[In the following review, Schenk admits that there are some fascinating aspects to Endo's Deep River, but complains that "a faint air of absurdity hovers over the entire enterprise."]

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 creator's ideas. We are given thumbnail sketches of these characters from the river of life, who all become pilgrims to the river of death, the Ganges. Consider:

1) While Numada underwent a possibly fatal operation, his caged myna bird died in his place, he thinks, and Numada goes to India to buy another caged myna to release it into nature, to repay his debt. Now this is a lovely tale in the context of Shinto, a celebration of life and nature, but in a contemporary, supposedly realistic novel …?

2) Isobe's wife's last words to him before dying were, "I know for sure I'll be reborn somewhere in this world. Look for me, find me, promise!" Isobe hears of a "scientific" study of "previous lives" at the University of Virginia, according to which an Indian child claims her previous life was lived as a Japanese. Isobe sets off for India to find her. Reincarnation along the wheel of samsara while awaiting Nirvana is of course a beautiful link with other aspects of Buddhism, but in a contemporary novel …?

3) Otsu was a Catholic novice who could never achieve ordination due to his stubbornness in maintaining that all religions contain some truths leading to the same goal. He calls Jesus his Onion (sic). He ends up helping Hindus bear corpses to the burning ghats of the Ganges. The one justification for his pantheistic view is a quotation from Gandhi, fortunately in its original English, so that it rings out as the one unassailable statement in the entire novel—not exactly a tribute to Endo's philosophic ingenuity.

4) It occurs to Mitsuko that her life parallels the life of the eponymous Therese Desqueyroux in François Mauriac's novel, from which many passages are quoted in support of her theory. Borrowing another novelist's characterization is rather a cheap way of characterizing one member of a new novel's cast of characters, is it not?

5) Finally, coincidences abound and are supposed to have deep significance beyond words. Well, a word does exist for this particular stretch of the imagination, and it is blarney.

Do these pilgrims to the Ganges find what they are looking for? Does Endo? Deep River has its fascinating aspects, I would not deny, but for me a faint air of absurdity hovers over the entire enterprise.

To boot, Endo is only partly well served by his translator, notwithstanding that Gessel is probably one of the best around. Typical of so many American translators from the Japanese, including the dean of them all, his hold on his source language is stronger than his hold on his target language, his native tongue. He does not translate into the level of International Standard English commensurate with his highly literary Japanese text, but rather into a kind of middling American vernacular (although punctuation and spellings in this edition are British). Stuff rather than things, stretch her wings rather than spread, and ambiguous contractions like he'd proliferate not only in dialogue but even in narrative passages, which is unforgivable. Frequently the plural their avoids the "sexist" his or her, as "When an individual dies, their spirit goes into a state of limbo." (Yet there are such easy ways to avoid this: "The spirit of an individual who dies goes into a state of limbo.")

Nevertheless, Deep River, highly praised elsewhere, is to be read, if with a grain of salt. Here is a passage, perfectly trans-lated, that will tell you whether to plunge in:

While [Isobe] was killing time in the gift shop … he discovered both Shirley MacLaine's Out on a Limb and Professor Stevenson's Children Who Remember Previous Lives propped in a corner of the display window, labelled as best-sellers. This seemed less like a coincidence than the workings of some invisible power [and] he couldn't stifle the feeling that his dead wife had been pushing him from behind, directing him towards the display window. Without even thinking, he bought the books.

If you can take that, this book is for you.