[In the following review, Beverly asserts that Endo's Foreign Studies is about what she calls "the tyranny of our incarnation" in which we are born into one existence and yearn to reach to each other as well as ourselves.]

Consider this book. The author calls it a novel even though it consists of one twenty five page long, perfectly realized short story, one swift historical account in twelve pages, and a long (one hundred seventy nine page) narrative that is primarily novelistic in impulse. The book was written in the mid sixties, in Japanese; finally, in 1989, the English translation appeared. In the preface, the author likens his former authorial self, the one who penned this novel, to "a pitiful younger brother." And the author is Shusaku Endo, the ardent and prolific Japanese Catholic whose most recently written novel Scandal concerns the subject of sexual perversion in contemporary Japan, whose masterwork Silence explores the apostasy of a seventeenth century Portuguese missionary, and whose Life of Jesus derives its warmth from a consideration of the mother like qualities of Christ.

Consider the plight of the reviewer who in a short space is asked to bring the book to life for you. Should I tell you what it feels like to read Foreign Studies? Tell you that the experience is rather like setting off on a somewhat brisk but steady trek with an acquaintance whose personal habits are both rigorous and ascetic, someone who expects you to trust him every step of the way? The terrain is somewhat rocky, unfamiliar, so you do, and just as you think that your footing is sure, Endo stops and says, "Look!" Naturally you look up, expecting to see some grand vista or unsuspecting animal. But Endo directs your eyes downward, to a spot not far from your own feet where flourishes a startling patch of language and thought, at once familiar but bizarre, and therefore oddly beautiful:

In the winter evening light (Tanaka) could make out a couple of grooves like railway lines, which had apparently been created by the wheels of passing traffic. He had never seen such a road in Tokyo. He was convinced that no such road existed in Japan. He had never before experienced such a road, tinged as it was with the smell of human habitation and the sweaty odor of human feet. If it had been possible, he would have liked to dig up this road … and take it home with him. And had he not felt so inhibited, he would even have liked to run his tongue over it.

Within this patch of language from "And You, Too," the third section of Foreign Studies, and within Endo's insistence that we linger with him over such a spot, lies his challenge to us as readers: we must read with the same awareness of the need for the conscious, moral life which preoccupies Endo as he writes. Our primary task is not to be distracted by twists in plot or the development of the protagonist, typical novelistic endeavors. Our job is to bear witness to the predicament of a particular person in a particular situation. In this instance, the person is Tanaka, an assistant professor of literary studies who has come to France to continue his research on the Marquis de Sade. And at this instant, a surge of bodily longing has caught Tanaka totally and uncharacteristically off guard.

Tanaka is a worrier; he frets over his advancement, he plans his strategies for research. He's fussy and judgmental, disheartened by the dreariness of Paris, unwilling to be embarrassed by Japanese who haven't "made it" in the expatriate life. In the midsixties enough Japanese have thrived in Europe in the two decades since the Second World War to create a known community. But Tanaka cares nothing for them. He sees Paris as a necessary way station on the path to academic success in his homeland. He's convinced that he studies Sade only to offer an eighteenth century European commodity.

But as Tanaka worries his way through this long narrative, we see that the remarkable combination of self absorption and alienation from deeper feelings of sympathy for self and others renders Tanaka oddly reminiscent of Sade, not in his monstrousness, but in the mindlessness that allows monstrousness to take root and grow. Estranged from himself and from those impulses that serve to sweeten life (Tanaka focuses periodically on the snapshot of his baby son), he literally errs, strays from the community that might help him.

But for the Endo who wrote Foreign Studies, the plight of the "stranger" is to be estranged. The collision of culture with culture, of the lone Easterner with the historically dense West, promises a suffering that enters the body itself. The three protagonists: Kudo, a fifties' student who finds his housing with a devout Catholic family in "A Summer in Rouen" to be an invitation for shame; "Araki Thomas," the first Japanese student to study in Europe in the seventeenth century and return to a homeland in which the banning of Catholicism now requires of him either martyrdom or apostasy; as well as Tanaka in "And You, Too," all find that one's true spirit may be alienated from one's body as long as there are others to please or to satisfy, as long as appearances must be kept up, as long as one must hide oneself.

But for some, the body in its sorrow and aloneness can no longer lie, and asks the spirit to join it. This is the mystery of physical suffering, and the gift for a character such as Tanaka is his inability to transcend his suffering body; he must claim it, know it, feel it, and in this way must begin to intuit his common tie with the imprisoned Sade, his own dark brother. Time and cultural difference may separate, but lone suffering brings together. When Tanaka feels his body thrill to the scent of a well traveled road, we suspect that only the surprise of the embodied life can save him, but we don't necessarily suspect that his salvation will reside in an almost predictable sickness. Still, Endo closes his narrative before he allows any salvation to mar the studied cynicism of the text.

Although Endo's conscious intention in this novel is to elaborate the agony and risk of cultural conflict in which the "other" is devalued by the ascendant culture, his profound achievement is in his portrayal of what could be called the tyranny of our incarnation. That we must be born into one body, in one place, at one time, seems to determine our lot. We yearn to reach each other across these baffling distances, and cannot reach even ourselves. Foreign Studies provides a wise and compelling exploration of the problem, but Endo does not bother with hope.

Ironically, Endo, in his striking ability to bring his Japanese characters so fully to our lives, undercuts his own pessimism. If you choose to follow him, you will discover that the pleasure of reading lies not in finding out "what happens to whom," but rests in the simple act of accompanying another person, letting your pace imitate his pace, slowly matching your breathing to his, feeling his sense of the trek enter you, so that your mind can fill with the questions, with the disturbances, with the affections, with the life that floods his sight as he guides you. Endo is a rare novelist, a determined thinker who quite simply ranges over territory no one else even knows is there.

For this reason it would be wise to give yourself the chance to consider this book.