rags, helping transport the sick and dead to the Ganges. She is beginning to find some meaning in life:

"I have learned though that there is a river of humanity. Though I still don't know what lies at the end of that flowing river. But I feel as though I've started to understand what I was yearning for through all the many mistakes of my past."

Otsu comes to a violent end when Sanjo is caught violating the Indian taboo that prohibits photographing the dead, and a mob turns on Otsu and beats him. He later dies in a hospital. Endo brings the novel to a turbulent end with a description of a real historical event: the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. It is another reminder of human imperfection.

Endo's characters are vividly painted and the story richly woven. While not all of Endo's novels have as much to offer non-Catholic readers, this one stands very well on its own. It offers up a glimpse of Japan rarely seen, a further dimension of the complex Japanese character as glimpsed in the works of writers as diverse as Kawabata, Oe, Mishima and Murakami.

Deep River by Shusaku Endo is of centered on a few individual that are part of a group Japanese tourists who had journeyed to the Ganges River in the middle of India. Throughout the story, he unveils their individual spiritual and emotional pasts, together, they had ventured there in silent separation in search for inner restoration. Whether in a spiritual or literal sense, every character has faced some sort of death, and was or waiting for a rebirth; the theme of death and rebirth could be found throughout the story.

Endo surrounds the story on five main characters. Might they lead their own separate paths, they have found themselves ventured in a land so foreign to their mind-frame for a purpose they might not be able to justify logically. There is Isobe, who was seeking for his dead wife reincarnated. Numada, who had went all the way to India to pay homage to a bird he believed has died in place of him. Mitsuko is a woman who never felt loved or alive and wanted to reconcile her past to Otsu, a former college "loser"--who desired to become a priest, but was rejected by the Catholic Church--whom she never was able to escape the wrong she has done him, but was drawn to him for reasons she never could understand. And Kiguchi, a former World War II veteran who was seeking for inner peace from the former horrors of deaths he had experienced.

This story can be view as a challenge taken by the author over the Western theological and cultural ideals, particular the Catholic Christian. I believe he has deliberately posed the question of just what might salvation look in light of his characters' long-sufferings. Death is an inevitable and inescapable part of life, and in order to attain wholeness, one needs face of his/her pain. As Otsu--whom I could rightly call Mitsuko's "object of rejection" than of affection--responds to Mitsuko's indignation over his choice in life, he speaks of his savior's death and rejection as the key to humanity's transgression. It was the betrayal by mankind that made Christ's message so powerful, for "as a result, he was etched into each of their guilty hearts, and they were never able to forget him...He died, but he was restored to life in their hearts"(Deep River 185). Endo reinforced his point by noting Otsu has not the "fluid flavored rhetoric," whose convictions can go no further than his lips, rather "Otsu's words were substantiated by the life of misfortune he had led" (Deep River 185). While the story ended in an unresolved peak, I wonder what he seeking to communicate, and just what might he want for those to take from the thresholds of life to his readers? Regardless, whether it is pain or healing, rejection or forgiveness, Endo has successfully woven a story that connects life to death and rebirth.