[In the following review, Coles discusses the psychological aspects of Endo's Deep River.]

With the epigraph to his latest novel the Japanese writer Shusaku Endo not only signals his story's intention, but by implication dismisses those critics who have made much of his relatively unusual situation as a Christian intellectual (he was baptized a Roman Catholic at the age of 11 and educated by priests) living in a nation far from the West, and for a long time successfully resisting its ever probing cultural (not to mention economic and political) assertiveness. Mr. Endo calls on a "Negro spiritual" for that epigraph and, indeed, for his book's title: "Deep river, Lord I want to cross over into campground." He is suggesting that his story will tell of a universal vulnerability, and the yearning that goes with it—the desire for a redemptive journey, a passage into more promising, secure terrain. The river in this instance is the Ganges: for Hindus a sacred setting, a way station toward new kinds of life to be assumed rather than a spot that marks the end of things, but for modern Japanese as well as Americans, reared on antisepsis and biotechnology, a place of absurdity if not danger—funeral pyres everywhere, and bodies of human beings and household pets floating downstream.

Before he brings his characters to that scene. Mr. Endo explores their contemporary bourgeois, cosmopolitan lives in an almost clinical way (they are called "cases"). These are troubled, restless people, no matter their privileged situation. Each of them has known disappointment, loss and psychological and moral jeopardy. Even as bodies float on the Ganges, these four men and one woman are perplexed, uneasy, pursued by demons of a past life—adrift in their own ways.

Isobe is a middle aged businessman whose wife died of cancer. He had always been cool, detached, all too self absorbed—making money, climbing higher on the social and economic ladders. He and his wife had learned to stay together, but to keep a substantial distance. With her death, more than the expected sadness overcame Isobe. A rigid emotional control, a determined practicality that had little use for playfulness or imaginative speculation, was challenged by a moment of overwhelming fatefulness, which, in this instance, seemed to make a mockery of all the carefully tended rituals and habits, if not compulsions, that had constituted a life and that were meant to preclude any hard, searching look into its meaning or purpose.

Taking aim at an agnosticism rooted in science and its pervasive rationalism, which these days is proving to be transnational and transcultural, Mr. Endo puts his finger on Isobe's spiritual pulse this way: "Because he lacked any religious conviction, like most Japanese, death to him meant the extinction of everything."

Before she died, Isobe's wife, Keiko, was haunted by disturbing dreams, and became persuaded (hope against hope) that death would not be final after all: "I'll be reborn somewhere in this world." She asked her husband to try to find her after death—thereby, of course, remaining loyal to her, remembering her in a decisive rather than cursory or occasional manner. When she was to be cremated, a Buddhist priest, in ceremonial attendance, explained his religion's assumptions: "When an individuals dies, their spirit goes into a state of limbo. Limbo means that they have not yet been reincarnated, and they wander uneasily about this world of men. Then, after seven days, they slip into the conjoined bodies of a man and a woman and are reborn as a new existence." Such a deduction is, of course, no more easily accepted by Isobe and millions like him in Japan than it would be by most Westerners.

This atmosphere of skeptical materialism informs the thinking of the others who figure in Mr. Endo's evocation of late 20th-century Japanese life. Mitsuko is an attractive divorcee, highly intelligent, relentlessly cynical, forbiddingly calculating—and yet, unbeknownst to herself, desperately vulnerable. She left a marriage that was ideal in secular terms; her husband is another of Mr. Endo's prosperous burghers. Now she does volunteer work in a hospital (she took care of Isobe's dying wife), and is haunted by memories of a relationship she had as a college student with Otsu, another "case"—a young man who would ultimately enlist as a seminarian in a Catholic religious order. Mitsuko had become Otsu's temptress, a derisively callous one at times. But she was also increasingly intrigued by, then taken with, this exquisitely innocent and generous person, so much her opposite. Together they discussed religion; and their chosen code name for God, Onion, becomes a symbolic theme that threads its way through the narrative: the many layers of faith, the humility faith asks of the believer, the connection between belief and tragedy—all of that conveyed through the ordinary, lowly onion, which one can peel and peel, though with tears. Onion addressed by those two youths eventually becomes Onion pursued with great passion, by Otsu within the Christian tradition, by Mitsuko within the confines of a willful and manipulative self centeredness that psychiatrists would find unsurprising—and very hard to challenge clinically.

All these people but Otsu are headed by plane for one of those sadly banal excursions meant to distract people already more distracted (ironically) than they might realize. To them, filling out his cast, Mr. Endo adds Numanda, a writer and naturalist who can put his heart into the construction of storybooks for children and converse passionately with birds while holding himself aloof from his wife and, it seems, all other fellow humans; and Kiguchi, a survivor of the Highway of Death in Burma, where cannibalism was rampant at the end of World War II—a terrible finale to Japan's ill fated effort to conquer the Asian mainland.

Taken together, these people make up their creator's take on modern man—as in Jung's "modern man in search of a soul." (Mr. Endo has studied psychoanalysis with interest, especially its Jungian variant.) All of these "cases" (again save Otsu) have tried to live conventional, reasonably successful secular lives and have failed—not in a dramatic way (an ostentatious turn to an "alternative life style," a collapse into madness), but with muffled cries of vague apprehension betraying a despair they don't even know, never mind acknowledge. Under such circumstances they are curiously restrained combatants, a seemingly unpromising crew for a traditionally constructed novel with a specific plot: a trip to a strange land; a tour guide who is a religious teacher of sorts; some minor but instructive, even emblematic characters (a young honeymooning couple, the husband a greedily prying photographer, the wife callow and spoiled, who give their creator a chance to comment on the self indulgent fatuousness of a certain type of Japanese—and not only Japanese—youth. Yet Mr. Endo is a master of the interior monologue, and he builds, "case" by "case," chapter by chapter, a devastating critique of a world that has "everything" but lacks moral substance and seems headed nowhere.

As his characters in India confront the great mysteries of Hinduism and Buddhism, including their notion of the migratory life of the soul, Mr. Endo gives life once more to some of his earlier characters, and to his longstanding metaphysical passions. Mitsuko has appeared in previous Endo fictions, and here, as before, the author explicitly connects her to one of his mentors. Francois Mauriac. She is a version of Mauriac's Therese Desqueyroux, whose sinful preoccupations and behavior, and whose capacity for evil, have been of no small interest to him. Mr. Endo himself was educated in France, and here, as in other fiction, for a spell he takes a Japanese character to a Europe (Lyons) that is for him quite familiar, even congenial, territory. In fact, Otsu, the failed seminarian who was such an easy prey to Mitsuko in his youth, and later an obsession of hers, is very much a character out of another French novelist's literary and religious imagination: the cure in Georges Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest. That cure, too, seems to be a bumbling innocent, no match for the guile of various high and mighty folk, especially certain church bureaucrats who can't for the life of them comprehend him, his nature and his manner of being. This is the Judeo-Christian story, endlessly retold—by the prophet Isaiah, by the writers of the four Gospels, by a succession of novelists (Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Dickens)—and given by Bernanos the expository life of a rural French parish in the early years of this century: Christ foretold, Christ remembered, Christ evoked.

The unnerving, voluntary marginality of the man Jesus, His topsy turvy embrace of the weak, the "despised and the scorned" as against the big shots of church and state alike, has sent shudders down the backs of all sorts of people long after His death—among them, presumably, plenty of bishops and the functionaries who do their bidding. This is the situation Catholic novelists (as opposed to apologists) of whatever national or racial background have had to confront: on one hand, the spiritual truth that emerged from an informal community of humble Jews who were peasants and fishermen, inspired by a radical teacher and healer who was rather quickly hounded down; and on the other hand the later historical truth of a tight knit, powerful organization that has been, supposedly for His sake, in the thick of things for all these centuries and that has often enough wandered from the straight and narrow. What the Catholic theologian Romano Guardini said ("the church is the cross on which Christ was crucified") Shusaku Endo has given us in novel after novel—in his brilliantly original Silence (which takes on that subtlest, maybe most pernicious version of pride, Christian smugness) and now, more than 25 years later, in this tale that has Otsu, like his Saviour, dying young and badly misunderstood.

All through Deep River Otsu's pilgrimage haunts Mitsuko, his secular antagonist, and through her, the other characters in this beautifully wrought, lyrically suggestive story, so charged by the moral energy of its maker—who (like Thomas Merton at the time of his accidental death in Asia) wants to bring a Catholic sensibility to the shores of Hinduism and Buddhism. Not that this is a novel of easy grace. Doubt, Shusaku Endo has always known, is very much an aspect of faith. In the last pages, his sardonic, shrewd, embittered heroine glimpses "the sorrows of this deep river of humanity," realizes herself to be a part of it and takes a momentary step away from the tenacious pride that has prompted her to be so standoffish. Soon enough, we know, she will be aiming again for her solitary, privileged perch above it all, revealing the defiance of the egoistic observer. If Christianity holds up to us the lonely individual challenged by a God who entered history, Buddhism gives us people who are ready to surrender, finally, a measure of their human and spiritual particularity and who, with acceptance, join their follow creatures as part of the great tide of humanity. Mr. Endo manages to merge both of these streams of faith, bringing them together in a flow that is, indeed, deep. His work is a soulful gift to a world he keeps rendering as unrelievedly parched.