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Analysis of Shūsaku Endō’s Deep River – Literary Theory and Criticism
Analysis of Shūsaku Endō’s Deep River – Literary Theory and Criticism
Literary Theory and Criticism
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HOME › JAPANESE LITERATURE › ANALYSIS OF SHŪSAKU ENDŌ’S DEEP RIVER
Analysis of Shūsaku Endō’s Deep River
BY NASRULLAH MAMBROL on OCTOBER 10, 2022
The Japanese writer Shūsaku Endō (1923– 96) was a Christian author who embraced a faith that combined both Eastern and Western spirituality. The novel Deep River centers on a visit to India by a group of Japanese tourists. The novel examines the internal journeys of four of the travelers—Isobe, Kiguchi, Numada, and Mitsuko—and explores their motivations for going to India, the fulfillment of their quests, and their discoveries along the way.
The novel begins with an account of the months just before and after the death of Isobe’s wife. Isobe, confronted with the fact that his mate of 35 years has cancer, comes to realize his dependence on his wife, whom he had taken for granted up to that point. After her death, her final words haunt him: “I . . . I know for sure . . . I’ll be reborn somewhere in this world. Look for me . . . find me . . . promise . . . promise!” In an attempt to fulfill her request, Isobe writes to a professor at the University of Virginia who is doing research on people who claim to have experienced previous lives. After learning of a young woman named Rajini Puniral, who lives in a village near Varanasi and who professes to have been Japanese in a prior life, Isobe determines to go to India in search of the woman.
At an informational meeting prior to the trip, Isobe recognizes Mitsuko, a hospital volunteer with whom his wife had bonded in her last days. On the way home from the meeting, Mitsuko recalls the “hollowness in her heart” during her university days and remembers her attempts to draw Ōtsu, a classmate who practiced the Christian faith, away from God. Ōtsu had told her, “Even if I try to abandon God . . . God won’t abandon me.” After graduating from the university, Mitsuko had married in hope of becoming a typical housewife and ridding herself of the destructive element that “lurked within the depths of her heart.” The marriage ended in divorce. Through the years she had carried on an intermittent correspondence with Ōtsu. His conversation and letters always spoke of a God who “made use even of my sins and turned me towards salvation.” Perhaps, Mitsuko thinks that Ōtsu, who now lives in Va¯ra¯nası¯, is drawing her to India.
At the pretrip meeting, Numada, an author of stories with dogs and birds as the main characters, expresses a desire to visit a wild bird sanctuary during the trip. He had had a pet hornbill but had released it when he entered a hospital for treatment for tuberculosis. His wife, sensing his need for an animal companion, brought a myna bird to the hospital to keep him company. After recovering from a surgery during which his heart had stopped, Numada learned that the myna had died during the operation, and he refl ects, “I wonder if it died in place of me?”
Kiguchi, another member of the tour group, fought in Burma during the war and now wishes to have a memorial service in India for his comrades who had died and for Tsukada, who had nursed Kiguchi when he had contracted malaria in the jungle. Years after the war, an American volunteer, Gaston, had comforted Tsukada as he died by assuring him of God’s forgiveness for his having eaten meat from the body of a comrade. Kiguchi had felt that the peaceful look on Tsukada’s face at his death “had been made possible because Gaston had soaked up all the anguish in Tsukada’s heart.”
Arriving in Va¯ra¯nası¯, Isobe sets about to fulfill the plea his wife had made on her deathbed. After meeting failure after failure, he cries out in his loneliness, “Darling! . . . Where have you gone?” Mitsuko answers his question with her comment: “At the very least, I’m sure your wife has come back to life inside your heart.”
Numada and Kiguchi also fulfill their personal missions. Numada, after buying a myna and carrying it to a wildlife sanctuary where no hunting is allowed, opens the door of the cage, urges the bird out, and watches it enjoy its freedom. He feels “as though a heavy burden he had carried on his back for many years had been removed.” On the banks of the Ganges, Kiguchi chants a sutra for Tsukada and his comrades who had died in the war. In so doing he carries out the wish he has had since the war.
Though Mitsuko remains unsure as to why she has come on the trip, she knows that she longs for something. After discovering that Ōtsu now devotes himself to carrying dying Hindus to the Ganges, she puts on a sari and approaches the river. A man beckons her to enter. She submerges her body and then acknowledges: “. . . there is a river of humanity. . . . I feel as though I’ve started to understand what I was yearning for through all the many mistakes of my past.”
Deep River deals with the universal themes of love, loss, sacrifice, acceptance, and redemption. Isobe, Numada, Kiguchi, and Mitsuko take spiritual journeys which lead them to understand God as “a great life force” in man and in nature. They recognize sacrificial love in many forms and in so doing experience the God whom Ōtsu defined as “love itself.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Endo, Shusaku. Deep River. Translated by Van C. Gessel. New York: New Directions, 1994.
Henry, Rick. “Review of Deep River, by Shusaku Endo.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 16, no. 2 (1996): 182–183.
O’Connell, Patricia. “Review of Deep River, by Shusaku Endo.” Commonweal 122, no. 10 (19 May 1995): 34–35.
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Literary Theory and Criticism
ABOUT
MCQS
LIBRARY
HOME › JAPANESE LITERATURE › ANALYSIS OF SHŪSAKU ENDŌ’S DEEP RIVER
Analysis of Shūsaku Endō’s Deep River
BY NASRULLAH MAMBROL on OCTOBER 10, 2022
The Japanese writer Shūsaku Endō (1923– 96) was a Christian author who embraced a faith that combined both Eastern and Western spirituality. The novel Deep River centers on a visit to India by a group of Japanese tourists. The novel examines the internal journeys of four of the travelers—Isobe, Kiguchi, Numada, and Mitsuko—and explores their motivations for going to India, the fulfillment of their quests, and their discoveries along the way.
The novel begins with an account of the months just before and after the death of Isobe’s wife. Isobe, confronted with the fact that his mate of 35 years has cancer, comes to realize his dependence on his wife, whom he had taken for granted up to that point. After her death, her final words haunt him: “I . . . I know for sure . . . I’ll be reborn somewhere in this world. Look for me . . . find me . . . promise . . . promise!” In an attempt to fulfill her request, Isobe writes to a professor at the University of Virginia who is doing research on people who claim to have experienced previous lives. After learning of a young woman named Rajini Puniral, who lives in a village near Varanasi and who professes to have been Japanese in a prior life, Isobe determines to go to India in search of the woman.
At an informational meeting prior to the trip, Isobe recognizes Mitsuko, a hospital volunteer with whom his wife had bonded in her last days. On the way home from the meeting, Mitsuko recalls the “hollowness in her heart” during her university days and remembers her attempts to draw Ōtsu, a classmate who practiced the Christian faith, away from God. Ōtsu had told her, “Even if I try to abandon God . . . God won’t abandon me.” After graduating from the university, Mitsuko had married in hope of becoming a typical housewife and ridding herself of the destructive element that “lurked within the depths of her heart.” The marriage ended in divorce. Through the years she had carried on an intermittent correspondence with Ōtsu. His conversation and letters always spoke of a God who “made use even of my sins and turned me towards salvation.” Perhaps, Mitsuko thinks that Ōtsu, who now lives in Va¯ra¯nası¯, is drawing her to India.
At the pretrip meeting, Numada, an author of stories with dogs and birds as the main characters, expresses a desire to visit a wild bird sanctuary during the trip. He had had a pet hornbill but had released it when he entered a hospital for treatment for tuberculosis. His wife, sensing his need for an animal companion, brought a myna bird to the hospital to keep him company. After recovering from a surgery during which his heart had stopped, Numada learned that the myna had died during the operation, and he refl ects, “I wonder if it died in place of me?”
Kiguchi, another member of the tour group, fought in Burma during the war and now wishes to have a memorial service in India for his comrades who had died and for Tsukada, who had nursed Kiguchi when he had contracted malaria in the jungle. Years after the war, an American volunteer, Gaston, had comforted Tsukada as he died by assuring him of God’s forgiveness for his having eaten meat from the body of a comrade. Kiguchi had felt that the peaceful look on Tsukada’s face at his death “had been made possible because Gaston had soaked up all the anguish in Tsukada’s heart.”
Arriving in Va¯ra¯nası¯, Isobe sets about to fulfill the plea his wife had made on her deathbed. After meeting failure after failure, he cries out in his loneliness, “Darling! . . . Where have you gone?” Mitsuko answers his question with her comment: “At the very least, I’m sure your wife has come back to life inside your heart.”
Numada and Kiguchi also fulfill their personal missions. Numada, after buying a myna and carrying it to a wildlife sanctuary where no hunting is allowed, opens the door of the cage, urges the bird out, and watches it enjoy its freedom. He feels “as though a heavy burden he had carried on his back for many years had been removed.” On the banks of the Ganges, Kiguchi chants a sutra for Tsukada and his comrades who had died in the war. In so doing he carries out the wish he has had since the war.
Though Mitsuko remains unsure as to why she has come on the trip, she knows that she longs for something. After discovering that Ōtsu now devotes himself to carrying dying Hindus to the Ganges, she puts on a sari and approaches the river. A man beckons her to enter. She submerges her body and then acknowledges: “. . . there is a river of humanity. . . . I feel as though I’ve started to understand what I was yearning for through all the many mistakes of my past.”
Deep River deals with the universal themes of love, loss, sacrifice, acceptance, and redemption. Isobe, Numada, Kiguchi, and Mitsuko take spiritual journeys which lead them to understand God as “a great life force” in man and in nature. They recognize sacrificial love in many forms and in so doing experience the God whom Ōtsu defined as “love itself.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Endo, Shusaku. Deep River. Translated by Van C. Gessel. New York: New Directions, 1994.
Henry, Rick. “Review of Deep River, by Shusaku Endo.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 16, no. 2 (1996): 182–183.
O’Connell, Patricia. “Review of Deep River, by Shusaku Endo.” Commonweal 122, no. 10 (19 May 1995): 34–35.
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Deep River
by
Endo Shusaku
general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author
To purchase Deep River
Title: Deep River
Author: Endo Shusaku
Genre: Novel
Written: 1993 (Eng. 1994)
Length: 216 pages
Original in: Japanese
Availability: Deep River - US
Deep River - UK
Deep River - Canada
Deep River - India
Le fleuve sacré - France
Wiedergeburt am Ganges - Deutschland
Japanese title: 深い河
Translated by Van C. Gessel
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Our Assessment:
B : fine if overly preachy tale of spiritual journeys
See our review for fuller assessment.
Review Summaries
Source Rating Date Reviewer
The Independent . 25/6/1994 Euan Cameron
The LA Times . 22/5/1995 Michael Harris
The Washington Post A 25/6/1995 Andrew Greeley
From the Reviews:
"Endo has always sought to interpret the proselytising spirit of Christianity for oriental sensibilities. (...) Now, in this beautifully crafted, mature work, his standpoint has changed. Understanding is possible, he now implies, and the path seems to be one that combines the Christian faith with Buddhist acceptance." - Euan Cameron, The Independent
"Deep River is a story of a kind usually dared only by veteran writers -- a direct, seemingly guileless inquiry into the meaning of life. (...) Endo's achievement here is mixed. Kiguchi, Isobe and Numada are realistic characters, and their stories are quietly effective. Otsu and Mitsuko, though, are the sort of people we bump into only in religious novels." - Michael Harris, The Los Angeles Times
"Endo is one of the world's great novelists, a wizard with plot and character and description who writes a simple story about simple people and packs it densely with drama, challenge and finally faith. (...) Endo has written so many wonderful novels that it would be patronizing to suggest that one is better than others. But surely Deep River, this moving story about a pilgrimage of grace, must be rated as one of the best of all of them." - Andrew Greeley, The Washington Post
Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
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The complete review's Review:
Deep River is a novel of spiritual journeys. Lots of spiritual journeys. It begins with the wife of Isobe being diagnosed as terminally ill, with only a few months to live. In typical Japanese fashion, the diagnosis is kept from her (though she catches on pretty quickly, wasting away in hospital), while Isobe realizes he has never really been that close to her and has, in many senses, failed her as a husband. Her dying demand of him is that he look for the reincarnation she is certain she will return to the world as.
It's a tall order for Isobe. Sensibly:
Because he lacked any religious conviction, like most Japanese, death meant to him the extinction of everything.
Nevertheless, he makes a sincere effort to follow her wishes, looking into this whole reincarnation idea and even corresponding with academics who study it. Eventually, this leads him to join a group tour to India, in 1984, where he thinks he might find what he's looking for.
Among the others on the tour happens to be a woman who volunteered at the hospital while Isobe's wife wasted away, Mitsuko. She is pulled to India because she is also looking for a spiritual encounter. Specifically, she hopes to again meet a man from her past, Ōtsu. An oddball Christian at the university she went to, she seduced him on a whim and challenge -- and demanded he gives up his religious ways if he wanted to be with her. When she dumped him, he turned all the more devoutly to Christianity, going to France to become a priest. A few years later she visited him in France -- while on her honeymoon ! -- and they've corresponded occasionally over the years, and now that he's in the Indian holy city of Vārānasī she wants to seek him out again. (Unsurprisingly, her marriage failed, and obviously she's also been looking for 'meaning' in her life -- hence also her penance cum charity work dealing with patients at the hospital.)
There are others on the trip too, including a veteran of the war who suffered greatly during the Japanese campaign in Burma, a successful author who writes "stories with dogs and birds as their main characters", and a couple on their honeymoon. They have a Japanese tour guide, Mr. Enami, who studied for four years in India and then found to his great disappointment that no Japanese university was interested in having him preach that kind of eastern wisdom, reducing him to this; he does his job dutifully, but is immensely frustrated.
India offers a spiritual contrast to Japan, and by bringing in Ōtsu's experiences in France -- where the Church derailed his ambitions to become a priest because his theology was too eastern-tinged to meet with their approval -- allows Endo to cover a wide spectrum, from Buddhism through Hinduism to Christianity. Ōtsu is the central spiritual figure -- and ultimately the Christian martyr, too -- but significantly his religious belief isn't by-the-Book Christianity. As he tells his French superiors:
I don't think God is someone to be looked up to as a being separate from man, the way you regard him. I think he is within man, and that he is a great life force that envelops man, envelops the trees, envelops the flowers and grasses.
Predictably, they dismiss this as pantheistic mumbo-jumbo; as to why Ōtsu spends so much of his life as a seminarian when his basic understanding of religion differs so from the official line, that is left unexplained.
Ōtsu explained to Mitsuko:
I can't help but be struck by the clarity and logic of the way Europeans think, but it seems to me as an Asian that there's something they have lost sight of with their excessive clarity and their overabundance of logic, and I just can't go along with it. Their lucid logic and their ways of explaining everything in such clear-cut terms sometimes even causes me pain.
It's hard not to see Deep River as Endo's own religious summa. Japan's most famous Catholic writer, he also had a difficult time in Europe (and also had severe medical issues which are also echoed in this book), yet clung to his Christianity. The East-meets-West aspect of Deep River, and the suggestion of how Christianity can meld with eastern religion -- the way how he, near the end of his own life, fit all the pieces of his experience together--, frequently threaten to overwhelm the book -- but then, of course, that basically is the book.
Endo is a fine writer, and much of the novel is quite good. An interesting feature is that he times the India-trip so that they are there when Indira Gandhi is assassinated (by a Sikh bodyguard -- another religious complication he has a bit more trouble with). But this remains a book a book about spiritual journeys -- which would be fine if it weren't so freighted with a specific message, which can make it tough to take. Granted, being entirely unspiritual, I am hardly the ideal audience for such a story, but it's the preachiness on offer here rather than the focus on the spiritual that weighs the books down so terribly -- belief, after all, is a common enough human condition, and can readily be conveyed even to those who don't share it without becoming too irritating, but Endo too often is more preacher than novelist here. Simplistic notions of 'east' and 'west' also grate -- this is a late-twentieth century novel by a worldly writer, and are thus considerably harder to excuse or accept than in fiction from an earlier time. And the martyring of Ōtsu -- christ, another guy who dies for 'our' sins ? give me a break ... -- predictable though it was, is certainly the final straw.
- M.A.Orthofer, 24 January 2013
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January 28, 2014
‘DEEP RIVER’ BY SHUSAKU ENDO (REVIEW)
Shusaku Endo is one of our recent additions to the J-Lit Giants hall of fame, and a well deserved one. I’ve enjoyed several of his books, and I’ve had this novel, highly recommended, on the shelves for a long time. Fortunately, it didn’t disappoint…
*****
Deep River (translated by Van C. Gessel, published by New Directions) is centred on a package tour to India by a group of Japanese tourists in October 1984 (the date is significant…). Over the course of just over two-hundred pages, we meet many people, all with different motivations for making the trip abroad.
Four of the group members stand out. There’s Numada, a children’s author, who finds peace in nature, preferring animals to people; old soldier Kiguchi, returning to the subcontinent to make offerings to his dead colleagues; Mitsuko, a single woman searching for meaning in her empty life; and Isobe, an old man whose wife recently died of cancer. Her last wish was for him to look for her after her death – you see, she believes in reincarnation…
The story starts off slowly as we learn about the background of the main characters and their reasons for joining the tour. While interesting in its way, I was a little impatient at times, with the writer taking half the book to get us to India. It is important though, as these first chapters set up everything that happens when we arrive.
Of the main characters, it’s perhaps Isobe and Mitsuko (who nursed Isobe’s wife in hospital) who stand out. Isobe is a typical, unemotional Japanese salaryman, learning to cope with life alone after decades of being cared for in a conventional, dry Japanese marriage. His wife’s death throws him off guard, leaving him unable to quite grasp what has happened:
“Isobe could not bring himself to believe that the strangely pallid fragments of bone strewn in the box were those of his wife. What the hell is this? What are we doing? He mumbled to himself as he stood beside his weeping mother-in-law and several other female relatives. This isn’t her.”
p.18 (New Directions, 1994)
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Rewriting the Death of Jesus: An Intertextual Reading of Shusaku Endo’s Deep River - Christian Scholar’s Review
Rewriting the Death of Jesus: An Intertextual Reading of Shusaku Endo’s Deep River - Christian Scholar’s Review
Article
Rewriting the Death of Jesus: An Intertextual Reading of Shusaku Endo’s Deep River
ByOctober 15, 2016No Comments
With the theme of hospitable readers and neighboring texts, the classical Greek virtue of hospitality meets the Christian virtue of loving one’s neighbor as one’s self.
Either virtue involves looking out for the well-being of those whom we encounter, whether as guest or as neighbor, including those whose claim on us might not seem natural or invited. Jesus’ response to the rich young ruler’s question, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:25-37) disrupts conventional notions of neighboring obligations, uncomfortably suggesting that our neighbor, and our accompanying ethical obligations of hospitality, extend beyond traditional boundaries formed by kinship and tribal solidarity. What then might it mean to consider texts as neighbors or readers as hosts from whom hospitality is to be expected?
Deep River, the last novel of Shusaku Endo, explores the spiritual yearnings of five Japanese characters, whose lives converge on a tour of sacred Buddhist sites in India. Each of these characters bears lifelong burdens of loneliness, isolation, or guilt, and their shared pilgrimage to the sacred river Ganges opens them up to the possibility of receiving and giving the love they so desperately need. Thematically, the novel moves toward a vision of an inclusive spiritual hospitality, in which the alien and the outcast can find spiritual consolation. These spiritual pilgrimages are set against the backdrop of multiple religious personae, but at the heart of the novel is the self-giving, unconditional love of Jesus and of the radical manner in which one character, Otsu, seeks to emulate Jesus’ love. In the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-religious setting of India, Otsu’s willingness to take up his cross and imitate Jesus’ example suggests an expansive understanding of what it means to love one’s neighbor.
In its textual composition as well, the novel opens up space in which the text itself enacts what could be construed as a form of hospitable reading. To describe a text as host is to build on longstanding tropes that personify the narrative perspective of a text in terms of a narrator or persona who tells the story. To describe the narrator of Deep River as a host is to acknowledge the multiple layers of stories and allusions that this narrator invites into the narrative fabric of the story. Nearly a prototypical embodiment of what Julia Kristeva has termed “intertextuality,”1 the narrative structure of Deep River consists of a pastiche of “neighboring texts”: each of the five characters has a personal story told through the construct of a clinical case study; at least two of these stories are revised adaptations of previous short stories written by Endo; the narrative frequently invokes the words of Isaiah 53, a passage of profound Christological significance for Christian readers; and several key episodes allude, both verbally and through narrative pattern, to the Christian sacraments of baptism, the Eucharist, and confession (penance and reconciliation). In addition, there is in the text an interpretive trace or echo of the religious pluralism of John Hick, who proposed that “there is not merely one way but a plurality of ways of salvation or liberation.”2 This pluralistic paradigm takes familiar Christian references and allusions, appropriating the spiritual and ethical associations of these Christian allusions, but reinterpreting their religious meaning through the pluralist theological paradigm.
Read intertextually, the novel raises important questions as to whether these allusive practices by a “host text” demonstrate hermeneutical hospitality or, perhaps, a more subversive undermining of the religious texts it reinterprets. While the intertextual text employs familiar rhetorical figures such as allusion or direct quotation—and this paper will at times refer to allusion as a metonymical shorthand for various rhetorical strategies employed in Deep River—Kristeva’s concept of the intertextual novel redefines the relationship between host text and its antecedent sources. Kristeva cites the view of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another,”3 to define intertextuality as an appropriation of multiple voices and perspectives which results in referential ambivalence. According to Kristeva’s reading of Bakhtin, a “writer can use another’s word, giving it a new meaning while retaining the meaning it already had. The result is a word with two significations: it becomes ambivalent.”4 What Bakhtin called the “hidden interior polemic” is a type of verbal ambiguity “characterized by the active (modifying) influence of another’s words on the writer’s word. It is the writer who ‘speaks,’ but a foreign discourse is constantly present in the speech that it distorts.”5
Kristevan and Bakhtinian intertextuality has a powerful anti-authoritarian teleology to it. For Bakhtin, writing in the context of the authoritarian Soviet state, the subversive nature of the dialogic text serves a purpose of political dissidence, but for Kristeva, that dissidence serves what she terms an “anti-theological” purpose.6
One need not agree with Kristeva that all such texts are inevitably “anti-Christian and anti-rationalist”7 to recognize that the “hidden interior polemic” could be a powerful means of undermining official pronouncements of powerful institutions, including the church. Such is the effect of the interpretive presence of Hick’s religious pluralism in Endo’s novel. This interpretive paradigm of pluralism acts as the “foreign discourse” in the novel, altering and redefining the iconography and the sacred texts that the novel, as host text, invites into its narrative.
For the first half of his career, Endo frequently described a tension between his Japanese identity and the beliefs of his adopted Christian faith, often using the metaphor of Christianity as a Western-style suit that did not fit his Japanese body. His project, as he described it to Kazumi Yamagata, was to “reshape this Western dress that my mother gave me and make it fit the Japanese body; [to explore if] it was possible to adapt Christianity to our mentality without distorting Christianity.”8 After Silence (1966), a novel in which a character provocatively pronounces Christianity to be a sapling that cannot grow in the swampy waters of Japan,9 Endo apparently concluded that the problem was with a paternalistic, judgmental Christianity that, in his view, had been shaped by Western culture. In his Life of Jesus, Endo articulated an alternative, maternal theology of Jesus’ love:
The religious mentality of the Japanese is—just as it was at the time when the people accepted Buddhism—responsive to one who “suffers with us” and who “allows for our weakness,” but their mentality has little tolerance for any kind of transcendent being who judges humans harshly, then punishes them. In brief, the Japanese tend to seek in their gods and buddhas a warm-hearted mother rather than a stern father. With this fact always in mind I tried not so much to depict God in the father-image that tends to characterize Christianity, but rather to depict the kind-hearted maternal aspect of God revealed to us in the personality of Jesus.10
From this point in his career, Endo would characterize Jesus’ love almost exclusively in terms of an empathetic identification with human suffering. Many readers, myself included, have interpreted this development in Endo’s thinking as an expression of his desire to find an enculturated expression of Christianity congenial to Japanese culture. By the time he wrote Deep River, however, Endo had apparently moved beyond Christian orthodoxy to embrace the paradigm of religious pluralism. Indeed, Mark Williams argues that Endo had “openly espoused” pluralism long before Deep River and that it can be “clearly seen germinating in his earlier works.”11
While composing Deep River, Endo discovered John Hick’s 1985 book, The Problems of Religious Pluralism, and embraced Hick’s argument that no religion has exclusive access to the divine. In his composition notes, Endo describes the shock of discovering a Christian theologian who claimed that “world religions are seeking the same God through different paths, cultures, and symbols” and who proposed that “religious pluralism should give up such a theology as to see Jesus as Messiah, and so should reconsider the problem of Jesus’s incarnation and of the Holy Trinity.”12 Hick rejected what he called “a juridical conception of salvation” whereby humans are granted a “change of status in the eyes of God from the guilt of participation in Adam’s original sin to a forgiveness made possible by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross,”13 instead redefining salvation or liberation as “the transformation of human existence from self-centredness to Reality-centredness.”14
In Deep River, Endo shapes the spiritual quests of his characters in pluralistic terms. Each character needs to be brought out of self-enclosed isolation to encounter some form of divine reality and to experience unconditional love and acceptance. Four of the characters (the remarkably cynical and nihilistic divorcée Mitsuko Naruse, the guilt-stricken war hero Kiguchi, the recently-widowed businessman Isobe, and Numada, the writer of children’s tales) have traveled to India to tour its sacred Buddhist sites. In Varinasi, they meet up with Otsu, one of Endo’s most compelling characters. Socially inept as a young man, he had been seduced and abandoned by Ms. Naruse, tried unhappily to reconcile his Japanese sensibilities with the scholastic theology he studied in a French seminary, and now pursues an unconventional ministry of bringing the dead bodies of the untouchables to the funeral pyres by the banks of the Ganges. Otsu is a contemporary holy fool, who understands one thing well: because Jesus has experienced rejection, he will never abandon anyone. Otsu clings fiercely to the unconditional love of Jesus and seeks to emulate that love in his idiosyncratic practice of the Imitatio Christi.
These tourists harbor private secrets too shameful or embarrassing to voice. Kiguchi wants to offer Buddhist prayers on behalf of his fellow soldiers who perished in the harrowing retreat through the jungles of Burma. He cannot forget the horrors of war and the guilt felt by his army buddy Tsukada for having eaten the flesh of a dead soldier. Isobe is in India on a quixotic quest to see if his deceased wife might be reincarnated as a young Indian girl. For most of his life, Isobe has embodied the stereotype of the workaholic Japanese businessman who takes his wife for granted and has only discovered upon her death how deeply he misses her. Numada has since childhood found it easier to communicate with dogs and birds than with humans and as an adult would confide his deepest secrets to a myna bird. This bird died while Numada was undergoing a dangerous operation, and Numada has long believed that the bird had, in some mysterious way, died in his place. He has come to India to repay this debt by releasing another bird into a bird sanctuary. Ms. Naruse’s motives for traveling to India are less clear, but she has never been able to forget the earnest young man she heartlessly seduced and discarded and has kept in touch with him sporadically from his seminary days to his present vocation of mercy. As a younger woman, she despised Otsu’s “foreign” god, and throughout her life had fiercely guarded her autonomy while simultaneously acknowledging her incapacity to love. She comes to India out of boredom, curiosity, and a spiritual longing of which she may not be entirely aware.
The Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53
From the earliest chapters of Deep River, with the extended flashback to Mitsuko’s and Otsu’s undergraduate days, to the day of the riot that appears to take Otsu’s life, the text of Isaiah 53 appears as a recurring refrain. From their first appearance, the suffering servant references are woven into a narrative argument that Christianity must be liberated from Western culture. In chapter three, the narrative takes us back to Mitsuko’s and Otsu’s undergraduate days at a Catholic university, where, as she waits for Otsu, she sees the crucifix, opens the Bible, and reads from Isaiah 53:
…he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him…. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.15
Initially, this passage emphasizes the cultural incomprehensibility of this image. Mitsuko implicitly associates the man with no beauty in the text with the iconic image of “the scrawny naked man on the cross,” the “ugly man she did not believe in.”16 Mitsuko, who has no discernible beliefs of her own, is offended that Otsu would serve this foreign God and determines to seduce Otsu, thereby intending to make him betray this God. Throughout the novel, Mitsuko continues to dismiss Christianity as a foreign religion. When she meets up with Otsu years later at the seminary in France, she tells him, “‘You’re a strange man. You’re Japanese, aren’t you? It makes my teeth stand on edge just to think of you as a Japanese believing in this European Christianity nonsense.’”17 In his defense, Otsu insists that he does not “‘believe in European Christianity’” and that he finds European “ways of thinking … ponderous to an Asian” like himself.18 Otsu’s statement concisely expresses the problem that Endo explored throughout his writing career: Christianity appears to many of his Japanese characters to be so enculturated in Western ways of thinking that it feels alien to their cultural identity. Because of Mitsuko’s antipathy to the word “God,” he proposes that they use an arbitrary signifier, “the 70 Onion,” to refer to a “force,” or an “entity that performs the labours of love.”19 Ironically, it is through the suffering servant motif of Isaiah 53 that Mitsuko discovers an alternative image of the divine, one less alienating to her cultural sensibilities. Mitsuko even begins to think of Otsu in language reminiscent of Isaiah: “He [Otsu] had no charm as a man, had nothing in his looks that might appeal to her, and he always aroused her feelings of contempt.”20 Although she claims to despise Otsu, she continues to write to him and to read the letters in which he defines his vocational mission in terms of Jesus’ ministry to the “lonely, the sick, and the suffering.”21 In these letters, he also begins to work out his emerging philosophy of religious pluralism: “‘God has many different faces. I don’t think God exists exclusively in the churches and chapels of Europe. I think he is also among the Jews and the Buddhists and the Hindus.’”22 This theme of God’s multiple faces is developed by associating the suffering servant not only with Christ, but also with Otsu and, through Mitsuko’s imagination, with the goddess Chamunda, “the goddess festering with leprosy, encoiled by poisonous vipers, gaunt, yet nursing children from her drooping breasts. … In them she had discovered the Asian mother who groans beneath the weight of the torments of this life.”23 For Mitsuko, this image of Chamunda is a fitting symbol of human suffering. She did not feel that same identification with the “ugly man on the cross,” but the “Asian mother” Chamunda manages to reach the emotional core of Mitsuko’s being.
In its pluralistically-inclusive practice of hospitable reading, the host text absorbs the language of Isaiah 53 to serve as a proxy for multiple avatars of suffering and compassion. The Isaiah text becomes cross-culturally inscribed in complex ways—as a traditional Christian reference to Jesus’ suffering on behalf of humanity, in support of Otsu’s anti-Western critique of scholastic theology, by association with the Hindu deities of Kali and Chamunda, as an image that fuses Christian and Asian images of suffering love, and then finally as the inspiration for Otsu to take up his own cross to follow Jesus, which Otsu pledges to do on the day of the riot and his fatal wound. Thematically, the novel uses this text to suggest the presence of a longsuffering, divine love infused in all religions, a love that, like the great river itself, welcomes all of humanity.
While it appears that the suffering servant motif becomes an inclusive expression of a universal divine love, the textual host exercises an important editorial excision that significantly transforms the meaning of his suffering. In the novel, the references to Isaiah 53 never complete verse 4, instead ending with the clause “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.” What is omitted are the theologically significant lines that follow:
… yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
[5] But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.
[6] All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. (Revised Standard Version)
Ending the quotations with the reference to bearing griefs and sorrows is consistent with Endo’s depiction of Jesus as an empathetic fellow-sufferer who understands grief and comforts the sorrowful. The omitted verses, however, point to the heart of the Christian gospel: the suffering servant is “wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities,” and it is through this very “chastisement” that the people are made whole. Isaiah speaks of these sufferings as a punishment on behalf of others, a theme that Paul expands on in Romans where he explains the meaning of Jesus’ death: “since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (Romans 3:23-25, RSV). The apostle Peter quotes directly from Isaiah 53 to declare that Jesus “bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Guardian of your souls” (I Peter 2: 24-25, RSV).
Omitting these references in Isaiah 53 to what the Christian church has always recognized to refer to Christ’s redemptive suffering on the cross might be an innocent redaction, a desire to focus primarily on Jesus’ empathetic experience of suffering without dismissing the salvific purpose of his death, were it not for the pluralist trace, which not only makes the idea of an atoning death unnecessary but identifies it as the problem for which pluralism is the solution. Moreover, the narrative echoes of the sacraments of baptism, the Eucharist, and penance also follow this theological revisionism by reinterpreting the meaning of the sacraments in therapeutic rather than soteriological terms.
The sacraments of baptism, the Eucharist, and penance (of which our focus will be on confession) are each alluded to in significant plot narratives in Deep River. The first two (baptism and the Eucharist) are part of the “sacraments of Christian initiation” while penance (confession) is the first of the “sacraments of healing.”24 Each of these sacraments is inextricably connected to the sacrificial death of Jesus, through which the grace of salvation is extended. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, of which Endo was a member, teaches that “through Baptism we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God.”25 Through the Eucharist, “those who have been raised to the dignity of the royal priesthood by Baptism and configured more deeply to Christ by Confirmation participate with the whole community in the Lord’s own sacrifice by means of the Eucharist.”26 The sacrament of penance and reconciliation, which includes the act of confession, involves an acknowledgement “of the holiness of God and of his mercy toward sinful man.”27 All of these sacraments point to the central claim of the Christian gospel: that humans are naturally in a state of sinful alienation from God, but that through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ, they may be saved from their sins and receive the gift of eternal life.
In the novel, these sacramental motifs appear at moments of spiritual cleansing or emotional healing that occur in the lives of several characters. While these sacramental motifs draw ethical and even spiritual power from their association with the death of Jesus, they minimize the need for the kind of confession that leads to repentance; indeed, they avoid using the category of sin as a descriptor of human actions. What marks the turning points in these characters’ lives is not a turning from sin to grace as much as it is a turning away from egotism, self-absorption, and loneliness toward greater empathy and love. The “salvation” of these characters thus follows the pluralist paradigm by which Hick refers to salvation as “the transformation of human existence from self-centredness to Reality-centredness.”28
Mitsuko’s spiritual quest takes her at the end of the novel literally into the sacred river in an initiation rite that, with symbolic allusions both to Christian baptism and to Hindu purification rites, suggests some form of spiritual epiphany. Before entering the river, Mitsuko overhears a guide explain that “‘The Hindus believe that once you enter this river, all of your past sins are washed away.”29 Indeed, the Ganges is understood to be “the archetype of all sacred waters; she is a goddess, Mother Gangā (Gangā Mātā), representative of the life-giving maternal waters of the ancient Vedic hymns; above all, she is the symbol par excellence of purity and the purifying power of the sacred.”30 At the same time, Mitsuko also continues her obsessive fixation on Otsu and the “Onion,” wondering “why did she care about him, why did she keep searching for him even as she went on mocking him”?31 The ambiguous pronoun “him” could refer either to Otsu or to the “Onion,” who, despite Otsu’s definition of the Onion as a force, is increasingly identified in the novel as a proxy for Jesus of Nazareth.
Both the Christian sacrament of baptism and Hindu purification rites presume that the water is associated with cleansing from sin. Mitsuko’s spiritual epiphany, however, conspicuously avoids any conscious expression of confession or even regret. Rather, it is an expression of discovery. Her self-described “‘fabricated prayer’”32 is largely an expression of her identification with the “river of humanity”:
“I have learned, though, that there is a river of humanity…. I feel as though I’ve started to understand what I was yearning for through all the many mistakes of my past”
***
“What I can believe in now is the sight of all these people, each carrying his or her own individual burdens, praying at this river…. I believe that the river embraces these people and carries them away… and I am a part of it.”33
The closest her prayer comes to a confession of sin is her reference to “the many mistakes of my past,” which she attributes to an unknown yearning. As an admission of sin, it is somewhat less robust than that expected in either Christian baptism or Hindu purification rites. Also unlike Christian baptism, in which God is always named in the persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Mitsuko resolutely refuses to name the object of her prayer, even maintaining ambivalence about the arbitrary name “Onion,” implying that it might itself be a portal that, at best, gestures toward something greater “that could not be limited to the Onion.”34 Her willingness to open herself up to, and identify with, the experiences of humanity represents a moment of significant personal growth for her, a sharp contrast to her hellion days of youth when she eagerly and maliciously sought her pleasure by inflicting pain on others. Her epiphany also illustrates the generic movement from self-centeredness to an other-centeredness by which Hick defines salvation. If it is meant to draw on the symbolic associations of baptism or a purification rite, however, it does so by omitting, or at the least minimizing, the need for repentance.
In addition to this baptismal motif, the novel has several confessional scenes. Kiguchi’s and Numada’s stories have multiple levels of self-disclosure, including moments that resemble the rite of confession. Both stories, coincidentally, are revised versions of short stories Endo wrote a decade or more earlier, and it is by comparing the earlier versions with the revised form in which they appear in Deep River that we can see most clearly Endo’s displacement of the theological language of confession in favor of a more therapeutic desire for self-disclosure and understanding.
Kiguchi needs to reveal the burden he has carried with him since the Second World War, a story that Endo first wrote in 1984 as a short story with the theologically-significant title, “The Last Supper.”35 Both versions share the same basic plot: a soldier named Tsukada survived the infamous Death March through Burma by eating the flesh of a deceased comrade. For the rest of his life, Tsukada is tormented by guilt and drinks himself to an early death, spending his last hours in a hospital where a foreign volunteer hears his confession and gives him absolution of sorts by indicating that he, too, as a survivor of the 1972 plane crash in the Andes, had eaten human flesh. By confessing his deed and hearing these words of understanding, Tsukada is able to die in peace. In “The Last Supper,” the foreign volunteer is an Argentinian named Echenique; in Deep River, the foreigner is a Frenchman named Gaston. In Deep River, Kiguchi was a fellow soldier, whose life was saved because Tsukada ate human flesh and thereby maintained his strength to carry his comrade to safety.
There are several subtle differences between the two versions of the story, differences that indicate a shift in the way that sin, guilt, and forgiveness are presented. In the earlier version, Tsukada ate the flesh of his deceased comrade for his own survival, not to save the life of another. Hence, Tsukada asks the Christian foreigner if his God could forgive “someone who has fallen into such depravity.”36 In Deep River, Tsukada asks if “someone who’s fallen that far into the hell of starvation” could be forgiven,37 the former term “depravity” conveying a moral failure while the latter construction (“fallen into the hell of starvation”) suggests greater passivity into material conditions of deprivation. The fact that Tsukada eats the meat to save Kiguchi’s life also affects the way in which the action is viewed by others. Late in the novel, Kiguchi dreams that Gaston explained to him that his friend “‘would be forgiven because he had done it out of compassion.’”38 This subtle change implies that forgiveness is merited if an offense is motivated by compassion. Christian forgiveness, however, does not depend upon what motivated the transgression, a truth more clearly communicated in the earlier version of the story.
The later version also changes the narrator of Kiguchi’s story from the hospital psychiatrist to Kiguchi himself. The earlier version contrasts the psychiatrist’s inability to relieve Tsukada’s guilt with the theologically-inflected compassion of the Christian foreigner, whose words seem to bring Tsukada peace in his final moments. To be sure, the psychiatrist manages to draw out Tsukada’s painful confession, but his consolations offer Tsukada no lasting relief: “Mr. Tsukada. You drink every night to forget those eyes, don’t you? … But not even that child [the son of the deceased soldier] blames you. It’s just the way things were.”39 By contrast, Echenique, after hearing Tsukada’s story, has his own startling revelation. One of the survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 that crashed in the Andes in 1972, he lived by eating the flesh of the deceased fellow passengers. In a brilliant plot device, Endo gives Echenique’s experience Eucharistic symbolism, using language that alludes, as does the title of the story, to the Last Supper.
Echenique explains that a priest on the plane sustained fatal injuries, but before dying, he gave the surviving passengers permission to eat his flesh. This priest had been a habitual drinker, and he implored the rest of the passengers to “eat my body … and wait until you’re saved.”40 In a bit of grim humor, he cannot help but joke about his alcohol-saturated body: “If you eat too much in one sitting, you’ll get drunk. I’ve got a thirteen-year supply of alcohol inside me.”41 This man offers up his body and his wine that others might be saved, and Echenique, in his halting Japanese, emphasizes the sacramental overtones of this grisly action: “I too eat. … But then I eat also his love.”42
In Deep River, the Eucharistic overtones remain, if less pronounced. The dying passenger, still described as a drunken man, tells the passengers to eat his flesh for “help” will come,43 a term with less theological resonance than the word “saved.” The narrative omits the joke about ingesting the man’s alcohol in his flesh, instead treating his history of alcoholism primarily as his moral failing that his final act of generosity redeems in the eyes of others. Most telling, however, is the final image given of Gaston sitting beside Tsukada’s bed:
Kiguchi could not tell whether such comfort eased Tsukada’s pain. But the figure of Gaston kneeling beside his bed looked like a bent nail, and the bent nail struggled to become one with the contortions of Tsukada’s mind, and to suffer along with Tsukada.44
When Tsukada finally does pass away, “Kiguchi couldn’t help but feel that this peaceful death-mask had been made possible because Gaston had soaked up all the anguish in Tsukada’s heart.”45 This beautiful and emotionally powerful image of a fellow-sufferer makes the purpose of his compassion the easing of Tsukada’s anguish, an action that is depicted without reference to forgiveness.
Numada has a different story of confession, one that merges the sacramental imagery of confession with the motif of a substitutionary death. An earlier version of Numada’s story appears as “A Forty-Year-Old Man,” with a different protagonist (Suguro) and a different context. Nevertheless, both stories share these elements: Numada (Suguro) had a pet bird to whom he used to tell his deepest secrets, things he could never confide to another human being. Numada (Suguro) also happened to have a chronic lung condition, which necessitated a risky operation during which his heart stopped on the operating table, leaving him momentarily dead. During his hospitalization, nobody remembered to care for his bird, which ended up dying during the operation. In both stories, the protagonist has the strong conviction that the bird died in his place, the Christian symbolism of which is unmistakable.
Once again, however, the alterations to the story serve to de-emphasize the soteriological theme of a vicarious death on behalf of a man who has sinned (“A Forty-Year-Old Man”) to the theme which predominates throughout Deep River, of the companionship of one who takes on our deepest burdens and demonstrates an unconditional love to the point of laying down one’s life for another. Confession is no longer the plea of a sinner who needs forgiveness but the plea of a lonely and alienated man who needs understanding.
In “A Forty-Year-Old Man,” Suguro bears the guilt of having betrayed his wife by sleeping with her cousin and subsequently taking her to an abortion clinic. This is the secret that he confesses to his myna bird, whom the narrator explicitly likens to a “priest seated in the confessional.”46 Endo skillfully uses blood imagery as expressions of Suguro’s guilt and as symbolic reminders of the atoning blood of Jesus. After his close call on the operating table, Suguro leaves the hospital with his wife, who seems to know about the affair, and who also apparently forgives her husband with the reassurance that “everything will be all right now.”47 Her forgiveness is symbolically reinforced by her statement that the bird died in his place, a phrase redolent with overtones of Jesus’ substitutionary death. This motif of confession draws on the traditional theology of the atonement and the relationship between confession of sin and forgiveness.
In Deep River, Numada’s story omits any reference to sin and guilt, transforming the practice of confession into a symbol of one’s need for self-disclosure to a non-judgmental being. Numada’s plight is not guilt but rather the intense loneliness he has experienced since childhood, a loneliness that has led him to the imaginative creation of an animal world in his books for children. The motif of a substitutionary death remains, the bird having apparently died in Numada’s place, but there seems to be no particular logic for this substitutionary death. Instead, the bird’s death seems simply to be an expression of unconditional love from a creature, even when it dies from neglect. The bird’s death also prefigures Otsu’s eventual death. In seeking to save the tourist Sanjo, who had violated the taboo against photographing the dead, from an angry mob, Otsu literally gives his life to save another man’s life.
This model of unconditional love, identified with Jesus, Otsu, Chamunda, the myna bird and throughout Endo’s oeuvre with a host of other unconventional exemplars of longsuffering love, reveals the heart of Endo’s theology. To the extent that Endo simply emphasizes the “suffering and brokenness of Christ,”48 he stands within an important strand of Japanese theology that Richard Mouw and Douglas Sweeney refer to as “Christus dolor theology.”49 However, as Mouw and Sweeney remind us, “to recognize that Jesus has suffered with us needs in no way to detract from the fact that in eternally significant ways he also suffered for us … bearing the full burden of our sin and guilt in ways that we could never do for ourselves.”50 That is the theological understanding of Jesus’ sufferings that the narrator of Deep River quietly abandons with the selective and theologically incomplete reading of Isaiah 53 and with the sacramental imagery emptied of soteriological significance. The cleansing of baptismal waters, the confessional self-disclosures, and even the Eucharistic overtones of eating human flesh come to signify therapeutic transformations of these characters, leading them from self-enclosed isolation into what Mitsuko calls the “river of humanity.”51
It is this pattern of subverting the orthodox meanings of the Christian texts and motifs in Deep River that defines the narrative as intertextual in the Kristevan sense, rather than as a more conventional rhetoric of allusion. By situating the characters’ transformative experiences in sacramental language and imagery, the narrative suggests that something of salvific significance has taken place, but the hidden interior polemic redefines those experiences in a therapeutic rather than theological idiom. There is a subversive element to this pattern of reading and appropriating sacred texts and images, of drawing from the rich spiritual capital of the Christian sacraments but then emptying them of their spiritual signification. While such textual and hermeneutical practices may well be defended as intellectually or even theologically necessary from the pluralist standpoint, one would be hard-pressed to describe this as a charitable form of reading the Christian tradition. Charitable reading practices, at least on some level, imply a hermeneutical adaptation of the Golden Rule (to read as one would wish to be read by others). One irony of the novel is that while the great river is a metaphor of hospitable welcome to all peoples and all spiritual practices, the novel itself does not seem to open up space for orthodox expressions of the Christian faith.
As a host text, Deep River consists of the stories of several individuals—Isobe, Numada, Kiguchi, Mitsuko, and Otsu—which are absorbed into a larger narrative about spiritual transformation. The narrative encourages a hospitable reading of their personal stories, their private struggles treated with generosity and respect and their human dignity affirmed. Likewise, the text welcomes multiple religious personae of this culturally and spiritually pluralistic setting—from the named deities Kali and Chamunda to the more archetypally generic “Asian mother” that the tour guide Enami passionately honors, from the generic and syncretistic “Onion” to the explicit textual presence of Jesus. As befits the titular symbol of the great river that embraces all of humanity, this narrative inclusivity reflects an expansive understanding of what it means to love one’s neighbor in an increasingly interconnected world.
In the classical world, hospitality was demanded by the gods and motivated to some extent by fear lest the stranger at one’s door turn out to be a deity in disguise. Jesus’ ethic of hospitality motivates, not by appealing to the fear of offending a deity but by elevating the moral status of “the least of these,” for He asserts that whatever acts of charity and kindness are offered to the most insignificant of humans are accepted as if they were performed directly for God (Matt. 25: 35-40).
In welcoming the suffering servant of Isaiah into the text, Deep River affirms this kingdom ethic of hospitable love for all people, no matter how insignificant or marginalized. Yet in its editorial concision of Isaiah 53, the textual host does not recognize the complete identity of the suffering servant: he is the man of sorrows, to be sure, despised and rejected by humanity, yet he also becomes the savior, the one by whose suffering humanity is healed, and he is exalted by the prophet as the “righteous one” who will “make many to be accounted righteous” (Isaiah 53:11, RSV). This is the incarnate God whose identity may easily be missed in the ambivalent texts of Deep River.
Cite this article
John T. Netland, “Rewriting the Death of Jesus: An Intertextual Reading of Shusaku Endo’s Deep River”, Christian Scholar’s Review, 46:1 , 65–78
FootnotesJulia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, trans. Seán Hand (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986). 37.
John Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 34.
Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” 37.
Ibid., 43–44.
Ibid., 44.
Ibid., 47, 49.
Ibid., 50.
Kazumi Yamagata, “Mr. Shusaku Endo Talks About His Life and Works as a Catholic Writer,” The Chesterton Review 12 (1986): 495.
Shusaku Endo, Silence, trans. William Johnston (New York: Taplinger, 1966), 147.
Shusaku Endo, A Life of Jesus, trans. Richard A. Schuchert, S.J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1973), 1.
Mark Williams, “Crossing the Deep River: Endo Shusaku and the Problem of Religious Pluralism,” in Xavier’s Legacies: Catholicism in Modern Japanese Culture, ed. Kevin M. Doak (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 116-117.
Quoted by John Hick in John Hick: An Autobiography (Oxford: One World, 2002), 286.
Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism, 31-32.
Ibid., 29.
Shusaku Endo, Deep River, trans. Van C. Gessel (New York: New Directions, 1994), 44-45.
Ibid., 45.
Ibid., 64.
Ibid., 65.
Ibid., 64.
Ibid., 116.
Ibid., 123.
Ibid., 121.
Ibid., 175.
he Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part Two: The Celebration of the Christian Mystery, Section Two: The Seven Sacraments of the Church, §1211. Online Resource. The Vatican.va., 1993. http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/ __P3E.HTM.
Ibid., §1213.
Ibid., §1322.
7Ibid., §1424.
Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism, 29.
Endo, Deep River, 196.
Lindsay Jones, Mircea Eliade, and Charles J. Adams, Encyclopedia of Religion (Detroit: Macmillan, 2005), 5:3274.
Endo, Deep River, 209.
Ibid., 210.
Ibid., 210–211.
Ibid., 211.
Shusaku Endo, “The Last Supper,” in The Final Martyrs, trans. Van C. Gessel (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1993), 147-167.
Ibid., 164.
Endo, Deep River, 101.
Ibid., 200.
Endo, “The Last Supper,” 160.
Ibid., 165–166.
Ibid., 166.
Ibid., 166.
Endo, Deep River, 102.
Ibid., 103.
Ibid., 103.
Shusaku Endo, “A Forty-Year-Old Man,” in Stained Glass Elegies, trans. Van C. Gessel (New York: New Directions, 1984), 23.
Ibid., 27.
Richard J. Mouw and Douglas A. Sweeney, The Suffering and Victorious Christ: Toward a More Compassionate Christology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 2.
Ibid., 1.
Ibid., 95.
Endo, Deep River, 211.
John T. Netland
Union University
John T. Netland is Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and Professor of English at Union University.
Article
Rewriting the Death of Jesus: An Intertextual Reading of Shusaku Endo’s Deep River
ByOctober 15, 2016No Comments
With the theme of hospitable readers and neighboring texts, the classical Greek virtue of hospitality meets the Christian virtue of loving one’s neighbor as one’s self.
Either virtue involves looking out for the well-being of those whom we encounter, whether as guest or as neighbor, including those whose claim on us might not seem natural or invited. Jesus’ response to the rich young ruler’s question, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:25-37) disrupts conventional notions of neighboring obligations, uncomfortably suggesting that our neighbor, and our accompanying ethical obligations of hospitality, extend beyond traditional boundaries formed by kinship and tribal solidarity. What then might it mean to consider texts as neighbors or readers as hosts from whom hospitality is to be expected?
Deep River, the last novel of Shusaku Endo, explores the spiritual yearnings of five Japanese characters, whose lives converge on a tour of sacred Buddhist sites in India. Each of these characters bears lifelong burdens of loneliness, isolation, or guilt, and their shared pilgrimage to the sacred river Ganges opens them up to the possibility of receiving and giving the love they so desperately need. Thematically, the novel moves toward a vision of an inclusive spiritual hospitality, in which the alien and the outcast can find spiritual consolation. These spiritual pilgrimages are set against the backdrop of multiple religious personae, but at the heart of the novel is the self-giving, unconditional love of Jesus and of the radical manner in which one character, Otsu, seeks to emulate Jesus’ love. In the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-religious setting of India, Otsu’s willingness to take up his cross and imitate Jesus’ example suggests an expansive understanding of what it means to love one’s neighbor.
In its textual composition as well, the novel opens up space in which the text itself enacts what could be construed as a form of hospitable reading. To describe a text as host is to build on longstanding tropes that personify the narrative perspective of a text in terms of a narrator or persona who tells the story. To describe the narrator of Deep River as a host is to acknowledge the multiple layers of stories and allusions that this narrator invites into the narrative fabric of the story. Nearly a prototypical embodiment of what Julia Kristeva has termed “intertextuality,”1 the narrative structure of Deep River consists of a pastiche of “neighboring texts”: each of the five characters has a personal story told through the construct of a clinical case study; at least two of these stories are revised adaptations of previous short stories written by Endo; the narrative frequently invokes the words of Isaiah 53, a passage of profound Christological significance for Christian readers; and several key episodes allude, both verbally and through narrative pattern, to the Christian sacraments of baptism, the Eucharist, and confession (penance and reconciliation). In addition, there is in the text an interpretive trace or echo of the religious pluralism of John Hick, who proposed that “there is not merely one way but a plurality of ways of salvation or liberation.”2 This pluralistic paradigm takes familiar Christian references and allusions, appropriating the spiritual and ethical associations of these Christian allusions, but reinterpreting their religious meaning through the pluralist theological paradigm.
Read intertextually, the novel raises important questions as to whether these allusive practices by a “host text” demonstrate hermeneutical hospitality or, perhaps, a more subversive undermining of the religious texts it reinterprets. While the intertextual text employs familiar rhetorical figures such as allusion or direct quotation—and this paper will at times refer to allusion as a metonymical shorthand for various rhetorical strategies employed in Deep River—Kristeva’s concept of the intertextual novel redefines the relationship between host text and its antecedent sources. Kristeva cites the view of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another,”3 to define intertextuality as an appropriation of multiple voices and perspectives which results in referential ambivalence. According to Kristeva’s reading of Bakhtin, a “writer can use another’s word, giving it a new meaning while retaining the meaning it already had. The result is a word with two significations: it becomes ambivalent.”4 What Bakhtin called the “hidden interior polemic” is a type of verbal ambiguity “characterized by the active (modifying) influence of another’s words on the writer’s word. It is the writer who ‘speaks,’ but a foreign discourse is constantly present in the speech that it distorts.”5
Kristevan and Bakhtinian intertextuality has a powerful anti-authoritarian teleology to it. For Bakhtin, writing in the context of the authoritarian Soviet state, the subversive nature of the dialogic text serves a purpose of political dissidence, but for Kristeva, that dissidence serves what she terms an “anti-theological” purpose.6
One need not agree with Kristeva that all such texts are inevitably “anti-Christian and anti-rationalist”7 to recognize that the “hidden interior polemic” could be a powerful means of undermining official pronouncements of powerful institutions, including the church. Such is the effect of the interpretive presence of Hick’s religious pluralism in Endo’s novel. This interpretive paradigm of pluralism acts as the “foreign discourse” in the novel, altering and redefining the iconography and the sacred texts that the novel, as host text, invites into its narrative.
For the first half of his career, Endo frequently described a tension between his Japanese identity and the beliefs of his adopted Christian faith, often using the metaphor of Christianity as a Western-style suit that did not fit his Japanese body. His project, as he described it to Kazumi Yamagata, was to “reshape this Western dress that my mother gave me and make it fit the Japanese body; [to explore if] it was possible to adapt Christianity to our mentality without distorting Christianity.”8 After Silence (1966), a novel in which a character provocatively pronounces Christianity to be a sapling that cannot grow in the swampy waters of Japan,9 Endo apparently concluded that the problem was with a paternalistic, judgmental Christianity that, in his view, had been shaped by Western culture. In his Life of Jesus, Endo articulated an alternative, maternal theology of Jesus’ love:
The religious mentality of the Japanese is—just as it was at the time when the people accepted Buddhism—responsive to one who “suffers with us” and who “allows for our weakness,” but their mentality has little tolerance for any kind of transcendent being who judges humans harshly, then punishes them. In brief, the Japanese tend to seek in their gods and buddhas a warm-hearted mother rather than a stern father. With this fact always in mind I tried not so much to depict God in the father-image that tends to characterize Christianity, but rather to depict the kind-hearted maternal aspect of God revealed to us in the personality of Jesus.10
From this point in his career, Endo would characterize Jesus’ love almost exclusively in terms of an empathetic identification with human suffering. Many readers, myself included, have interpreted this development in Endo’s thinking as an expression of his desire to find an enculturated expression of Christianity congenial to Japanese culture. By the time he wrote Deep River, however, Endo had apparently moved beyond Christian orthodoxy to embrace the paradigm of religious pluralism. Indeed, Mark Williams argues that Endo had “openly espoused” pluralism long before Deep River and that it can be “clearly seen germinating in his earlier works.”11
While composing Deep River, Endo discovered John Hick’s 1985 book, The Problems of Religious Pluralism, and embraced Hick’s argument that no religion has exclusive access to the divine. In his composition notes, Endo describes the shock of discovering a Christian theologian who claimed that “world religions are seeking the same God through different paths, cultures, and symbols” and who proposed that “religious pluralism should give up such a theology as to see Jesus as Messiah, and so should reconsider the problem of Jesus’s incarnation and of the Holy Trinity.”12 Hick rejected what he called “a juridical conception of salvation” whereby humans are granted a “change of status in the eyes of God from the guilt of participation in Adam’s original sin to a forgiveness made possible by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross,”13 instead redefining salvation or liberation as “the transformation of human existence from self-centredness to Reality-centredness.”14
In Deep River, Endo shapes the spiritual quests of his characters in pluralistic terms. Each character needs to be brought out of self-enclosed isolation to encounter some form of divine reality and to experience unconditional love and acceptance. Four of the characters (the remarkably cynical and nihilistic divorcée Mitsuko Naruse, the guilt-stricken war hero Kiguchi, the recently-widowed businessman Isobe, and Numada, the writer of children’s tales) have traveled to India to tour its sacred Buddhist sites. In Varinasi, they meet up with Otsu, one of Endo’s most compelling characters. Socially inept as a young man, he had been seduced and abandoned by Ms. Naruse, tried unhappily to reconcile his Japanese sensibilities with the scholastic theology he studied in a French seminary, and now pursues an unconventional ministry of bringing the dead bodies of the untouchables to the funeral pyres by the banks of the Ganges. Otsu is a contemporary holy fool, who understands one thing well: because Jesus has experienced rejection, he will never abandon anyone. Otsu clings fiercely to the unconditional love of Jesus and seeks to emulate that love in his idiosyncratic practice of the Imitatio Christi.
These tourists harbor private secrets too shameful or embarrassing to voice. Kiguchi wants to offer Buddhist prayers on behalf of his fellow soldiers who perished in the harrowing retreat through the jungles of Burma. He cannot forget the horrors of war and the guilt felt by his army buddy Tsukada for having eaten the flesh of a dead soldier. Isobe is in India on a quixotic quest to see if his deceased wife might be reincarnated as a young Indian girl. For most of his life, Isobe has embodied the stereotype of the workaholic Japanese businessman who takes his wife for granted and has only discovered upon her death how deeply he misses her. Numada has since childhood found it easier to communicate with dogs and birds than with humans and as an adult would confide his deepest secrets to a myna bird. This bird died while Numada was undergoing a dangerous operation, and Numada has long believed that the bird had, in some mysterious way, died in his place. He has come to India to repay this debt by releasing another bird into a bird sanctuary. Ms. Naruse’s motives for traveling to India are less clear, but she has never been able to forget the earnest young man she heartlessly seduced and discarded and has kept in touch with him sporadically from his seminary days to his present vocation of mercy. As a younger woman, she despised Otsu’s “foreign” god, and throughout her life had fiercely guarded her autonomy while simultaneously acknowledging her incapacity to love. She comes to India out of boredom, curiosity, and a spiritual longing of which she may not be entirely aware.
The Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53
From the earliest chapters of Deep River, with the extended flashback to Mitsuko’s and Otsu’s undergraduate days, to the day of the riot that appears to take Otsu’s life, the text of Isaiah 53 appears as a recurring refrain. From their first appearance, the suffering servant references are woven into a narrative argument that Christianity must be liberated from Western culture. In chapter three, the narrative takes us back to Mitsuko’s and Otsu’s undergraduate days at a Catholic university, where, as she waits for Otsu, she sees the crucifix, opens the Bible, and reads from Isaiah 53:
…he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him…. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.15
Initially, this passage emphasizes the cultural incomprehensibility of this image. Mitsuko implicitly associates the man with no beauty in the text with the iconic image of “the scrawny naked man on the cross,” the “ugly man she did not believe in.”16 Mitsuko, who has no discernible beliefs of her own, is offended that Otsu would serve this foreign God and determines to seduce Otsu, thereby intending to make him betray this God. Throughout the novel, Mitsuko continues to dismiss Christianity as a foreign religion. When she meets up with Otsu years later at the seminary in France, she tells him, “‘You’re a strange man. You’re Japanese, aren’t you? It makes my teeth stand on edge just to think of you as a Japanese believing in this European Christianity nonsense.’”17 In his defense, Otsu insists that he does not “‘believe in European Christianity’” and that he finds European “ways of thinking … ponderous to an Asian” like himself.18 Otsu’s statement concisely expresses the problem that Endo explored throughout his writing career: Christianity appears to many of his Japanese characters to be so enculturated in Western ways of thinking that it feels alien to their cultural identity. Because of Mitsuko’s antipathy to the word “God,” he proposes that they use an arbitrary signifier, “the 70 Onion,” to refer to a “force,” or an “entity that performs the labours of love.”19 Ironically, it is through the suffering servant motif of Isaiah 53 that Mitsuko discovers an alternative image of the divine, one less alienating to her cultural sensibilities. Mitsuko even begins to think of Otsu in language reminiscent of Isaiah: “He [Otsu] had no charm as a man, had nothing in his looks that might appeal to her, and he always aroused her feelings of contempt.”20 Although she claims to despise Otsu, she continues to write to him and to read the letters in which he defines his vocational mission in terms of Jesus’ ministry to the “lonely, the sick, and the suffering.”21 In these letters, he also begins to work out his emerging philosophy of religious pluralism: “‘God has many different faces. I don’t think God exists exclusively in the churches and chapels of Europe. I think he is also among the Jews and the Buddhists and the Hindus.’”22 This theme of God’s multiple faces is developed by associating the suffering servant not only with Christ, but also with Otsu and, through Mitsuko’s imagination, with the goddess Chamunda, “the goddess festering with leprosy, encoiled by poisonous vipers, gaunt, yet nursing children from her drooping breasts. … In them she had discovered the Asian mother who groans beneath the weight of the torments of this life.”23 For Mitsuko, this image of Chamunda is a fitting symbol of human suffering. She did not feel that same identification with the “ugly man on the cross,” but the “Asian mother” Chamunda manages to reach the emotional core of Mitsuko’s being.
In its pluralistically-inclusive practice of hospitable reading, the host text absorbs the language of Isaiah 53 to serve as a proxy for multiple avatars of suffering and compassion. The Isaiah text becomes cross-culturally inscribed in complex ways—as a traditional Christian reference to Jesus’ suffering on behalf of humanity, in support of Otsu’s anti-Western critique of scholastic theology, by association with the Hindu deities of Kali and Chamunda, as an image that fuses Christian and Asian images of suffering love, and then finally as the inspiration for Otsu to take up his own cross to follow Jesus, which Otsu pledges to do on the day of the riot and his fatal wound. Thematically, the novel uses this text to suggest the presence of a longsuffering, divine love infused in all religions, a love that, like the great river itself, welcomes all of humanity.
While it appears that the suffering servant motif becomes an inclusive expression of a universal divine love, the textual host exercises an important editorial excision that significantly transforms the meaning of his suffering. In the novel, the references to Isaiah 53 never complete verse 4, instead ending with the clause “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.” What is omitted are the theologically significant lines that follow:
… yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
[5] But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.
[6] All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. (Revised Standard Version)
Ending the quotations with the reference to bearing griefs and sorrows is consistent with Endo’s depiction of Jesus as an empathetic fellow-sufferer who understands grief and comforts the sorrowful. The omitted verses, however, point to the heart of the Christian gospel: the suffering servant is “wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities,” and it is through this very “chastisement” that the people are made whole. Isaiah speaks of these sufferings as a punishment on behalf of others, a theme that Paul expands on in Romans where he explains the meaning of Jesus’ death: “since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (Romans 3:23-25, RSV). The apostle Peter quotes directly from Isaiah 53 to declare that Jesus “bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Guardian of your souls” (I Peter 2: 24-25, RSV).
Omitting these references in Isaiah 53 to what the Christian church has always recognized to refer to Christ’s redemptive suffering on the cross might be an innocent redaction, a desire to focus primarily on Jesus’ empathetic experience of suffering without dismissing the salvific purpose of his death, were it not for the pluralist trace, which not only makes the idea of an atoning death unnecessary but identifies it as the problem for which pluralism is the solution. Moreover, the narrative echoes of the sacraments of baptism, the Eucharist, and penance also follow this theological revisionism by reinterpreting the meaning of the sacraments in therapeutic rather than soteriological terms.
The sacraments of baptism, the Eucharist, and penance (of which our focus will be on confession) are each alluded to in significant plot narratives in Deep River. The first two (baptism and the Eucharist) are part of the “sacraments of Christian initiation” while penance (confession) is the first of the “sacraments of healing.”24 Each of these sacraments is inextricably connected to the sacrificial death of Jesus, through which the grace of salvation is extended. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, of which Endo was a member, teaches that “through Baptism we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God.”25 Through the Eucharist, “those who have been raised to the dignity of the royal priesthood by Baptism and configured more deeply to Christ by Confirmation participate with the whole community in the Lord’s own sacrifice by means of the Eucharist.”26 The sacrament of penance and reconciliation, which includes the act of confession, involves an acknowledgement “of the holiness of God and of his mercy toward sinful man.”27 All of these sacraments point to the central claim of the Christian gospel: that humans are naturally in a state of sinful alienation from God, but that through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ, they may be saved from their sins and receive the gift of eternal life.
In the novel, these sacramental motifs appear at moments of spiritual cleansing or emotional healing that occur in the lives of several characters. While these sacramental motifs draw ethical and even spiritual power from their association with the death of Jesus, they minimize the need for the kind of confession that leads to repentance; indeed, they avoid using the category of sin as a descriptor of human actions. What marks the turning points in these characters’ lives is not a turning from sin to grace as much as it is a turning away from egotism, self-absorption, and loneliness toward greater empathy and love. The “salvation” of these characters thus follows the pluralist paradigm by which Hick refers to salvation as “the transformation of human existence from self-centredness to Reality-centredness.”28
Mitsuko’s spiritual quest takes her at the end of the novel literally into the sacred river in an initiation rite that, with symbolic allusions both to Christian baptism and to Hindu purification rites, suggests some form of spiritual epiphany. Before entering the river, Mitsuko overhears a guide explain that “‘The Hindus believe that once you enter this river, all of your past sins are washed away.”29 Indeed, the Ganges is understood to be “the archetype of all sacred waters; she is a goddess, Mother Gangā (Gangā Mātā), representative of the life-giving maternal waters of the ancient Vedic hymns; above all, she is the symbol par excellence of purity and the purifying power of the sacred.”30 At the same time, Mitsuko also continues her obsessive fixation on Otsu and the “Onion,” wondering “why did she care about him, why did she keep searching for him even as she went on mocking him”?31 The ambiguous pronoun “him” could refer either to Otsu or to the “Onion,” who, despite Otsu’s definition of the Onion as a force, is increasingly identified in the novel as a proxy for Jesus of Nazareth.
Both the Christian sacrament of baptism and Hindu purification rites presume that the water is associated with cleansing from sin. Mitsuko’s spiritual epiphany, however, conspicuously avoids any conscious expression of confession or even regret. Rather, it is an expression of discovery. Her self-described “‘fabricated prayer’”32 is largely an expression of her identification with the “river of humanity”:
“I have learned, though, that there is a river of humanity…. I feel as though I’ve started to understand what I was yearning for through all the many mistakes of my past”
***
“What I can believe in now is the sight of all these people, each carrying his or her own individual burdens, praying at this river…. I believe that the river embraces these people and carries them away… and I am a part of it.”33
The closest her prayer comes to a confession of sin is her reference to “the many mistakes of my past,” which she attributes to an unknown yearning. As an admission of sin, it is somewhat less robust than that expected in either Christian baptism or Hindu purification rites. Also unlike Christian baptism, in which God is always named in the persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Mitsuko resolutely refuses to name the object of her prayer, even maintaining ambivalence about the arbitrary name “Onion,” implying that it might itself be a portal that, at best, gestures toward something greater “that could not be limited to the Onion.”34 Her willingness to open herself up to, and identify with, the experiences of humanity represents a moment of significant personal growth for her, a sharp contrast to her hellion days of youth when she eagerly and maliciously sought her pleasure by inflicting pain on others. Her epiphany also illustrates the generic movement from self-centeredness to an other-centeredness by which Hick defines salvation. If it is meant to draw on the symbolic associations of baptism or a purification rite, however, it does so by omitting, or at the least minimizing, the need for repentance.
In addition to this baptismal motif, the novel has several confessional scenes. Kiguchi’s and Numada’s stories have multiple levels of self-disclosure, including moments that resemble the rite of confession. Both stories, coincidentally, are revised versions of short stories Endo wrote a decade or more earlier, and it is by comparing the earlier versions with the revised form in which they appear in Deep River that we can see most clearly Endo’s displacement of the theological language of confession in favor of a more therapeutic desire for self-disclosure and understanding.
Kiguchi needs to reveal the burden he has carried with him since the Second World War, a story that Endo first wrote in 1984 as a short story with the theologically-significant title, “The Last Supper.”35 Both versions share the same basic plot: a soldier named Tsukada survived the infamous Death March through Burma by eating the flesh of a deceased comrade. For the rest of his life, Tsukada is tormented by guilt and drinks himself to an early death, spending his last hours in a hospital where a foreign volunteer hears his confession and gives him absolution of sorts by indicating that he, too, as a survivor of the 1972 plane crash in the Andes, had eaten human flesh. By confessing his deed and hearing these words of understanding, Tsukada is able to die in peace. In “The Last Supper,” the foreign volunteer is an Argentinian named Echenique; in Deep River, the foreigner is a Frenchman named Gaston. In Deep River, Kiguchi was a fellow soldier, whose life was saved because Tsukada ate human flesh and thereby maintained his strength to carry his comrade to safety.
There are several subtle differences between the two versions of the story, differences that indicate a shift in the way that sin, guilt, and forgiveness are presented. In the earlier version, Tsukada ate the flesh of his deceased comrade for his own survival, not to save the life of another. Hence, Tsukada asks the Christian foreigner if his God could forgive “someone who has fallen into such depravity.”36 In Deep River, Tsukada asks if “someone who’s fallen that far into the hell of starvation” could be forgiven,37 the former term “depravity” conveying a moral failure while the latter construction (“fallen into the hell of starvation”) suggests greater passivity into material conditions of deprivation. The fact that Tsukada eats the meat to save Kiguchi’s life also affects the way in which the action is viewed by others. Late in the novel, Kiguchi dreams that Gaston explained to him that his friend “‘would be forgiven because he had done it out of compassion.’”38 This subtle change implies that forgiveness is merited if an offense is motivated by compassion. Christian forgiveness, however, does not depend upon what motivated the transgression, a truth more clearly communicated in the earlier version of the story.
The later version also changes the narrator of Kiguchi’s story from the hospital psychiatrist to Kiguchi himself. The earlier version contrasts the psychiatrist’s inability to relieve Tsukada’s guilt with the theologically-inflected compassion of the Christian foreigner, whose words seem to bring Tsukada peace in his final moments. To be sure, the psychiatrist manages to draw out Tsukada’s painful confession, but his consolations offer Tsukada no lasting relief: “Mr. Tsukada. You drink every night to forget those eyes, don’t you? … But not even that child [the son of the deceased soldier] blames you. It’s just the way things were.”39 By contrast, Echenique, after hearing Tsukada’s story, has his own startling revelation. One of the survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 that crashed in the Andes in 1972, he lived by eating the flesh of the deceased fellow passengers. In a brilliant plot device, Endo gives Echenique’s experience Eucharistic symbolism, using language that alludes, as does the title of the story, to the Last Supper.
Echenique explains that a priest on the plane sustained fatal injuries, but before dying, he gave the surviving passengers permission to eat his flesh. This priest had been a habitual drinker, and he implored the rest of the passengers to “eat my body … and wait until you’re saved.”40 In a bit of grim humor, he cannot help but joke about his alcohol-saturated body: “If you eat too much in one sitting, you’ll get drunk. I’ve got a thirteen-year supply of alcohol inside me.”41 This man offers up his body and his wine that others might be saved, and Echenique, in his halting Japanese, emphasizes the sacramental overtones of this grisly action: “I too eat. … But then I eat also his love.”42
In Deep River, the Eucharistic overtones remain, if less pronounced. The dying passenger, still described as a drunken man, tells the passengers to eat his flesh for “help” will come,43 a term with less theological resonance than the word “saved.” The narrative omits the joke about ingesting the man’s alcohol in his flesh, instead treating his history of alcoholism primarily as his moral failing that his final act of generosity redeems in the eyes of others. Most telling, however, is the final image given of Gaston sitting beside Tsukada’s bed:
Kiguchi could not tell whether such comfort eased Tsukada’s pain. But the figure of Gaston kneeling beside his bed looked like a bent nail, and the bent nail struggled to become one with the contortions of Tsukada’s mind, and to suffer along with Tsukada.44
When Tsukada finally does pass away, “Kiguchi couldn’t help but feel that this peaceful death-mask had been made possible because Gaston had soaked up all the anguish in Tsukada’s heart.”45 This beautiful and emotionally powerful image of a fellow-sufferer makes the purpose of his compassion the easing of Tsukada’s anguish, an action that is depicted without reference to forgiveness.
Numada has a different story of confession, one that merges the sacramental imagery of confession with the motif of a substitutionary death. An earlier version of Numada’s story appears as “A Forty-Year-Old Man,” with a different protagonist (Suguro) and a different context. Nevertheless, both stories share these elements: Numada (Suguro) had a pet bird to whom he used to tell his deepest secrets, things he could never confide to another human being. Numada (Suguro) also happened to have a chronic lung condition, which necessitated a risky operation during which his heart stopped on the operating table, leaving him momentarily dead. During his hospitalization, nobody remembered to care for his bird, which ended up dying during the operation. In both stories, the protagonist has the strong conviction that the bird died in his place, the Christian symbolism of which is unmistakable.
Once again, however, the alterations to the story serve to de-emphasize the soteriological theme of a vicarious death on behalf of a man who has sinned (“A Forty-Year-Old Man”) to the theme which predominates throughout Deep River, of the companionship of one who takes on our deepest burdens and demonstrates an unconditional love to the point of laying down one’s life for another. Confession is no longer the plea of a sinner who needs forgiveness but the plea of a lonely and alienated man who needs understanding.
In “A Forty-Year-Old Man,” Suguro bears the guilt of having betrayed his wife by sleeping with her cousin and subsequently taking her to an abortion clinic. This is the secret that he confesses to his myna bird, whom the narrator explicitly likens to a “priest seated in the confessional.”46 Endo skillfully uses blood imagery as expressions of Suguro’s guilt and as symbolic reminders of the atoning blood of Jesus. After his close call on the operating table, Suguro leaves the hospital with his wife, who seems to know about the affair, and who also apparently forgives her husband with the reassurance that “everything will be all right now.”47 Her forgiveness is symbolically reinforced by her statement that the bird died in his place, a phrase redolent with overtones of Jesus’ substitutionary death. This motif of confession draws on the traditional theology of the atonement and the relationship between confession of sin and forgiveness.
In Deep River, Numada’s story omits any reference to sin and guilt, transforming the practice of confession into a symbol of one’s need for self-disclosure to a non-judgmental being. Numada’s plight is not guilt but rather the intense loneliness he has experienced since childhood, a loneliness that has led him to the imaginative creation of an animal world in his books for children. The motif of a substitutionary death remains, the bird having apparently died in Numada’s place, but there seems to be no particular logic for this substitutionary death. Instead, the bird’s death seems simply to be an expression of unconditional love from a creature, even when it dies from neglect. The bird’s death also prefigures Otsu’s eventual death. In seeking to save the tourist Sanjo, who had violated the taboo against photographing the dead, from an angry mob, Otsu literally gives his life to save another man’s life.
This model of unconditional love, identified with Jesus, Otsu, Chamunda, the myna bird and throughout Endo’s oeuvre with a host of other unconventional exemplars of longsuffering love, reveals the heart of Endo’s theology. To the extent that Endo simply emphasizes the “suffering and brokenness of Christ,”48 he stands within an important strand of Japanese theology that Richard Mouw and Douglas Sweeney refer to as “Christus dolor theology.”49 However, as Mouw and Sweeney remind us, “to recognize that Jesus has suffered with us needs in no way to detract from the fact that in eternally significant ways he also suffered for us … bearing the full burden of our sin and guilt in ways that we could never do for ourselves.”50 That is the theological understanding of Jesus’ sufferings that the narrator of Deep River quietly abandons with the selective and theologically incomplete reading of Isaiah 53 and with the sacramental imagery emptied of soteriological significance. The cleansing of baptismal waters, the confessional self-disclosures, and even the Eucharistic overtones of eating human flesh come to signify therapeutic transformations of these characters, leading them from self-enclosed isolation into what Mitsuko calls the “river of humanity.”51
It is this pattern of subverting the orthodox meanings of the Christian texts and motifs in Deep River that defines the narrative as intertextual in the Kristevan sense, rather than as a more conventional rhetoric of allusion. By situating the characters’ transformative experiences in sacramental language and imagery, the narrative suggests that something of salvific significance has taken place, but the hidden interior polemic redefines those experiences in a therapeutic rather than theological idiom. There is a subversive element to this pattern of reading and appropriating sacred texts and images, of drawing from the rich spiritual capital of the Christian sacraments but then emptying them of their spiritual signification. While such textual and hermeneutical practices may well be defended as intellectually or even theologically necessary from the pluralist standpoint, one would be hard-pressed to describe this as a charitable form of reading the Christian tradition. Charitable reading practices, at least on some level, imply a hermeneutical adaptation of the Golden Rule (to read as one would wish to be read by others). One irony of the novel is that while the great river is a metaphor of hospitable welcome to all peoples and all spiritual practices, the novel itself does not seem to open up space for orthodox expressions of the Christian faith.
As a host text, Deep River consists of the stories of several individuals—Isobe, Numada, Kiguchi, Mitsuko, and Otsu—which are absorbed into a larger narrative about spiritual transformation. The narrative encourages a hospitable reading of their personal stories, their private struggles treated with generosity and respect and their human dignity affirmed. Likewise, the text welcomes multiple religious personae of this culturally and spiritually pluralistic setting—from the named deities Kali and Chamunda to the more archetypally generic “Asian mother” that the tour guide Enami passionately honors, from the generic and syncretistic “Onion” to the explicit textual presence of Jesus. As befits the titular symbol of the great river that embraces all of humanity, this narrative inclusivity reflects an expansive understanding of what it means to love one’s neighbor in an increasingly interconnected world.
In the classical world, hospitality was demanded by the gods and motivated to some extent by fear lest the stranger at one’s door turn out to be a deity in disguise. Jesus’ ethic of hospitality motivates, not by appealing to the fear of offending a deity but by elevating the moral status of “the least of these,” for He asserts that whatever acts of charity and kindness are offered to the most insignificant of humans are accepted as if they were performed directly for God (Matt. 25: 35-40).
In welcoming the suffering servant of Isaiah into the text, Deep River affirms this kingdom ethic of hospitable love for all people, no matter how insignificant or marginalized. Yet in its editorial concision of Isaiah 53, the textual host does not recognize the complete identity of the suffering servant: he is the man of sorrows, to be sure, despised and rejected by humanity, yet he also becomes the savior, the one by whose suffering humanity is healed, and he is exalted by the prophet as the “righteous one” who will “make many to be accounted righteous” (Isaiah 53:11, RSV). This is the incarnate God whose identity may easily be missed in the ambivalent texts of Deep River.
Cite this article
John T. Netland, “Rewriting the Death of Jesus: An Intertextual Reading of Shusaku Endo’s Deep River”, Christian Scholar’s Review, 46:1 , 65–78
FootnotesJulia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, trans. Seán Hand (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986). 37.
John Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 34.
Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” 37.
Ibid., 43–44.
Ibid., 44.
Ibid., 47, 49.
Ibid., 50.
Kazumi Yamagata, “Mr. Shusaku Endo Talks About His Life and Works as a Catholic Writer,” The Chesterton Review 12 (1986): 495.
Shusaku Endo, Silence, trans. William Johnston (New York: Taplinger, 1966), 147.
Shusaku Endo, A Life of Jesus, trans. Richard A. Schuchert, S.J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1973), 1.
Mark Williams, “Crossing the Deep River: Endo Shusaku and the Problem of Religious Pluralism,” in Xavier’s Legacies: Catholicism in Modern Japanese Culture, ed. Kevin M. Doak (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 116-117.
Quoted by John Hick in John Hick: An Autobiography (Oxford: One World, 2002), 286.
Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism, 31-32.
Ibid., 29.
Shusaku Endo, Deep River, trans. Van C. Gessel (New York: New Directions, 1994), 44-45.
Ibid., 45.
Ibid., 64.
Ibid., 65.
Ibid., 64.
Ibid., 116.
Ibid., 123.
Ibid., 121.
Ibid., 175.
he Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part Two: The Celebration of the Christian Mystery, Section Two: The Seven Sacraments of the Church, §1211. Online Resource. The Vatican.va., 1993. http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/ __P3E.HTM.
Ibid., §1213.
Ibid., §1322.
7Ibid., §1424.
Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism, 29.
Endo, Deep River, 196.
Lindsay Jones, Mircea Eliade, and Charles J. Adams, Encyclopedia of Religion (Detroit: Macmillan, 2005), 5:3274.
Endo, Deep River, 209.
Ibid., 210.
Ibid., 210–211.
Ibid., 211.
Shusaku Endo, “The Last Supper,” in The Final Martyrs, trans. Van C. Gessel (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1993), 147-167.
Ibid., 164.
Endo, Deep River, 101.
Ibid., 200.
Endo, “The Last Supper,” 160.
Ibid., 165–166.
Ibid., 166.
Ibid., 166.
Endo, Deep River, 102.
Ibid., 103.
Ibid., 103.
Shusaku Endo, “A Forty-Year-Old Man,” in Stained Glass Elegies, trans. Van C. Gessel (New York: New Directions, 1984), 23.
Ibid., 27.
Richard J. Mouw and Douglas A. Sweeney, The Suffering and Victorious Christ: Toward a More Compassionate Christology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 2.
Ibid., 1.
Ibid., 95.
Endo, Deep River, 211.
John T. Netland
Union University
John T. Netland is Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and Professor of English at Union University.
===
BOOKS / REVIEWS | ESSENTIAL READING FOR JAPANOPHILES
Deep River
BY IAIN MALONEY
SPECIAL TO THE JAPAN TIMES
Dec 13, 2014
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In “Deep River” a group of elderly Japanese tourists and a couple join a tour of holy Buddhist sites in India. Motivated by different forms of grief and guilt, each is searching for healing. The narrative involves four main characters: Isobe, recently widowed, Kiguchi, a war veteran haunted by memories of Burma, Numada, a writer recovering from a serious illness, and Mitsuko, a cynical nurse searching for a heretical priest she knew in her youth.
Deep River, by Shusaku Endo, Translated by Van C. Gessel.
New Directions, Fiction.
The novel is a Dostoevskian study of the acceptance and forgiveness of sins, handled with a Graham Greene insouciance. Through religious devotion, ritual cleansing or submission to punishment, each character’s spiritual crisis is played out against a backdrop of culture clashes and group tensions. As with all of Endo’s books, it is deeply spiritual and unashamedly Christian, though he stops short of suggesting that Christianity may be a salve to the existential malaise he sees at the heart of modern Japanese life.
For a book that deals with such lofty ideas, Endo’s subtle touch and jagged humor make the journey easy going. The young Japanese couple’s whining about the dirtiness and poor service in India — a playfully used stereotype — provides welcome comic relief.
This short novel is both deep and fast-flowing, a moving examination of regret and acceptance, and a black comedy of manners encapsulating the shifting sands and strata of modern Japanese society.
Deep River : Endo, Shusaku, Gessel, Van C.: Amazon.reviews
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Deep River Hardcover – 18 December 1995
by Shusaku Endo (Author), Van C. Gessel (Author)
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The river is the Ganges, where a group of Japanese tourists converge: Isobe, grieving the death of the wife he ignored in life; Kiguchi, haunted by war-time memories of the Highway of Death in Burma; Numada, recovering from a critical illness; Mitsuko, a cynical woman struggling with inner emptiness; and, the butt of her cruel interest, Otsu, a failed seminarian for whom the figure on the cross is a god of many faces. In this novel, the renowned Japanese writer Shusaku Endo reaches his ultimate religious vision.
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...Mr. Endo is a master of the interior monologue, and he builds 'case' by 'case, ' chapter by chapter, a devastating critique of the world that has 'everything' but lacks moral substance and seems headed nowhere.--Robert Coles "New York Times Book Review"
A soulful gift to a world he keeps rendering as unrelievedly parched.--Robert Coles "New York Times Book Review"
One of Japan's greatest twentieth-century writers.-- "Publishers Weekly"
From the Back Cover
Thirty years lie between the leading contemporary Japanese writer Shusaku Endo's justly famed Silence and his powerful new novel Deep River, a book which is both a summation and a pinnacle of his work. The river is the Ganges, where a group of Japanese tourists converge: Isobe, grieving the death of the wife he ignored in life; Kiguchi, haunted by wartime memories of the Highway of Death in Burma; Numanda, recovering from a critical illness; Mitsuko, a cynical woman struggling with inner emptiness; and butt of her cruel interest, Otsu, a failed seminarian for whom the figure on the cross is a god of many faces. Bringing these and other characters to vibrant life and evoking a teeming India so vividly that the reader is almost transported there, Endo reaches his ultimate religious vision, one that combines Christian faith with Buddhist acceptance.
About the Author
Shusaku Endo (1923-1996) is widely regarded as one of the most important Japanese authors of the late twentieth century. He won many major literary awards and was nominated for the Nobel Prize several times. His novel Silence was recently made into a major film directed by Martin Scorsese.
Van C. Gessel is a professor of Japanese at Brigham Young University, and has a Ph.D. in Japanese literature from Columbia University. After joining the Church of Latter-day Saints in 1968, Gessel served as a missionary to Japan from 1970-71. He was given a lifetime achievement award from the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture of Columbia University for his translations of modern Japanese fiction.
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Product details
Publisher : New Directions (18 December 1995)
Language : English
Hardcover : 222 pages
ISBN-10 : 0811212890
ISBN-13 : 978-0811212892
Dimensions : 14.48 x 2.29 x 21.34 cm
Customer Reviews: 4.3 out of 5 stars 90 ratings
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5.0 out of 5 stars A book of great substance, rich landscape and thoughtful characters.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 29 January 2011
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Deep River is an authentic and rewarding story that peers directly into the heart and mind of one of Japan's really great writers. I opened it and could not close it until I had finished it.
This short (200 page) novel packs more emotional punch and character depth is a paragraph than most books do in a chapter. I was quickly taken in on Endo's portraiture of the main characters. Isobe grieving for his recently deceased wife is captured so well - the classic suffering in silence of a late middle age salaryman suddenly and for the first time unable to suppress feelings and emotions. There is Kiguchi. Endo deftly uses spare but gripping language to describe the desperation of the Japanese soldiers of WWII retreating through Burma at the tail end WWII. It's both a physical and mental hardship which plays on Kiguchi even 40 years later.
Then there is the intriguing interplay between Mitsuko, 20 years removed from the beguilingly smart and beautiful college student who is now in middle age, divorced and still bothered by Otsu, a student at the same time as she, who is committed to Christianity but is insecure and inarticulate about his faith and position in life. She sees him as weak and yet cannot quite convince herself as she herself looks for something to commit to in her own life.
These and others cross paths on a seemingly innocent group tour heading to India. Using the backdrop of 1980's India and the deep spirituality of the people coming to the Ganges in pilgrimage provokes something in each of our characters to lead them further on the path of life. The story ends with some characters finding what they were looking for and for others there remains lots of ambiguity.
For me this was a deeply satisfying snapshot of men and women of various stages of life confronting emotional and spiritual needs.
This is a well paced story with universal themes, empathetic characters and full of provocative challenges to the meaning of faith or friendship or alienation. It's done earnestly and intelligently.
Equally I liked the very Japanese manner and tone. Endo questions the materialism creeping into modern Japan by then. He shows the growing generation gaps between characters of different ages. And he clearly has doubts about Christianity's role in Japan or Asia. He is willing to express where others may have only been thinking or burying deep within them. In Japan those are rare traits and because of that this is a gem.
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Consumer Watchdog
3.0 out of 5 stars Flawed Masterpiece
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 11 February 2011
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Read this book for the possibilities of what it could have been. Not for what it is. This work really does have a masterpiece hidden within it, like a sculpture in marble, but the final form is missing. Many of the conversations are just not that realistic or engaging while the plot appears somewhat contrived at times. The character of Gaston, for example, appears to have been simply 'transplanted' from 'Wonderful Fool', although it does serve the purpose of echoing the self-sacrifice of Otsu and acts as a counterpoint to Mitsuko's motivation for working in a Hospital. While the book purports to be about a group of Japanese tourists the focus eventually turns to the fate of Otsu, a Catholic priest of sorts. On the one hand, Otsu's failings are, at times, a projection of Endo himself (with his troubles of reconciling Western thought with Eastern traditions) while the sacrifices Otsu makes clearly cast him as a Christ-like figure. Underlying 'Deep River' is the beautiful idea of redemption. The Classical writers directed Western thought to believe that life, in all its guises, is a quest for immortality whether it be through fame, deeds or our own children. In 'Deep River', Endo portrays life not as a quest for immortality (a little surprising given the religious scope of the work), nor as the pursuit of happiness, but as a searching for fulfillment. A disparate group of Japanese tourists each seek an answer to their troubles. Only the minor characters of Sanjo and his wife seem to be 'typical' tourists unburdened with life's troubles being simply swept along by materialism. In a place where two rivers meet, Endo tried to reconcile the East -West dichotomy in his own thinking. He doesn't quite get there. 'Deep River' is a good read but lacks the philosophical weight and credibility of 'Silence'. Endo requested to be buried with two of his books. One of these was 'Deep River', which he believed to be his masterpiece, but which is flawed. The other was 'Silence', which is his masterpiece, and one of the greatest works of the twentieth century.
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Elias Baumgarten
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting characters and description of an amazing place (Varanasi)
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 25 January 2013
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This novel is about a few Japanese tourists visiting India, especially Varanasi. I chose to read the novel originally because Varanasi is probably the most amazing place to which I have traveled, a holy Hindu city on the Ganges in India (also known as Benaras). So this novel would probably appeal most to people who have either visited or would want to visit Varanasi or an exotic place of spiritual importance like Varanasi.
On the other hand, the novel is more about the characters of the individual Japanese: a man grieving over the death of his wife and hoping to find her reincarnated, another who has haunting memories of wartime in Burma, two rather shallow (but not atypical) tourists, a couple, one of whom just wants to take pictures without any real interest in the culture and his wife who wishes she were in Europe where everything is neater and cleaner, and a woman who is partly cynical about everything but who also gets drawn into elements of Indian spirituality.
The novel would appeal to people interested in spirituality generally. The author seems to have a cosmopolitan view of spirituality, but the novel also has a Christian element. One of the characters, not mentioned in the previous paragraph, could be thought of as a Christ figure. Many will find him the most powerful figure of all.
I enjoyed the novel and found the characters interesting. I don't know Japanese, but it seemed well translated or, I should say. written quite well in English.
In sum, this is a good novel even if not an example of the greatest literature.
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Ash
5.0 out of 5 stars Very thoughtful
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 30 April 2016
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I absolutely loved this book. It was a requirement for my Japanese Literature course and I'm very glad I got to read it. It's very interesting, especially because you along with the characters have no idea where it's all headed. I wouldn't describe it as 'eventful', but rather it goes through the book introducing various Japanese characters that are very unlike each other and how they all come together in the Ganges of India, each one searching for their own sense of understanding or closure in their lives. If you're familiar with Indian or Japanese culture, this may be of interest to you. I am personally interested in both, so I was pleased to see a lot of cultural blend. The author of this book, Endo Shusaku, was a Japanese Christian and struggled with that identity, trying to make sense of it, which does reveal itself in the pages of this book. It offers interesting perspectives and I would recommend to read with an open and thoughtful mind.
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Brian Lewis
5.0 out of 5 stars Deeply Moving
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 2 December 2016
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This novel by Shusaku Endo follows several Japanese tourists from their homeland to India and the holy waters of the Ganges river. The characters each face spiritual and moral crises in the course of the book. The author does an excellent job at intertwining the multiple story lines and setting the tone.
Endo is also the author of Silence, and given the recent movie by Martin Scorcese, some may feel a need to reach that first. But it seems to me that both books, though similar in style and tone are stand alone books, one set in feudal Japan and this set in contemporary Japan and India.
Highly recommended.
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ira feirstein
4.0 out of 5 stars Good but only fair translation.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 23 September 2020
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I found it deep. Not sure that the translate is up to the original. Perhaps a new translation could reveal a truly profound Work.
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QuixoticMan
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Stories of Self Discoverey with an interesting view of Indian Culture on the Gangees
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 27 July 2017
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I found this book engaging from the first page. Several character's stories are unfolded in parallel, all leading to an experience on a tour of India around the Ganges River. This is a compelling story witnessing the revelations of these different characters, and also provides an interesting view of Indian Culture on the Ganges river.
Prior to this, I read Endo's Silence. I think I enjoyed Deep River even more.
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Allen Aicken
4.0 out of 5 stars The river subsumes it all.
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on 20 March 2013
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The book has a spiritual, even religious, heart that sees life through the eyes of one committed to the starting point of Jesus, yet it sees that life, warts and all. There are the usual story themes here but they come from a Japanese perspective, which translates most beautifully into deeper and clearer Western perception. There is hope in ihe novel that filters through from surprising sources.
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Antonio De Felice
4.0 out of 5 stars Very nice book
Reviewed in Japan 🇯🇵 on 22 July 2015
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I liked it a lot. It is a book from several points of view. Each person has a story to tell. Each of them has something good/bad we can think about.
It is really good book to think about ourselves and about the people around us.
3 people found this helpful
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Mary Reynolds
5.0 out of 5 stars Very thought provoking
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 29 June 2014
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I bought this book to decide ir I wanted to take a short course about it. This book is the amazing story of 4 individuals, each with their own back story, going to India and the Ganges River specifically. Themes include feeling of apartness, responsibility, differing cultures, religions, good and bad within each of us, promises, etc. etc. A novel about people and less about plot. An amazing read for such a short book.
3 people found this helpful
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BGH
5.0 out of 5 stars Really good book and brilliantly translated
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 3 August 2016
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Really good book and brilliantly translated. There are similarities in terms of theme with another book by Endo: Silence. I really liked the setting of India and the "back stories" of the main characters in this book. Very readable and highly recommended.
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ARP
4.0 out of 5 stars Christianity in the East
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 11 October 2015
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Considered a seminal work, and perhaps it is. Endo offers Western Christians a rare glimpse into what it means to stand up for the Church in the midst of serious critics
4 people found this helpful
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Ryan
3.0 out of 5 stars Not what I expected
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on 26 December 2012
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The novel starts pretty well as Endo describes case by case who the main characters are. However the narrative gets repetitive at times and in the end the cases don't really come together.
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Robert D.
5.0 out of 5 stars Perhaps his best..?
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 24 March 2009
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Though his book Silence is often understood to be his masterpiece, I still think this may be my favorite book by Endo. There are already plenty of reviews here that simply tell you the whole story, so I will not do that, let me just say that if you are on any sort of religious/spiritual or intellectual pilgrimage, this is the kind of book you will appreciate.
4 people found this helpful
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Angela Fitzpatrick
3.0 out of 5 stars I was disappointed in this book
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 14 September 2014
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I was disappointed in this book. I expected that the characters were going to have some kind of soul awakening in this book and in my opinion they didn't. This book gave some background to each character and talked mostly of their trip to the Ganges.
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bdixon
3.0 out of 5 stars Not properly recorded
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 18 March 2017
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The last 2 CD's were duplicates of an earlier CD! Disappointed. The author and story were great - sure would like to know how it ended!
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R. Dickerson
5.0 out of 5 stars Classic
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 22 April 2017
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Classic book and the basis for the movie of the same name. Graphic violence so not good for younger readers. Not a feel good story.
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juanitabanana
5.0 out of 5 stars An extraordinary writer
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 27 December 2012
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Quite a marvellous, dark, troubling, insightful, beautiful read. Some of the personal stories in this novel are also in his book of short stories 'Five by Endo' and are just as absorbing as part of this novel.
3 people found this helpful
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ibo girl
5.0 out of 5 stars I particularly like Endo's sensitivity in dealing with the India
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 17 November 2014
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Just finished reading this interesting book about Japanese tourists in India. It is interesting to learn how other cultures view each other. I particularly like Endo's sensitivity in dealing with the India.
5 people found this helpful
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jimmy O
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 21 February 2015
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GOOD READ
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====
====
Deep River
Shūsaku Endō
,
Van C. Gessel
3.93
2,278 ratings296 reviews
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In this moving novel, a group of Japanese tourists, each of whom is wrestling with his or her own demons, travels to the River Ganges on a pilgrimage of grace.
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216 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1993
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Shusaku Endo (遠藤周作), born in Tokyo in 1923, was raised by his mother and an aunt in Kobe where he converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of eleven. At Tokyo's Keio University he majored in French literature, graduating BA in 1949, before furthering his studies in French Catholic literature at the University of Lyon in France between 1950 and 1953. A major theme running through his books, which have been translated into many languages, including English, French, Russian and Swedish, is the failure of Japanese soil to nurture the growth of Christianity. Before his death in 1996, Endo was the recipient of a number of outstanding Japanese literary awards: the Akutagawa Prize, Mainichi Cultural Prize, Shincho Prize, and Tanizaki Prize.
(from the backcover of Volcano).
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K.D. Absolutely
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March 5, 2012
Reading Deep River is like having a sugar rush. It is too much sweet. Right after the book, I just thought of having an edgy book. Maybe one that is dark and sad. I thought I’d like to neutralize the taste and get rid of the sweetness. Maybe a dark and strong coffee or some salty corn chips. Maybe just brush my teeth and I would be fine again.
Had I read this in high school when I was still a naïve young man, I would have rated this with 5 stars outright. It talks about pantheism or a belief that God and material world are one and the same thing and that God is present in everything. It talks about One God. The God was there at the beginning but men had different ideas of worshipping Him so they created different religions. No religion is perfect since men are not perfect. It tackles the beliefs of three religions: Buddism, Catholicism and Hinduism. The setting starts with the characters in Japan and as they search for something, they all end up in India particularly at the Ganges River. This river is the most sacred river to the Hindus. They believe that the river is holy because its water comes from a confluence of many small streams and thus it has its cleansing effect. They believe that when you bathe in it, your soul is purified and you are reborn. They also scatter the ashes of their dead people believing that they will have a peaceful journey to reincarnation. So, even carcasses of dead animals can be seen floating on it. So, they submerge themselves there, swim and even rinse their mouths, unmindful of the fact that the water is ranked among the top 5 most polluted rivers in the world in 2007 due to high levels of fecal coliform bacteria.
The storytelling is wonderful though. The plot is thicker than say Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist and the characters are multi-dimensional. Each of the four Japanese tourists has his/her own interesting story. The story of Isobe was the one that struck me most. The opening scene of him being told that his wife for 35 years had cancer and would only have 4 months to live was so moving it made me glued to the book and ignored the 2 buddy books I was expected to read for our book club. The other equally brilliant story was that of the soldier Kiguchi and I was entralled by the twist. I did not see it coming. The death of his friend and the way Endo made it intersect with the life of atheist nurse Mitsuko were nicely crafted. Endo chose not to incorporate fantasy or supernatural elements to make himself believable. This is my first time to read a Japanese novel with religion as the main theme. I’ve read 8 books by Haruki Murakami and one book each by Banana Yoshimoto, Yukio Mishima and Kenzaburo Oe. They all did not dwell anything on religion and all use gimmicks (talking river, apparition, surrealism, falling leaches, talking cat, etc). So, this book got me interested since I found it refreshing and beguiling.
Yet, after reading, the sweet taste was there. Motherhood statement like All religions are equal. Scenes that seemed like pan in the sky: the Japanese priest carries the dead Hindus imitating Jesus Christ; the nuns belonging to the congregation of Mother Theresa (may the Lord bless her soul) helping the sick and the needy; and the nurse realizes that she needs God in her life after all. They were too positive that my head was swirling and my heart was palpitating from sugar rush. Quite timely because this was the season of Lent but I just did not expect the book to be like a Religion101 prescribed-book in high school.
But then, maybe I am an old man and my eyes are jaded already. I better have my blood sugar checked and my eyes refracted one of these days.
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April 25, 2012
Deep River is a rich story which jumps around in time, in place, in ideas. So off we go, to Japan, Washington DC, France, Manchuria, Burma and India. We catch glimpses of the gods Chamunda and Kali, the Burma Highway of Death, yakiimo, reincarnation, a Ginko tree, a stray dog, Buddhist holy spots such as Lumbini Kapilavastu, Buddh-Gaya and Sarnath, the caste system called varna jati, the Andes Survivors, Shirley Maclaine, Indira Gandhi - and - sins of the flesh. Pierrot appears as a man, and as a bird. There is the quintessential ugly American, who happens to be Japanese this time.
One of the characters studies the works of François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Julien Green at University (as Endo himself did). Their novels become a blueprint of her life.
Endo has stated in an essay that characters in a novel are free and cannot be coerced. He, like other great Christian writers (Charlotte Bronte, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Waugh, Greene, Tolkien, Flannery O’Connor, to name a few), reveals much about his characters through their relationship with God - but they act freely and have a will of their own.
The title and the epigraph reference an old negro spiritual called Deep River. However, the river in question here is the Ganges, sacred to Hindus. On its shores, in the year 1984, the characters search for spiritual meaning in their lives. They are pilgrims who do not know what they seek - it's not really the Buddist temples they are touring. Endo sees them as "cases", and there is a chapter for each.
The case of Otsu is central. A failed Catholic priest, he is a type of Prince Myshkin, a bumbling Christ like figure, full of goodness. Otsu has his onion, a name he uses for God. As in the parable of the onion told by Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, the humble, earthy onion takes on a spiritual significance.
Another case is the woman Mitsuko. Acting out Moïra in Julien Green's novel, she seduced Otsu while they were students together, then spurns and despises him. Later on, in a loveless marriage she sees herself as Therese Desqueyroux.
Numada, who yearns for a connection with every living thing but finds it only with animals, has a back-story which could be its own novel, though that could be said of all these characters.
There's Kiguchi, a former soldier in Burma, with hellish memories,
I like this image of Chamunda too, Kiguchi unexpectedly announced with deep feeling. "On the battlefields in Burma, I always felt as though death was close at hand, and when I look at this gaunt statue now, I remember all the soldiers who died in the rain. The war was - horrible. And all those soldiers - they looked just like this."
Isobe, recently widowed, searches for his lost wife, yet the search is more inward than he knows.
Enami, the tour guide, has issues of his own and sees Chamunda as his mother. And that figure of woman, whether goddess or virgin or human is a major theme in the story.
The ending is abrupt, although you can easily make your own conclusions. I just wanted more. Also, some expressions in the translation seemed a bit clichéd. So, a heaping 4.5 stars and a handful of stardust too.
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Dhanaraj Rajan
448 reviews · 303 followers
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September 11, 2019
First Declaration: This book is my new favourite. And it has made it to the list of my all time favourites.
The Reasons:
The book answers many questions or tries to answer many questions. These questions are obviously the themes very close to my heart.
Some of the Questions:
1. What is humanity? Is suffering part of humanity? Why can life be only of happiness? (Answer is primarily tried in the episode relating to Hindu Goddess Chamunda. And parts of the answer are also scattered in the other chapters).
2. The differences. Do they add to the value of human kind? What are the negative sides to them? Do we bond together because of the hatred we have for the other? For instance, do I bond with my fellow compatriots because we are united in hating my enemy nation? Is the enmity the reason for our bonding or the love? Can differences be brought together under one unifying umbrella? If yes, at what expense? (Answer partially tried in the episode relating Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination).
3. What is a true religion? Is it Catholicism/Christianity or Hinduism or Buddhism or Shintoism? Can one religion claim superiority over other religions? Can one religion claim full authority for God's revelation? Why are there many religions? The answers are tried in the episodes relating the encounters between a Japanese Catholic Priest (Otsu) and Mitsuko (the girl who seduced Otsu in his school days). These episodes are my favourites too. The present day hot theological discussions on Religious Pluralism are expressed in a wonderful manner by Endo. Implicit in these arguments are also the tensions between the understanding of spirituality in the East and in the West. Superb analysis. (Disclaimer: It will appeal to the people in the East and for the people in West it may not appeal immediately. But it might help in clarifying the positions of the people in the East).
4. Reincarnation. Can a person be reincarnated after his/her death? I loved the answer. One gets reborn in one's memory.
5. Can good exist in bad? And can life and death be together? Can sin which results in separation from God also act as the source of redemption? Again, the answer is lovely.
6. Who is Jesus? What is the River Ganges? What does the Amida Sutra (Buddhist religious text) say? You will love the answers as you read the pages in the book.
7. How does a person cope with the loss of the beloved/hope? How does one deal with the grief? How does one deal with his/her inability to love?
Finally: Endo had brought to the conclusion of his own heart's search for many answers in this novel (Endo's last novel). If he had time left, he could have written another five or six novels each for the each question mentioned. Anyway, he did well in encapsulating everything in a succinct manner and weaving them in a superb story.
Postscript: In this novel, Shusaku Endo recommends, using the characters as his mouthpieces, two French novels. I will have to read them. The recommendations are: Moira by Julien Green and Therese by Francois Mauriac.
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Fabian
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September 28, 2020
Wow, those forlorn and disparate spirits do not rest! But they do manage to come together, and what they find there, at the fated nucleus, fountainhead, existential monolith is exactly what moves the reader towards the epic end. The Ganges has never before been characterized in such a raw, personified way...
Asians in the Holy Lands. Japanese tourists in India...
There is something about the P.O.V. of Japanese tourists... mystical figures all their own. I will definitely abstain from saying anything about Japanese tourists in Las Vegas. Or Los Angeles. Or the beaches of Mexico. So the psychologies of these very Eastern characters is like mana from heaven, we unaccustomed to such unabashed neosemiEuropean repression. Unique, sad. But I cannot altogether subscribe to such fickle ways of reality...
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Mariel
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September 17, 2011
Do you know that scene in Billy Madison when (this is a major spoiler if you haven't seen Billy Madison and still mean to) Bradley Whitford's character is asked to explain the difference between ethics and morals? And he whips out a gun instead? (It's on youtube.Here it is anyway. It must be wrong to post links to Adam Sandler movies. What can I say? I'm a heathen.) Deep River is apparently beloved by ethics students all over goodreads and amazon. I guess it is loved in Japan too, if ejaculatory book jacket quotes are to be believed (why would they falsely present information?). I really didn't love it. I'm probably the only person who pretty much hates this book. I don't know what the heck it had to do with ethics anyway. If I had a gun I'd whip it out instead of answering the big questions about which religion is more valid than the other. I don't care about any of them. So what does that have to do with ethics (or morals)? If anyone trembles in face of the gun than maybe any of these characters was anything more than a platform for Endo's religious posturing.
What Shusaku Endo tried to do with his novel is something I can appreciate in a "That's a nice message" kind of way. Like a bumper sticker in traffic. I don't want to stare at that same bumper sticker for hours during a traffic jam. World peace! Yeah, let's get that. Am I going to be stuck here all day? Look, there's a horrific car accident. Or a billboard. Yawn. Looking for a face in crowds that don't have any. The answer was spiritual. Was it? The make up was different. Hinduism, Buddhism or Christianity. Sure, all religions should get along and are as valid as any other. It seems to me that if you are going to believe in any outside of what you were raised into it would come from living rather than theorizing and talking a whole lot. That bumper sticker solved all my problems!
The characters were fighting the great gnawing hunger in the stomach that's dread of nothing to look forward to. The not even knowing why you don't feel anything. The characters were not characters but faceless subjects for Endo to easiest fit the expressions of the serene gods. If they had looked in each other... If there was an other to look to... One husband took his wife for granted while she was alive and follows her last words about reincarnation because he doesn't know what else to do. It's a feeling she had. But we don't know her! She was the stereotype of the doormat Japanese wife. Where was the belated passion? Doing what someone said or ignoring them is still frictionless. Another guy is dying. So is everyone else. The furthest into the void is Mitsuko and her quest to "win" over God/Jesus when she has premarital sex with a fellow student, Otsu. Yeah, because people who are dying to preach to you about what big Christians they are never whore it up. Riiiight. Since he threatened to kill her when she dumped him I'd say he wasn't taking the basics to heart. She gets the idea from your basic idiot guys having fun because they instinctively scorn someone who doesn't know how to fake the same normal. Not exactly groundbreaking insights here. There could have been something in the mutual emptiness if only. Endo pretty much writes that she feels empty and wants to be chosen over God by a man who doesn't know if he believes in the first place. Because he's as boring as she is, I thought. She'd have better luck with unsmiling Russian guards. If there's a pitch black version of empty it is these two. Too empty for me to give a fuck.
That's not even the worst of it. Deep River is your basic hollow travel guide story. Yep. They go to India (what a load of crock their tour guide was! The Japanese are so shocked by the presence of the lower castes. Because Japan doesn't have that? Are you fucking kidding me, Endo? What about the burakumin? See what I mean? Like American tourists who are shocked by the starving and don't notice the homeless on their own streets. But there are poor people living amongst the rich!) Who needs real characters when you have an exotic backdrop and temples and pictures of virgin Marys and goddesses of suffering. The characters can talk about how they question their beliefs and then you can tack on an ending about relating to the gods that represent and never have any real personal feeling with those who really do live around you. That's better than a hug. But they were in India and anything can happen if you distract readers with the comings and goings.
Are there ethics about not getting away with not writing a real book because you tacked on a religious answer? Or is that a moral dilemma? I hate this book, anyway. I look for answers in art. Can't expressing being the expression? Does it gotta get stuck that way?
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William2
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July 7, 2012
Second reading. Isobe is a middle-aged, Japanese businessman whose wife is dying of cancer. Before she dies she comes out of a coma long enough to whisper to her husband: ‘I know for sure...I’ll be reborn somewhere in this world. Look for me...find me...promise... promise!’ He is stricken by her loss. Whereas he hardly ever thought about her during her life, now he thinks about her all the time. He has never loved her as he does in death.
Ms. Naruse is a young hospital volunteer who sometimes sits with Mrs. Isobe. Back in college she was friends with a bullying group of young men, a few of whom she screwed without pleasure. The men want her to seduce Mr Ōtsu, a young student enrolled in the college's divinity program. Ms. Naruse despises everyone around her--especially Ōtsu--because doing so allows her to feel superior to them. She is in fact quite lost. She competes with Ōtsu’s god. She tries to break his faith. She is a cruel woman utterly lacking a spiritual life and devoid of compassion.
Numada makes his living writing stories about children and animals. He grew up in Japanese-occupied Manchuria (“Manchukuo”). His emotional connections in life have all been with animals. Things are going along quite well for Mr. Numada and his raucous family, he is alone even when surrounded by them, when he develops a serious lung condition. He’s in the hospital for two years and barely survives his final surgery. A myna bird his wife has brought him for company in the hospital, he believes, dies in his stead.
Kiguchi and Tsukada were both soldiers during WW II who traveled the Burmese Highway of Death. British and colonial-Indian troops chased their unit through inhospitable terrain during the rainy season until starvation and illness set in. It is thanks to Tsukada that Kiguchi is still alive. At one point he had brought Kiguchi meat he identified as that of a dead cow. Both survive. Thirty years later back in Japan Tsukada has the misfortune to meet the wife and daughter of the man whose flesh he ate. He drinks himself to death as a result.
All these characters,who respond to suffering in different ways, join a tour group going to India to see the Buddhist holy sites. Mr. Isobe to search for his reborn wife. Why India? This question is never addressed. Ms. Naruse goes to follow the troubled Ōtsu because, despite his misfortunes, he’s found meaning in life that she hasn’t. Numada wants to make an offering in thanksgiving for his survival. Kiguchi wants to undertake a Buddhist ceremony of remembrance for Tsukada and the soldiers who traveled the Highway of Death. At some point they all end up standing before the ghats on the River Ganges.
Varanasi, a Hindu holy city, is a place of extraordinary contrasts. Living and dying is everywhere, one right next to the other. The place is teeming, pestilential, filthy. Old and infirm Hindus from all over India travel here to die so their cremated remains --a free service supplied by outcasts-- can be scattered on the River Ganges. For only in this way, they believe, will their karmic slate be wiped clean. Only in this way can they proceed to the next life unfettered by mistakes made in the one they’re leaving.
In reading Endo’s earlier novels I often bridled at his particularly cloying form of Christian storytelling. In Deep River however something entirely new happens. Ōtsu is an outcast among his Catholic brethren because he will not adopt the view that Catholicism is the one true faith. In India he finally breaks with the Church and finds a welcome from a group of local saddhus, Hindu mendicants. It is his belief that every religion has validity, that every faith moves the supplicant toward salvation. For this view he is damned by his pious, dogmatic teachers and fellow students.
Deep River, Endo’s last novel, represents a fundamental shift for him in his subject matter and possibly in his world view. The book’s strength is its religious pluralism, its ecumenicism, nowhere evident in the doctrinaire earlier novels I have read. His narrative is without clutter and full of pungent Indian street scenes. The characters' humanity or lack thereof is convincing and movingly rendered. This is my favorite Endo novel without question. Highly recommended.
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Sơn Lương
140 reviews · 102 followers
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March 4, 2019
Những câu chuyện từng đọc đâu đó về Sông Hằng, nơi người ta vừa đốt xác thả trôi sông vừa đắm mình, tắm gội, thậm chí uống nước thánh bất chấp sự ô nhiễm của nó, ùa về đầy đủ khi chính chúng được mô tả rõ nét, nhiều lần trong .. Đó cũng là cái nền để tác giả Shusaku Endo luận về khác biệt trong quan niệm về tâm linh và tôn giáo giữa người cùng quốc gia dân tộc, và giữa người thuộc các chủng tộc, nền văn hóa khác nhau.
Bên dòng sông Hằng là câu chuyện về 4 du khách Nhật cùng tham gia một tour đến Ấn Độ, mỗi người chọn điểm đến này với một mục đích riêng. Độc giả sẽ được kể cho nghe về từng trường hợp một, để hiểu rằng họ là Isobe - một người đàn ông góa bụa đến Ấn Độ tìm bóng hình người vợ quá cố, được cho rằng đã tái sinh trong hình hài một bé gái; một cựu binh muốn chữa lành nỗi day dứt từ chiến tranh và cầu nguyện cho các chiến sĩ trận vong, một người muốn tạ ơn đời vì được ‘chết đi sống lại’, và Mitsuko - một người phụ nữ muốn tìm kiếm một hình bóng dù chẳng rõ để làm gì.
Sông Hằng có gì hay để thu hút những du khách, hay đúng hơn là khiến họ sốc? “Tín đồ Ấn gió coi nơi các dòng sông giao nhau là thánh địa. Kẻ giàu đi xe lửa, xe hơi, người nghèo lội bộ, chen chúc nhau đi hành hương tới thành phố này; Họ tin là một khi được dầm mình trong dòng sông Hằng linh thiêng, thì sẽ được rửa sạch mọi tội lỗi và nghiệp chướng, và khi chết rồi, nếu tro người chết được đem rải xuống cho trôi, họ sẽ được giải thoát khỏi vòng luân hồi".
Bốn người, bốn câu chuyện, bốn quan điểm về tâm linh và đức tin. Họ sẽ được dẫn dắt bởi Enami - một hướng dẫn viên người Nhật từng học tại Ấn và yêu nước Ấn. Anh sẽ là đại diện cho một cách nhìn trong câu chuyện đức tin: với một người không cùng lý tưởng về niềm tin và tín ngưỡng, ta sẽ tôn trọng họ hay khinh khỉnh sự “vô minh” của người đó?
Nếu người hướng dẫn viên Enami chọn cách nghĩ thứ hai, thì một nhân vật khác sẽ hoàn toàn đối nghịch với anh. Ootsu, người từ nhỏ đã kính chúa, sau theo học cả thần học để làm linh mục, nhưng cởi mở trong cách nghĩ, rằng Chúa có thể là bất kỳ ai, và ta có thể gọi ngài là Củ Hành cũng được, miễn là có đức tin. “Nhưng dẫu sao đi nữa, Củ Hành không phải chỉ hiện hữu trong Kitô giáo Tây phương, mà còn hiện hữu cả trong Ấn giáo, Phật giáo. Và không phải chỉ tin mà thôi, tôi đã chọn một lối sống chứng minh cho niềm tin đó". Ootsu đã sống như thế, để rồi bị cho là “rối đạo”, chẳng trường đại học, thần học viện hay tu viện nào chấp nhận anh.
Những quan điểm trái ngược nhau sẽ còn tiếp diễn. Chuyện tái sinh thì sao? Ông Isobe, cho đến trước khi vợ qua đời, hoàn toàn chẳng quan tâm gì đến chuyện kiếp sau. Nhưng vì lời trăn trối của vợ, hãy tìm em ở kiếp sau, mà bắt đầu tìm hiểu và dấn thân vào cuộc hành trình tìm tái sinh của vợ. Nhưng với Mitsuko, tái sinh không có thì tốt hơn: "Nghĩ chết là hết sẽ thoải mái hơn, còn hơn là phải è vai ra gánh lấy quá khứ và tái sinh ở kiếp sau".
Chuyện người Hindu "ngâm mình và súc miệng ở chính nơi người ta, sau khi thiêu xác chết, thả tro cho trôi" là dơ bẩn đáng ghê tởm hay linh thiêng? Enami, người từng du học và yêu đất nước Ấn Độ cũng những mâu thuẫn tồn tại trong đất nước này, khẳng định: “Không có dơ gì cả. Một khi đã chọn đi Ấn...là tự đưa mình vào một thế giới hoàn toàn khác biệt với u châu (...) ở một chiều không gian khác (...) Chúng ta từ giờ sẽ đi và một thế giới khác mà chúng ta đã đánh mất".
Mình thích câu chuyện của Mitsuko và Ootsu, và đó cũng là câu chuyện được dành nhiều đất nhất trong sách. Một người không tin vào Chúa, quyết tâm quấy phá một người ngoan đạo và còn buộc anh phải từ bỏ người, để rồi cuối cùng mải miết đi tìm anh. "Cô không hiểu rõ tại sao xưa cũng như nay cô lại cứ bận tâm bận trí về anh ta. Cuộc đời của Ootsu, như xác côn trùng sa lưới nhện, cứ dai dẳng treo ở một nơi nào đó trong lòng cô. Mình không nhất thiết phải gặp. Cô không biết bao lần đã tự nhủ lòng như thế. Dù có đi Varanasi đi nữa, mình cũng chẳng tìm con người ấy mà làm gì".
Bên dòng sông Hằng được viết từ góc nhìn của một người Công giáo, nhắc đến cả Phật giáo và Ấn giáo. Còn mình đọc với tư cách một người vô thần. Tôn giáo, như nhiều người có tín ngưỡng mà mình từng tiếp xúc, họ nói rằng trải qua biến cố trong đời rồi mới còn tôn giáo cứu giúp, có một cái để họ tin và dựa vào.
Ông Isobe khi vợ mất mới bắt đầu thử tin vào tâm linh. Mitsuko không phải là người duy nhất vô thần, mà còn có cặp vợ chồng mới cưới chọn trăng mật ở Ấn Độ thay vì đi châu Âu.
Với mình Bên dòng sông Hằng là quyển sách đáng đọc. Mình thích cái cách những người xa lạ buộc phải gắn bó với nhau trong thời gian ngắn trong những chuyến đi. Thích cách tác giả đưa ra những va chạm về đức tin và tín ngưỡng. Và thích nhất một câu đâu đó trong sách, “Trong cuộc đời của chúng ta đều có cái gì đó, dù đã chấm dứt nhưng không mất hẳn.”
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Celia
1,166 reviews · 150 followers
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February 8, 2020
"Endo has successfully dramatized the discovery that the sacred river of humanity flows within ourselves."--National Catholic Reporter
That description has really grabbed me.
Book is now both heard and read. I listened to the crisp voice of David Holt while I followed the text in a library paperback.
The book is written by a Japanese author but is primarily about India. A group of Japanese tourists are led through various parts of India as they seek spiritual re-birth. The experience of seeing the Ganges is central to their re-awakening.
The characters are very well drawn out.
There is Isobe, recently widowed and searching for his re-incarnated wife,
Kiguchi, a war veteran haunted by memories of Burma,
Numada, a writer recovering from a serious illness, and
Mitsuko, a cynical nurse searching for a heretical priest she knew in her youth.
I look forward to my next Shusaku Endo: Silence.
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Nguyên Trang
521 reviews · 499 followers
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January 12, 2019
Đọc xong câu chuyện chỉ cho mình thấy một điều: đó là ở đời này, chỉ có đau đớn là thứ tồn tại thật sự và có ý nghĩa. Hạnh phúc thì lúc nào cũng vậy, hời hợt, thoáng qua. Ở đời, ai có nỗi đau lớn lao là một may mắn; còn không, hãy cúi mình xuống hứng nỗi đau nhân gian ;)) anw điều này cũng không có gì mới mẻ.
Truyện viết ok nhưng không đặc biệt quá. Giống như Ấn Độ, nó pha trộn rất nhiều thứ lại với nhau. Tuy nhiên, mình không thấy nó chạm được tới nơi tới chốn chỗ cần tới. Là truyện đáng đọc nhưng không phải truyện nhất thiết phải đọc.
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Inderjit Sanghera
450 reviews · 85 followers
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May 16, 2020
The novel begins with the beautiful-yet haunting-image of a man who, upon finding out that his wife has cancer, also hears the vulgar reverberations of a street pedlar selling his wares, his wife's death forever associated with the pedlar's voice in his mind. In many ways this passage comes to symbolise the feelings of the various characters who inhabit the novel, who are seeking a sense of fulfilment in India as their inner lives have become dominated by a sense of loss and ennui.
Endo explores the motivations of his characters with patience and understanding, building empathy for his characters. So the spiritually empty Mitsuko seeks to the vacuity which has overtaken her life with mockery; firstly for the conventions of bourgeois Japanese society and secondly for religion via her cruel treatment towards the pathetic Otsu. The writer Numada is unable to replicate the empathy he shares with animals in his relationship with people, whereas Kiguchi is haunted by his time as a soldier during the Second World War. Finally we come to Isobe, the character whose wife dies of cancer and is seeking for a sense of passion and love for her which didn't exist when she was alive.
Whilst, like most Endo's stories, the novel is highly moralistic, it does this in way which isn't cloying or sententious, or in a way that all of the character reach a moral apotheosis at the end of the novel. Instead Endo focuses on the human condition, with the stories acting as snapshots at a certain point in time of the characters lives, who demonstrated both frailty and strength, selfishness and selflessness and who are merely seeking a sense of belonging in a world which they cannot seem to make sense of.
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booklady
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September 9, 2019
After reading my friend Dhanaraj Rajan's review of this book I knew I wanted to read this.
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Thiên Di
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May 7, 2019
một cuốn sách Người đã gửi tới cho tôi để trả lời cho câu hỏi mà tôi luôn canh cánh trong lòng và luôn hỏi Người. và hệt như cách nghĩ khi đó ai hỏi tôi vì sao tôi yêu Người: bởi vì Người là một người đau khổ, đau khổ hơn tất cả chúng ta, và đau khổ như thế nhưng Người luôn yêu tôi.
cuốn sách hay ở chỗ tác giả kết nối mọi nền văn hóa với một tình yêu thương bàng bạc xuyên thấm, khiến ta xúc động
"...Ngài không duyên dáng, không oai vệ
Ngài bị khinh khi, và là đồ phế bỏ của người đời,
con người đớn đau và những ốm o xo bại,
như một kẻ có gặp chúng tôi thì lo giấu mặt
bị khinh khi, và chúng tôi đã chẳng đếm xỉa
Trái lại, chính các bệnh tật của chúng tôi, Ngài đã mang
chính các đau khổ của chúng tôi, Ngài đã vác..."
(Isaiah 53:2-4)
fiction
japanese
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S.
5 books · 66 followers
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December 13, 2013
it's been reported in literary papers or sections that an unofficial "twenty-year rule" applies to the Nobel Prize in Literature-- that is, every twenty years or so (unless it was every twenty-five years, and I'm misremembering), the Nobel Literature Prize committee "has" to award the prize to a Japanese writer. such would not be unvelieable. if I remember the WP entry on the NPL correctly, the first twenty years of the prize were entirely Sweden or Sweden-Norway specific, until the realization slowly dawned that the entire world was watching what was then the only true international prize, and a large cash bonus to boot. Japan is 10% of the world economy and possibly that percentage of major world literature in sales, and perhaps more importantly to the publishing world at large, it highly respects copyright and will even invest in projects requiring half of all royalties be sent abroad.
the first big postwar duel apparently erupted between YASUNARI KAWABATA (the master of elegiac, short little pieces capturing Japanese uniqueness and intricate social minueting) and his protégée YUKIO MISHIMA (who wrote longer, more ambitious plot-filled novels about grief and longing). literary scholars, after decades of scholarship on both, probabliy feel the Prize was mis-awarded-- MISHIMA, despite his vainglorious death, is more highly referenced and influential; more writers fifty years on list him as "influence," whereas Kawabata, while known to the entire community, is more the origami-expert of the intricate fold.
today of course the central Nobel story is HARUKI MURAKAMI vs. HARUKI MURAKAMI. as in, will the Nobel Prize award the medal to HM or will it fail to act in time. no other name is seriously floated in contention.
the 1980s battle is interesting on a different level. both KENZABURO OE (the eventual winner) and ENDO SHUSAKU are a bit less read today and considered a step down from the KAWABATA-MISHIMA showdown. OE represented secular sociality and ENDO heretical Christianity. but aside from this issue, there is the overall sense of aesthetics in each's work, and of course the philosophy.
this is a book about five Japanese pilgrims to the Ganges and the "case" of each, describing the spiritual concerns and life events that bring them all to India for a brief trip. it begins "on the airplane" and then explores the background and history of each.
endo's other work I've read although a 3/5 non-fiction/fiction piece (literary analysis and just literature), always inspires rounds of conversation in artistic dinners.
this work is more just a very solid 5/5 lit work
red-queen
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Huy
731 reviews
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December 23, 2018
Mình là một người không tin vào Tôn giáo, không tin vào những đấng linh thiêng hay tối cao. Và mình lúc nào cũng thấy thắc mắc khi gặp những người sùng đạo và tin tưởng vào những bậc cao hơn, và mãi không bao giờ hiểu được, một người vô thần như mình đọc những cuốn sách kiểu này, dĩ nhiên là sẽ không thấy thích.
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George
2,116 reviews
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December 12, 2022
3.5 stars. An original, intelligent, character based novel about Japanese tourists undergoing varieties of life crisis, visiting the river Ganges, at Varanasi, India, during the week of the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister. All the characters seek reconciliation, self acceptance or fulfillment.
One character is a World War 2 veteran haunted by memories of his experiences in Burma, another, Isobe, is coming to terms with his wife’s death from cancer and her comments on reincarnation. Otsu, a Japanese Catholic, never fully accepted by the church elders, has followed his faith in God, to India. Misuko is a woman seeking forgiveness for once seducing Otsu in a frivolous attempt to undermine his faith when she was a student.
This book was first published in 1993.
1001-books-list-read-2007-to-2018
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David Rush
333 reviews · 30 followers
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December 17, 2017
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Matthew 5:5
Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles 1 Corinthians 1:22-25
I wonder at the faith and Christianity of Shusaku Endo a thoughtful, reflectfull Japanese Christian. Did he feel as at odds with his faith and heritage as the central character, Otso, of Deep Rivet?Did he feel himself as outcast as Otsu who identified with the lowest caste of India?
I will draw a conclusion that Endo found the essence of Christ in the suffering sacrifice rather that the victorious resurrected champion of the prosperity gospel. I think Endo saw “true” Christianity in the comfort of the poor and meek.
I think more people would NOT like this book than do. In Endo's world the avenues of success only bring a hollow happiness. In my (American) world the general feel I get is that the Christianity brings a victorious uplifting life full of prosperity. Endo would have none of that. For him you only get to the truth by embracing the poor and outcast.
So....do you think this life is a project of empirical pluses and minuses and the point is to end up with a positive when you die? And the “authentic” life is one that discounts anything that is not measurable, and religion is at best an illusion and at worst the bane of humanity?
If so, this book will be nonsense to you.
Are your religions beliefs secure and do they provide reason and stability that explains everything? If so, this book will be nonsense to you.
There are a number of “themes” involving connecting with something. First, for Otsu, is the notion that Christ is found most clearly in the rejected. Which leads him, as a Catholic priest, to be shunned by his order and end up adopting the clothes of a Hindu untouchable who's only task is to carry other discarded, poor, and dying people to the river Ganges just before they die.
And then there is this idea that our existence is actually a river of humanity and we are all trying to connect with it. I think Endo is saying we use most of our energy avoiding the very things that really do give us the connection to everything else we need.
For Miss Naruse she wants to experience actual love, not the kind that is actually a role that people adopt with enthusiasm.
For Mr Kiguchi it is honoring his fellow Japanese soldiers who suffered a burtal retreat in WWII in Burma.
For Mr Numada it is a mystical connection with nature embodied by a Myna bird.
And finally for Mr Isobe, he is only recognizing his connection with his wife after she dies after telling him to look for her to be reborn somewhere in the world.
If I were to write a high school report about it I think I would come up with something about the Deep River of the the Ganges is much like life itself. And that the road of death Mr. Kiguchi was on is also much like life itself. In that we will all die sometime.
If you are sure of yourself, in your belief or non-belief...then you will think this book is nonsense. But for those of us you inexplicably think what the world tells us about itself is most likely wrong...well, you might end up loving this book.
Quotes...
After living nearly five years in a foreign country, I can't help but be struck by the clarity and logic of the way Europeans think, but it seems to me as an Asian that there's something they have lost sight of with their excessive clarity and their over abundance of logic, and I just can't go along with it....in the final analysis, the faith of the Europeans is conscious and rational, and these people reject anything they cannot slice into categories with their rationality. Pg117
But an Asian like me just can't make sharp distinctions and pass judgment on everything the way they do. Pg118
Every time I look at the River Ganges, I think of my Onion (Christ). The Ganges swallows up the ashes of every personas it flows along, rejecting neither the beggar woman who stretches out her finger-less hands for the murdered prime minister Gandhi. The river of love that is my Onion flows past, accepting all, rejecting neither the ugliest of men nor the filthiest. Pg 185
The Onion had died many long years ago, but he had been reborn in the lives of other people. Even after nearly two thousand years had passed, he had been reborn in those nuns, and had been reborn in Otsu. And just as Otsu had been taken off to a hospital on a litter, the nuns likewise disappeared in the river of people. Pg 215
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Chinook
2,242 reviews · 19 followers
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January 24, 2018
For a short book, Deep River covers a lot. It’s interesting to be gazing through a window at the lives of these Japanese men and women as they themselves gaze through a window at Europeans (mostly French) and Indians. The main themes of the book are religion and grief - characters contemplate rebirth, Japanese Buddhism, the differences between Japanese Christianity and European Christianity, Hinduism and a few personal constructions, like the man who thinks of God as being in communion with nature and a woman who eventually decides that humanity is all connected in their river of sorrows.
But the book also touches on the horrors of war, on marriage, of generational gaps in Japan, on sex and love, on work and its discontents, on travel and being respectful of new cultures. It is heavily influenced by two books, Moira and Thérèse Desqueyroux, which influence and mirror one woman’s choices.
Japanese novels tend, for me, to be somewhat hard to understand at a fundamental level - there always seems to be something presented as a universal feeling or action that baffles me. In this novel it’s the bullying of Otsu, which seems to the students to be inevitable and amusing. The tour guide later takes a similar attitude towards the tourists, one of wanting to have revenge against them for no reason that makes sense to me. It’s also sometimes hard to wrap my mind around the male-female relationships presented in Japanese novels.
1001
asia
europe
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Tereza
139 reviews · 13 followers
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February 1, 2020
Moje první seznámení s Endóem (paradoxně s jeho poslední knihou) a hned láska na první začtení. Příběh o ztrátách a hledání, pošetilých tužbách srdce, o pomíjivosti času - to všechno na pozadí uměřeného Japonska, pořádkumilovné Francie a barevné, nespoutané a neuchopitelné Indie. Přečtěte si ji!
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Brennan
178 reviews · 2 followers
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November 13, 2021
Endo's infamous final novel, that had many quibbling over whether he finally abandoned the strict perimeters of Catholicism for a more generous pluralism/ecumenism. After all the reading I did for thesis, it seems inconclusive. His wife Junko indicates in a reflection a few years after his death that the pluralist beliefs of Otsū in Deep River are Endo's own. But a 1994 interview (the year of the novel's publication) with his close friend (and translator) William Johnston, Endo is recorded as saying "I have no doubt that dialogue is a very fine thing. But it has its limits. After all, when we Christians talk to Buddhists and learn from them, we must know where to draw the line. I would like to hear something about that." All that to say we can't really know. Nor should we.
I enjoyed the novel, but its cast of characters fell flat for me. I did not find them meticulously drawn or movingly real. Their monologues and dialogues were stilted. I always wonder what is lost in translation. Certain decisions by Gessel are odd--words like "pendulous" and "pestilential" stick out sorely. I did find the novel's cliffhanger ending reminiscent of Mark's gospel, an indication that Endo's spirituality remained Christocentric. Better than Volcano, worse than The Sea and Poison.
endō
religious-fic
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Nguyet Minh
168 reviews · 95 followers
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August 22, 2021
Sông Hằng - một dòng sông linh thiêng của người Ấn giáo, là nơi mà dòng chảy của nó đón nhận tất cả những sinh mệnh bất kể đẳng cấp hay địa vị, là nơi mà dù xa đến đâu, dù bằng nhiều phương tiện khác nhau, người Ấn giáo nhất định phải tìm về để chết, để chờ chết hoặc để ngụp lặn tắm rửa trong đó với niềm tin sâu sắc rằng dòng nước thiêng ấy sẽ rửa sạch mọi tội lỗi và nghiệp chướng, tro của người qua đời được rải xuống sông sẽ giúp họ thoát khỏi kiếp luân hồi.
Nhóm du khách Nhật với những nghề nghiệp, hoàn cảnh và câu chuyện khác nhau cùng tham gia một tour du lịch đến Ấn Độ với những mục đích riêng nhưng có vẻ như đều liên quan đến việc kiếm tìm. Đó là ông Isobe mất đi người vợ và lời trăn trối của vợ về việc sẽ tái sinh và mong muốn ông hãy đi tìm bà. Đó là Mitsuko, nữ hộ lý vô thần dù đã kết hôn nhưng chưa bao giờ tìm thấy cảm xúc hoặc tình yêu đích thực của đời mình, cô là người đàn bà mà “ngọn lửa ân ái chẳng bao giờ cháy lên được.” Trong sự trống rỗng đó, cô luôn nghĩ đến Ootsu, một người bạn cũ với đức tin to lớn với Chúa và chỉ mong trở thành linh mục để tận hiến cho đức tin ấy. Cô đi tìm anh tại một tu viện ở Vasanari. Đó là ông Numata, một người chuyên viết chuyện đồng thoại, thế giới đồng thoại ông tạo ra sẽ dẫn ông thoát khỏi những mâu thuẫn và sự tàn bạo của cuộc sống với bệnh tật và mất mát. Đó là ông Kiguchi - một cựu chiến binh ở chiến trường Miến Điện năm xưa với ám ảnh khôn nguôi về đồng đội đã chết, về việc chứng kiến cảnh ăn thịt người của nhau để tồn tại và có sức giúp kẻ khác. Và đó là cặp vợ chồng nhiếp ảnh gia Sajou, tiêu biểu cho lớp trẻ chuộng chủ nghĩa thực dụng. Họ chỉ đơn giản đến Ấn Độ vì tò mò và mua sắm vài thứ kỷ niệm với thái độ khinh miệt nền văn hoá này.
Trưởng đoàn là anh chàng hướng dẫn viên Enami, người gắn bó với Ấn Độ nhiều năm và am hiểu văn hoá của nó đủ để bảo vệ nó khỏi sự khinh miệt từ khách Nhật. Anh có một khái niệm lạ lùng về thiên nhiên Ấn Độ, đó là vẻ “dâm tính” của nó, luôn “có cái gì đó cứ kích thích dục tính, âm ỉ trong cái không khí nóng bức của xứ Ấn”, xứ mà thiên nhiên mang hai mặt: sáng tạo và phá hủy. Khi sống lâu trong một nền văn hoá nào đó, người ta dễ trở nên sùng bái nó và định kiến với những quan điểm khác.
Tất cả họ tìm đến Vasanari, một thành phố rất Ấn Độ trong lòng Ấn Độ để trải nghiệm không gian thánh địa linh thiêng, nơi các dòng chảy giao nhau nhưng cũng là nơi mà tín ngưỡng và thực tế tạo thành những mảng đối lập của sạch sẽ và dơ dáy, từ bi và tàn nhẫn. Người ta tìm về Ấn Độ bởi hy vọng khám phá khởi nguồn của Phật giáo nguyên thuỷ nhưng những âm hưởng và tàn dư còn sót lại đã bị che lấp bởi Ấn giáo khổng lồ. Vậy nên, những vị khách ấy đã trở nên thất vọng và thờ ơ. Ông Isobe không ngừng thầm gọi vợ trong niềm mong mỏi gặp lại “tái sinh” của bà dọc bờ sông Hằng. Mitsuko vô tình gặp lại anh bạn linh mục trong một hình hài khác như một người Ấn giáo thực thụ với những xác chết vác trên vai đưa họ về dòng sông Ấn giáo, về với Chúa trong tâm thức của riêng anh. Những đám người ăn xin bị bệnh phong cùi, những xác động vật trôi sông, sự nóng bức ngột ngạt từ những giàn thiêu lộ thiên cùng mùi người sống, mùi tử khí tạo nên một bức tranh hỗn độn không thể tìm được ở nơi nào khác trên thế giới khi mà sự trật tự và ngăn nắp đã trở thành tiêu chuẩn.
Ông Numata chưa bao giờ cho rằng thiên nhiên là tàn bạo, ngược lại nó hẳn là cầu nối sự sống và con người. Ông đi tìm mua một con nhồng hoang để phóng sinh nó trở về với tự nhiên, là cách ông trả ơn cho việc giữ được sinh mệnh của mình qua bệnh hiểm nghèo. Còn Kiguchi chỉ mong mỏi tìm đến một ngôi chùa để cầu siêu cho các chiến sĩ tử trận năm xưa. Với tín đồ Ấn giáo, hữu ngạn sông Hằng mới chính là nơi linh thiêng nhất, còn tả ngạn biểu tượng cho sự dơ dáy.
Xuyên suốt câu truyện là những quan điểm tôn giáo và trăn trở về thần học trái ngược nhau của những người cùng dân tộc. Trong đó có cả Kito giáo, Phật giáo, Ấn giáo và cả vô thần. Đức tin như một tấm thảm được trải ra cho tất cả mọi người. Có kẻ chọn đi lên nó, có kẻ thích đi ở bên ngoài bằng đôi chân trần của mình. Niềm yêu kính một tôn giáo là thứ tình cảm tự nguyện và bền chặt của một cá nhân với đức tin đó, còn kẻ vô thần là một vị khách đứng bên ngoài quan sát bằng đôi mắt khách quan. Cũng có lúc, khi cuộc sống vắng bóng tâm tình hay chẳng còn gì để bấu víu vào nữa, người ta định hướng lại lối sống, chọn cách quay về với nơi họ từng thờ ơ, để tìm những kết nối tâm linh lấp đầy lại cảm giác cô đơn trống rỗng.
Cuộc đời đã sắp xếp sẵn mọi việc một cách thứ tự mà người sống trong đó chẳng thể biết trước được. Người rời bỏ thế gian sẽ không bao giờ có cơ hội được biết người còn sống sẽ phải đối diện với điều gì. Ý vị thâm sâu của đời sống chỉ có thể đến khi có nhiều đánh đổi và mất mát. Chỉ tình yêu son sắt mới khiến người ta chôn sâu ước nguyện được tái sinh để gặp lại người thương, để tiếp tục tha thiết và gắn bó.
Dọc bờ sông Hằng, họ ném đi ảo ảnh và tìm thấy thực tế chồng chất lên nhau, “tái sinh” hay hoàn toàn biến mất đều là thứ trực cảm tâm linh nằm trong sâu thẳm mỗi người. Vợ chồng nhiếp ảnh gia Sajou không đại diện cho bất cứ hình thức tâm linh nào, bất chấp mất mát đau buồn của người khác để thỏa mãn cho những đòi hỏi tầm thường của bản thân, vô tình đưa chàng linh mục Ootsu cận kề cái chết khi vừa phải bảo vệ sự trong sạch cho người chết đến thói hám danh của kẻ sống. Cuối truyện là sự kiện bà tổng thống Indira Gandhi bị ám sát đẩy niềm tin tôn giáo lẫn thực tế xã hội với bất đồng, bất bình đẳng lên đỉnh điểm. Dẫu là người đàn bà ăn xin rụng hết ngón tay hay bà thủ tướng bị ám sát cũng đều trở về với dòng sông Hằng, nơi đón nhận cả điều tốt đẹp lẫn nhơ bẩn.
Và hành trình tìm kiếm của nhóm khách Nhật ấy cũng khép lại. Điều họ tìm thấy chính là việc phải tiếp tục tồn tại với một tâm thế khác.
tác-giả-nhật
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Emilia P
1,705 reviews · 49 followers
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August 9, 2012
Dang, yo.
Shusaku Endo wrote this book I read called SILENCE. It's about Catholic missionaries to Japan in like the 1600s and it's kinda boring and pretty one-note but also well written and about an important culture clash. Shusaku Endo, a Japanese Catholic, is an intriguing character himself, and so one is impelled to read more of his work. Especially since it's featured in Season 6 of Lost. And with good reason.
Silence was written in the 60s and Deep River was written in the 90s. The openness and full-heartedness of the latter belies a man with the wisdom and sadness and understanding of a whole life between these books - but it's still very clearly the same dude -- a person who cares about faith and the soul, in a way that is very Japanese and un-Japanese at the same time.
I tried to explain this to my cooly-Japanophile husband - to say this book was about how Japanese people are so focused on appearing calm and collected on the surface but are tumultuous and sad and beautiful underneath, and that perhaps that calm exterior itself signals, hints at, a profundity of soul which we openly emotional Westerners can only dream about. So that's what I thought this book captured really well -- everyone suffers, and here is a story about how four or five (or six or seven!) emphatically Japanese people suffered, in their own cultural context, mostly in silence and bitterness, and how they dealt with it by tapping into the life-force which connects us across cultures, ages, faiths (there's a Japanese Catholic priest who dresses up like a Hindu to carry bodies to the creamation grounds, to wit) , etc, while on a trip to the Ganges, the river of rebirth, in India. It sounds hippy-dippy, but it isn't. It's about how big our small little lives are -- it's a character study above all, no big sweeping things happen in it, in the end. It's about accepting and bearing suffering, and trying to love. It's kind of sad. But it's sweet.
There's a quote on the back about how Endo is unsentimental, yet sympathetic, and that's a mark of great writing. I have to agree. This is a wonderful book. Read it, yo.
lost
real-books
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Nick
489 reviews · 36 followers
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November 22, 2011
A group of Japanese tourists travel to India to visit historic sites from the life of the Buddha, without realizing that there are few modern Buddhists there. They wind up in Varanasi, by the side of the sacred, polluted Ganges, where people go to die. The group includes Isobe, who is looking for his reincarnated wife, who he ignored when she was alive and Mitsuko, who has found emptiness in a series of personae: hedonistic student, wife, volunteer at a hospital. Least affecting is Numada, a author of children's books and haunted by the fate of animals. Kiguchi's story is riveting, as he struggles not just with the memories of surviving the war in Burma, but of the soldier who sacrificed everything to save him. A thoughtful, meditative book, focussed on the struggle to define what truly matters, but not without a sly humor, as the fastidious Japanese try and mostly fail to cope with the overwhelming mass of humanity that is India, along with the comic foils, a pair of married tourists, her wishing to be in France, he trying to establish himself as a photographer. A book that lingers in the mind.
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A.K. Kulshreshth
7 books · 54 followers
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April 27, 2020
This is a great work. I listened to the audio book and will also read the print version.
Four very diverse characters, all Japanese, end up on a visit to the holy city of Varanasi, on the banks of the sacred river Ganga. Each of them has a different motive. In my interpretation, they get what they wanted to varying degrees, with none of them finding easy answers.
This is a book that works at many levels - from its range of settings in India, Japan, France, Burma and Manchuria, to its chronicling of events from Second World War Burma to Indira Gandhi's assassination and its characters and story arch. Two of its characters - Mitsuke and Otsu - are particularly fascinating.
It is necessary to mention that there are plenty of bloopers in this work. For example, the harmonium is not similar to a harmonica, contrary to Mr. Endo's assertion (assuming the translator is not to blame). In the audio book, Ganga is pronounced Gaan-Jaa. That is wrong, which is bad enough, but Gaanjaa also has a meaning. It means Opium in Hindi (and in other Indian languages)...
I put down the bloopers to poor quality control, and still rate this work highly because of its many strengths.
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Aubrey
1,287 reviews · 731 followers
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December 18, 2015
There is death. Yet, there is also life. There are long emotionally dead passages. Yet, there are also moments so charged with feeling they consume all in their path, carry them along for a bit and then leave behind ones willing to do anything to catch up. You have the search for reincarnated love ones, the search for emotional fulfillment, the search to reconcile death with life, the search for atonement, each person ever searching for something omnipresent in its never clearly defined state. And on it goes, this one period of time accepting all parts of life into its midst; the river mentioned in the pages embodies this, and will take everything in without spitting out any straightforward conclusions of its own. This is definitely a novel that won't get very far with a reader without some interpretation on their part; it is only fully enjoyed if one can see their own life experiences within the pages, and leave with a new understanding of just what it means to exist.
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Kristel
1,503 reviews · 40 followers
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December 7, 2019
This is the second book that I have read by Roman Catholic, Japanese Author Shūsaku Endō. His books, Silence and Deep River are both included on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. Endō explores religion, especially Catholicism and the Japanese culture in his writings. In this book, set during the time period when Indira Ghandi, prime minister of India, was assassinated examines the lives of 4 Japanese who are on a tour to India to visit Buddhist sites.
1. Osamu Isobe, a man looking for his reincarnated wife.
2. Mitsuko Naruse, a former housewife who takes a trip both as a pilgrimage and to see her ex-boyfriend Otsu as atonement for mistreating him
3. Numada, a bird watcher who wants to set a bird in his possession free.
4. Kiguchi, a former WWII Imperial Japanese Army soldier.
These characters are on a journey, a pilgrimage and it is the story of their individual pilgrimage. The deep river is the Ganges where all peoples are taken in and flow together.
This was an interesting book and look at both Japanese and Indian culture. One point the author makes; I think, is that all Gods are the same God and that in seeking God, no matter which God, that Jesus is born again in that person. Another point in the book is that peoples, cultures, and religions are at odds with each other and in the best circumstances, conflict remains. I personally did not enjoy the descriptions of the river but also believe that the author did an excellent job of painting the picture of the river bank and of India (without using the camera). This book did not inspire me to want to visit India.
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Pip
428 reviews · 7 followers
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January 11, 2018
I found this novel so much more powerful that Silence, which was about a group of Portuguese missionaries who were tortured in Seventeenth Century Japan. Endo, a practising Catholic, returns to the theme of forcing a Christian to deny one's faith, an idea which seems quaintly anachronistic now, but which he must feel strongly about to reintroduce it again. This time he tracks a group of Japanese on a pilgrimage to Buddhist Holy Sites in India. One of them had ignored his wife until her dying plea for him to look for her reincarnated self allowed Endo an opportunity to explore the idea of reincarnation. Another protagonist is a children's novelist with an affinity for animals who believes that a mynah bird sacrificed himself so that the author could live. Although he is not Christian the sacrifice of Jesus is mirrored in his story. A third pilgrim had suffered atrociously in Burma. His life was saved by a comrade who ate human flesh in order to survive (another Christian symbol) but became an alcoholic because his guilt was terrible. The fourth protagonist is a woman who believes she has no capacity for love. She seems to be following a student friend whom she had seduced and then dumped after forcing him to deny his faith. That he should also be in Varanasi, striving to live a meaningful life by helping the Untouchables carry bodies to the Ghats, and that he should die saving a clueless tour member who is insensitively trying to photograph the funeral pyres, stretches coincidence to the limits, but the whole works because it is a nifty way to talk about contrasting religious beliefs.
I listened to an Audible version, read by David Holt. He was a pleasure to listen to, my only carp being that when he spoke as the clueless Japanese tourist he used an English dialect which seemed forced to me, but that was a minor quibble. The Deep River of the title was the Ganges, of course, but it also was the river of humanity, flowing on, absorbing individuals ceaselessly despite their various beliefs and idiosyncracies.
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Wen Cof
1 review · 4 followers
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November 17, 2014
Shusaku Endo’s book Deep River is about a journey to the river Ganges with a collection of tourists immersed in their own private spiritual struggles. Each character presents a face of spirituality as a whole. The characters face uncomfortable spiritual questions that aren’t always neatly answered. I loved the book because it brings together ideas of Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism.
Not only are the questions uncomfortable, so are the characters. The young woman Mitsuko, is so cruel, I almost stopped reading the book. But I’m glad I continued, because I realized that what she displays on the outside, so many of us are really hiding on the inside. She comments that the chaos and disorder of India is comforting to her, while the neatly organized gardens of Paris are disconcerting. There is something comforting about the chaos of India to Mitsuko, and there is something comforting about the chaos of the book to the reader. It jangles and fits together at odd angles. The ending is not a neat bow on a package, but is left open the reader to write their own conclusion.
So why did I love this book with ugly characters and an inharmonious plot? Because it didn’t try to explain or mollify their questions – it just took me on a journey as a reader through their process, and allowed me to draw my own conclusions about right, wrong, good, evil, life and death. It allowed me to also travel to the Ganges and observe and reflect.
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Christopher
1 book · 47 followers
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July 23, 2012
Another book I started with high hopes which failed to live up to my expectations. Endo's characters all end up seeming contrived and sometimes ridiculous in their actions and dialogue as the stories progress and they make their pilgrimages to the Hindu and Buddhist holy sites along the Ganges. I was hoping for some insight into Christianity as it is viewed and experienced in Japan and the Orient but was instead treated to an individual's ecumenistic dreams. And I think maybe he sets up some of his characters as straw men to let us all know what he thinks of modern materialistic Japan. The character's backgrounds are all somewhat interesting and I think Endo writes very well (or has been translated very well). However, no great events happen, no deep thoughts are offered, no great revelations are found, and ultimately, the book ends up being a rather boring read. I saw another review somewhere before I started reading this that said: "Deep River, Shallow Story" - I agree. It's not your everyday pulpish junk, so I bumped up the 2.5 stars to 3. I can't imagine spending time on another Endo work again.
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Long On Air
104 reviews · 37 followers
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January 31, 2020
Một quá trình cuốn hút bằng đậm đặc câu chuyện, đậm đặc trải nghiệm. Cái kết hay cụ thể hơn là câu trả lời cho trường hợp của từng nhân vật đều rất hay, ý nghĩa nhưng có phần hơi ngắn gọn. Khi đọc về cuối, thoáng qua mong muốn tác giả sẽ viết kĩ hơn, sâu hơn về tâm lí, cảm xúc từng nhân vật như ở phần đầu.
Nhưng có thể đấy là dụng ý của Endo Shusaku. Nhiều khi cách mà chúng ta đi qua mỗi trải nghiệm đã là một câu trả lời rồi, nên đến cuối cùng không cần phải diễn giải quá nhiều chăng?
Đặc biệt yêu thích cấu trúc của cuốn sách. Cách tác giả sắp xếp để từng nhân vật, từng câu chuyện xuất hiện rất thú vị. Các giá trị văn hoá, tôn giáo, tâm linh được truyền tải tinh tế, vừa vặn, không gây sự choáng ngợp hay cảm giác khó tiếp nhận cho độc giả.
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Melissa
1,067 reviews · 72 followers
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January 30, 2018
A very interesting study in faith as seen through the eyes of a group of Japanese tourists to India as they recall pivotal moments of their lives, experiences, and their personal struggles as they try to reconnect with past acquaintances, past loves, and reconcile past traumas through the lens of different faiths and depths of faith as they visit the intersection of Asian faith, with Buddhism, Catholicism, and Hinduism.
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Book Wormy
1,340 reviews · 18 followers
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December 26, 2019
For me this book was an interesting exploration of religious beliefs and how they are more alike than different when you break it down and look into it. We start by exploring Christianity and the idea of sacrificing yourself for a higher good before moving on to look at Buddhism and the ideas of reincarnation eventually we end up in India with Hinduism and the caste system which while there is a strict hierarchy kept in life in death everyone is equal and the River Ganges accepts all souls with no questions asked.
The Japanese tourists on the pilgrimage all have different reasons for going to India and while some personal quests are successful others (on the surface are not) everyone in the group is changed by the experience.
I liked the way the back stories of everyone on the trip are slowly revealed and how they all have subtle connections to each other. India is also beautifully bought to love in all her beauty and all her ugliness
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Joanne Fate
318 reviews · 3 followers
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January 22, 2021
This isn't my first Shusaku Endo book, and it won't be my last. The book starts with chapters that could be short stories in and of themselves. The main characters are all Japanese. Endo brings most of them to India on a tour. There's a lot about religions in this book. Endo was Roman Catholic, living in a mostly Buddhist country. When they travel to India they tour many religious places.
Parts of this book are sad. There's talk of death and the afterlife. The writing transcends all that. It is beautifully written and profound.
I'll stop there. I'm listening through the alphabet, partly to try to get to some books that have been in my library for a while.
I loved the narration as well. It suited the book.
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Emma Much
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April 15, 2022
very nice
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Ana Rita Ramos
140 reviews · 2 followers
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December 28, 2021
Lindíssimo.
Pessoas com motivações e histórias de vida muito diferentes partem para a Índia para se encontrarem dentro de si mesmas e/ ou para buscarem alguém. É-nos feita através dos seus olhos uma visita à Índia pobre e ao rio Ganges onde todos os indianos anseiam terminar a sua existência.
Um livro forte no conteúdo e no significado cheio de mensagens profundas e ensinamentos.
Quando terminei fiquei com a sensação de querer mais.
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Brent
91 reviews · 1 follower
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June 18, 2020
Unreliable narrator is a term many people are probably familiar with from literature class. It doesn't quite cover what is happening in this novel though, as it is written in third person. So the narrator is giving you, the reader, a (fairly) accurate view of the thoughts and actions of the characters (or at least an accurate view of the thoughts and the actions that each character finds to be important), but the characters in the story are, to varying degrees, rather unreliable.
They have incorrect knowledge that informs their thinking and decision making. They have prejudices and desires, and these prejudices and desire color the events they chose to focus on in the story. Many of the reviews have comments as, "Endo says..." or "the author is saying."
Endo is not saying anything in this book the way the statement, "Endo says..." would imply. Yes he wrote the story, and collected sections out of the lives of his characters, but it is his characters that are saying and doing things. Endo means something and it is our job as a reader to try and understand what he means by selections of events and thoughts that he choose to weave into a story.
For example, characters make statements about the various religions in the book, that as far as their knowledge and understanding goes, they believe to be true. Some of these statements are true and some of them are demonstrably false. As a reader you can choose two options, Endo didn't bother to do his homework and made some mistakes (or some variation there of), or he knew the statement was false, but allowed his character to say it because it was something his character believed.
Depending on which option you choose, it will change how you interpret the book. There is also a risk involved because if you the reader does not know that the character is mistaken, you are less likely to ask further questions of the text.
In the story there is one, and possibly two, character(s) who believe that Mary is a Goddess in the Roman Catholic Church. This is a common confusion that many people have, even other non-Roman Catholic Christians can misunderstand who Roman Catholics believe.
But Endo was a Roman Catholic and he knew what he believed. So why would his characters state the Mary was a Goddess? If it is something that other Christian misunderstand about Roman Catholics, think how confusing it must be for someone who doesn't come from a Christian background (as most of his characters don't) to try to understand Mary's place in Roman Catholic theology.
That is just the Christian misunderstanding his characters have. Some of them make equally incorrect statements about Hinduism and Buddhism. And here is where part of the problem may be, Western readers are probably as ignorant of Hinduism and Buddhism as Asian readers are likely to be of Christianity. So when someone is reading along, and they come to a Hindu goddess named in the work, they are likely to think, "Oh okay, that is how it is. Good to know," and keep reading. But a large part of the story is the incongruity of the beliefs his characters hold (what they think Catholics believe about Mary), and what is true (what Catholics really believe about Mary). What the characters believe cause them to misinterpret many of the actions of others in the book. One of the characters, a Japanese tour guide in Indian, even muses on how his fellow Japanese probably don't understand what the meaning of religious practice is to Hindus, while he is (if I am reading the text properly) misunderstanding the practice himself.
So if you think Endo was a sloppy writer, you may come to the conclusion that the book is about all religions lead to the same place and we should all get along. But if you think Endo was purposeful in his craft, then that leads to some more interesting questions.
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booklady
2,200 reviews · 65 followers
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September 9, 2019
After reading my friend Dhanaraj Rajan's review of this book I knew I wanted to read this.
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Thiên Di
71 reviews · 56 followers
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May 7, 2019
một cuốn sách Người đã gửi tới cho tôi để trả lời cho câu hỏi mà tôi luôn canh cánh trong lòng và luôn hỏi Người. và hệt như cách nghĩ khi đó ai hỏi tôi vì sao tôi yêu Người: bởi vì Người là một người đau khổ, đau khổ hơn tất cả chúng ta, và đau khổ như thế nhưng Người luôn yêu tôi.
cuốn sách hay ở chỗ tác giả kết nối mọi nền văn hóa với một tình yêu thương bàng bạc xuyên thấm, khiến ta xúc động
"...Ngài không duyên dáng, không oai vệ
Ngài bị khinh khi, và là đồ phế bỏ của người đời,
con người đớn đau và những ốm o xo bại,
như một kẻ có gặp chúng tôi thì lo giấu mặt
bị khinh khi, và chúng tôi đã chẳng đếm xỉa
Trái lại, chính các bệnh tật của chúng tôi, Ngài đã mang
chính các đau khổ của chúng tôi, Ngài đã vác..."
(Isaiah 53:2-4)
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S.
5 books · 66 followers
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December 13, 2013
it's been reported in literary papers or sections that an unofficial "twenty-year rule" applies to the Nobel Prize in Literature-- that is, every twenty years or so (unless it was every twenty-five years, and I'm misremembering), the Nobel Literature Prize committee "has" to award the prize to a Japanese writer. such would not be unvelieable. if I remember the WP entry on the NPL correctly, the first twenty years of the prize were entirely Sweden or Sweden-Norway specific, until the realization slowly dawned that the entire world was watching what was then the only true international prize, and a large cash bonus to boot. Japan is 10% of the world economy and possibly that percentage of major world literature in sales, and perhaps more importantly to the publishing world at large, it highly respects copyright and will even invest in projects requiring half of all royalties be sent abroad.
the first big postwar duel apparently erupted between YASUNARI KAWABATA (the master of elegiac, short little pieces capturing Japanese uniqueness and intricate social minueting) and his protégée YUKIO MISHIMA (who wrote longer, more ambitious plot-filled novels about grief and longing). literary scholars, after decades of scholarship on both, probabliy feel the Prize was mis-awarded-- MISHIMA, despite his vainglorious death, is more highly referenced and influential; more writers fifty years on list him as "influence," whereas Kawabata, while known to the entire community, is more the origami-expert of the intricate fold.
today of course the central Nobel story is HARUKI MURAKAMI vs. HARUKI MURAKAMI. as in, will the Nobel Prize award the medal to HM or will it fail to act in time. no other name is seriously floated in contention.
the 1980s battle is interesting on a different level. both KENZABURO OE (the eventual winner) and ENDO SHUSAKU are a bit less read today and considered a step down from the KAWABATA-MISHIMA showdown. OE represented secular sociality and ENDO heretical Christianity. but aside from this issue, there is the overall sense of aesthetics in each's work, and of course the philosophy.
this is a book about five Japanese pilgrims to the Ganges and the "case" of each, describing the spiritual concerns and life events that bring them all to India for a brief trip. it begins "on the airplane" and then explores the background and history of each.
endo's other work I've read although a 3/5 non-fiction/fiction piece (literary analysis and just literature), always inspires rounds of conversation in artistic dinners.
this work is more just a very solid 5/5 lit work
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Huy
731 reviews
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December 23, 2018
Mình là một người không tin vào Tôn giáo, không tin vào những đấng linh thiêng hay tối cao. Và mình lúc nào cũng thấy thắc mắc khi gặp những người sùng đạo và tin tưởng vào những bậc cao hơn, và mãi không bao giờ hiểu được, một người vô thần như mình đọc những cuốn sách kiểu này, dĩ nhiên là sẽ không thấy thích.
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George
2,116 reviews
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December 12, 2022
3.5 stars. An original, intelligent, character based novel about Japanese tourists undergoing varieties of life crisis, visiting the river Ganges, at Varanasi, India, during the week of the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister. All the characters seek reconciliation, self acceptance or fulfillment.
One character is a World War 2 veteran haunted by memories of his experiences in Burma, another, Isobe, is coming to terms with his wife’s death from cancer and her comments on reincarnation. Otsu, a Japanese Catholic, never fully accepted by the church elders, has followed his faith in God, to India. Misuko is a woman seeking forgiveness for once seducing Otsu in a frivolous attempt to undermine his faith when she was a student.
This book was first published in 1993.
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David Rush
333 reviews · 30 followers
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December 17, 2017
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Matthew 5:5
Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles 1 Corinthians 1:22-25
I wonder at the faith and Christianity of Shusaku Endo a thoughtful, reflectfull Japanese Christian. Did he feel as at odds with his faith and heritage as the central character, Otso, of Deep Rivet?Did he feel himself as outcast as Otsu who identified with the lowest caste of India?
I will draw a conclusion that Endo found the essence of Christ in the suffering sacrifice rather that the victorious resurrected champion of the prosperity gospel. I think Endo saw “true” Christianity in the comfort of the poor and meek.
I think more people would NOT like this book than do. In Endo's world the avenues of success only bring a hollow happiness. In my (American) world the general feel I get is that the Christianity brings a victorious uplifting life full of prosperity. Endo would have none of that. For him you only get to the truth by embracing the poor and outcast.
So....do you think this life is a project of empirical pluses and minuses and the point is to end up with a positive when you die? And the “authentic” life is one that discounts anything that is not measurable, and religion is at best an illusion and at worst the bane of humanity?
If so, this book will be nonsense to you.
Are your religions beliefs secure and do they provide reason and stability that explains everything? If so, this book will be nonsense to you.
There are a number of “themes” involving connecting with something. First, for Otsu, is the notion that Christ is found most clearly in the rejected. Which leads him, as a Catholic priest, to be shunned by his order and end up adopting the clothes of a Hindu untouchable who's only task is to carry other discarded, poor, and dying people to the river Ganges just before they die.
And then there is this idea that our existence is actually a river of humanity and we are all trying to connect with it. I think Endo is saying we use most of our energy avoiding the very things that really do give us the connection to everything else we need.
For Miss Naruse she wants to experience actual love, not the kind that is actually a role that people adopt with enthusiasm.
For Mr Kiguchi it is honoring his fellow Japanese soldiers who suffered a burtal retreat in WWII in Burma.
For Mr Numada it is a mystical connection with nature embodied by a Myna bird.
And finally for Mr Isobe, he is only recognizing his connection with his wife after she dies after telling him to look for her to be reborn somewhere in the world.
If I were to write a high school report about it I think I would come up with something about the Deep River of the the Ganges is much like life itself. And that the road of death Mr. Kiguchi was on is also much like life itself. In that we will all die sometime.
If you are sure of yourself, in your belief or non-belief...then you will think this book is nonsense. But for those of us you inexplicably think what the world tells us about itself is most likely wrong...well, you might end up loving this book.
Quotes...
After living nearly five years in a foreign country, I can't help but be struck by the clarity and logic of the way Europeans think, but it seems to me as an Asian that there's something they have lost sight of with their excessive clarity and their over abundance of logic, and I just can't go along with it....in the final analysis, the faith of the Europeans is conscious and rational, and these people reject anything they cannot slice into categories with their rationality. Pg117
But an Asian like me just can't make sharp distinctions and pass judgment on everything the way they do. Pg118
Every time I look at the River Ganges, I think of my Onion (Christ). The Ganges swallows up the ashes of every personas it flows along, rejecting neither the beggar woman who stretches out her finger-less hands for the murdered prime minister Gandhi. The river of love that is my Onion flows past, accepting all, rejecting neither the ugliest of men nor the filthiest. Pg 185
The Onion had died many long years ago, but he had been reborn in the lives of other people. Even after nearly two thousand years had passed, he had been reborn in those nuns, and had been reborn in Otsu. And just as Otsu had been taken off to a hospital on a litter, the nuns likewise disappeared in the river of people. Pg 215
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Chinook
2,242 reviews · 19 followers
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January 24, 2018
For a short book, Deep River covers a lot. It’s interesting to be gazing through a window at the lives of these Japanese men and women as they themselves gaze through a window at Europeans (mostly French) and Indians. The main themes of the book are religion and grief - characters contemplate rebirth, Japanese Buddhism, the differences between Japanese Christianity and European Christianity, Hinduism and a few personal constructions, like the man who thinks of God as being in communion with nature and a woman who eventually decides that humanity is all connected in their river of sorrows.
But the book also touches on the horrors of war, on marriage, of generational gaps in Japan, on sex and love, on work and its discontents, on travel and being respectful of new cultures. It is heavily influenced by two books, Moira and Thérèse Desqueyroux, which influence and mirror one woman’s choices.
Japanese novels tend, for me, to be somewhat hard to understand at a fundamental level - there always seems to be something presented as a universal feeling or action that baffles me. In this novel it’s the bullying of Otsu, which seems to the students to be inevitable and amusing. The tour guide later takes a similar attitude towards the tourists, one of wanting to have revenge against them for no reason that makes sense to me. It’s also sometimes hard to wrap my mind around the male-female relationships presented in Japanese novels.
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Tereza
139 reviews · 13 followers
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February 1, 2020
Moje první seznámení s Endóem (paradoxně s jeho poslední knihou) a hned láska na první začtení. Příběh o ztrátách a hledání, pošetilých tužbách srdce, o pomíjivosti času - to všechno na pozadí uměřeného Japonska, pořádkumilovné Francie a barevné, nespoutané a neuchopitelné Indie. Přečtěte si ji!
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Brennan
178 reviews · 2 followers
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November 13, 2021
Endo's infamous final novel, that had many quibbling over whether he finally abandoned the strict perimeters of Catholicism for a more generous pluralism/ecumenism. After all the reading I did for thesis, it seems inconclusive. His wife Junko indicates in a reflection a few years after his death that the pluralist beliefs of Otsū in Deep River are Endo's own. But a 1994 interview (the year of the novel's publication) with his close friend (and translator) William Johnston, Endo is recorded as saying "I have no doubt that dialogue is a very fine thing. But it has its limits. After all, when we Christians talk to Buddhists and learn from them, we must know where to draw the line. I would like to hear something about that." All that to say we can't really know. Nor should we.
I enjoyed the novel, but its cast of characters fell flat for me. I did not find them meticulously drawn or movingly real. Their monologues and dialogues were stilted. I always wonder what is lost in translation. Certain decisions by Gessel are odd--words like "pendulous" and "pestilential" stick out sorely. I did find the novel's cliffhanger ending reminiscent of Mark's gospel, an indication that Endo's spirituality remained Christocentric. Better than Volcano, worse than The Sea and Poison.
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Nguyet Minh
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August 22, 2021
Sông Hằng - một dòng sông linh thiêng của người Ấn giáo, là nơi mà dòng chảy của nó đón nhận tất cả những sinh mệnh bất kể đẳng cấp hay địa vị, là nơi mà dù xa đến đâu, dù bằng nhiều phương tiện khác nhau, người Ấn giáo nhất định phải tìm về để chết, để chờ chết hoặc để ngụp lặn tắm rửa trong đó với niềm tin sâu sắc rằng dòng nước thiêng ấy sẽ rửa sạch mọi tội lỗi và nghiệp chướng, tro của người qua đời được rải xuống sông sẽ giúp họ thoát khỏi kiếp luân hồi.
Nhóm du khách Nhật với những nghề nghiệp, hoàn cảnh và câu chuyện khác nhau cùng tham gia một tour du lịch đến Ấn Độ với những mục đích riêng nhưng có vẻ như đều liên quan đến việc kiếm tìm. Đó là ông Isobe mất đi người vợ và lời trăn trối của vợ về việc sẽ tái sinh và mong muốn ông hãy đi tìm bà. Đó là Mitsuko, nữ hộ lý vô thần dù đã kết hôn nhưng chưa bao giờ tìm thấy cảm xúc hoặc tình yêu đích thực của đời mình, cô là người đàn bà mà “ngọn lửa ân ái chẳng bao giờ cháy lên được.” Trong sự trống rỗng đó, cô luôn nghĩ đến Ootsu, một người bạn cũ với đức tin to lớn với Chúa và chỉ mong trở thành linh mục để tận hiến cho đức tin ấy. Cô đi tìm anh tại một tu viện ở Vasanari. Đó là ông Numata, một người chuyên viết chuyện đồng thoại, thế giới đồng thoại ông tạo ra sẽ dẫn ông thoát khỏi những mâu thuẫn và sự tàn bạo của cuộc sống với bệnh tật và mất mát. Đó là ông Kiguchi - một cựu chiến binh ở chiến trường Miến Điện năm xưa với ám ảnh khôn nguôi về đồng đội đã chết, về việc chứng kiến cảnh ăn thịt người của nhau để tồn tại và có sức giúp kẻ khác. Và đó là cặp vợ chồng nhiếp ảnh gia Sajou, tiêu biểu cho lớp trẻ chuộng chủ nghĩa thực dụng. Họ chỉ đơn giản đến Ấn Độ vì tò mò và mua sắm vài thứ kỷ niệm với thái độ khinh miệt nền văn hoá này.
Trưởng đoàn là anh chàng hướng dẫn viên Enami, người gắn bó với Ấn Độ nhiều năm và am hiểu văn hoá của nó đủ để bảo vệ nó khỏi sự khinh miệt từ khách Nhật. Anh có một khái niệm lạ lùng về thiên nhiên Ấn Độ, đó là vẻ “dâm tính” của nó, luôn “có cái gì đó cứ kích thích dục tính, âm ỉ trong cái không khí nóng bức của xứ Ấn”, xứ mà thiên nhiên mang hai mặt: sáng tạo và phá hủy. Khi sống lâu trong một nền văn hoá nào đó, người ta dễ trở nên sùng bái nó và định kiến với những quan điểm khác.
Tất cả họ tìm đến Vasanari, một thành phố rất Ấn Độ trong lòng Ấn Độ để trải nghiệm không gian thánh địa linh thiêng, nơi các dòng chảy giao nhau nhưng cũng là nơi mà tín ngưỡng và thực tế tạo thành những mảng đối lập của sạch sẽ và dơ dáy, từ bi và tàn nhẫn. Người ta tìm về Ấn Độ bởi hy vọng khám phá khởi nguồn của Phật giáo nguyên thuỷ nhưng những âm hưởng và tàn dư còn sót lại đã bị che lấp bởi Ấn giáo khổng lồ. Vậy nên, những vị khách ấy đã trở nên thất vọng và thờ ơ. Ông Isobe không ngừng thầm gọi vợ trong niềm mong mỏi gặp lại “tái sinh” của bà dọc bờ sông Hằng. Mitsuko vô tình gặp lại anh bạn linh mục trong một hình hài khác như một người Ấn giáo thực thụ với những xác chết vác trên vai đưa họ về dòng sông Ấn giáo, về với Chúa trong tâm thức của riêng anh. Những đám người ăn xin bị bệnh phong cùi, những xác động vật trôi sông, sự nóng bức ngột ngạt từ những giàn thiêu lộ thiên cùng mùi người sống, mùi tử khí tạo nên một bức tranh hỗn độn không thể tìm được ở nơi nào khác trên thế giới khi mà sự trật tự và ngăn nắp đã trở thành tiêu chuẩn.
Ông Numata chưa bao giờ cho rằng thiên nhiên là tàn bạo, ngược lại nó hẳn là cầu nối sự sống và con người. Ông đi tìm mua một con nhồng hoang để phóng sinh nó trở về với tự nhiên, là cách ông trả ơn cho việc giữ được sinh mệnh của mình qua bệnh hiểm nghèo. Còn Kiguchi chỉ mong mỏi tìm đến một ngôi chùa để cầu siêu cho các chiến sĩ tử trận năm xưa. Với tín đồ Ấn giáo, hữu ngạn sông Hằng mới chính là nơi linh thiêng nhất, còn tả ngạn biểu tượng cho sự dơ dáy.
Xuyên suốt câu truyện là những quan điểm tôn giáo và trăn trở về thần học trái ngược nhau của những người cùng dân tộc. Trong đó có cả Kito giáo, Phật giáo, Ấn giáo và cả vô thần. Đức tin như một tấm thảm được trải ra cho tất cả mọi người. Có kẻ chọn đi lên nó, có kẻ thích đi ở bên ngoài bằng đôi chân trần của mình. Niềm yêu kính một tôn giáo là thứ tình cảm tự nguyện và bền chặt của một cá nhân với đức tin đó, còn kẻ vô thần là một vị khách đứng bên ngoài quan sát bằng đôi mắt khách quan. Cũng có lúc, khi cuộc sống vắng bóng tâm tình hay chẳng còn gì để bấu víu vào nữa, người ta định hướng lại lối sống, chọn cách quay về với nơi họ từng thờ ơ, để tìm những kết nối tâm linh lấp đầy lại cảm giác cô đơn trống rỗng.
Cuộc đời đã sắp xếp sẵn mọi việc một cách thứ tự mà người sống trong đó chẳng thể biết trước được. Người rời bỏ thế gian sẽ không bao giờ có cơ hội được biết người còn sống sẽ phải đối diện với điều gì. Ý vị thâm sâu của đời sống chỉ có thể đến khi có nhiều đánh đổi và mất mát. Chỉ tình yêu son sắt mới khiến người ta chôn sâu ước nguyện được tái sinh để gặp lại người thương, để tiếp tục tha thiết và gắn bó.
Dọc bờ sông Hằng, họ ném đi ảo ảnh và tìm thấy thực tế chồng chất lên nhau, “tái sinh” hay hoàn toàn biến mất đều là thứ trực cảm tâm linh nằm trong sâu thẳm mỗi người. Vợ chồng nhiếp ảnh gia Sajou không đại diện cho bất cứ hình thức tâm linh nào, bất chấp mất mát đau buồn của người khác để thỏa mãn cho những đòi hỏi tầm thường của bản thân, vô tình đưa chàng linh mục Ootsu cận kề cái chết khi vừa phải bảo vệ sự trong sạch cho người chết đến thói hám danh của kẻ sống. Cuối truyện là sự kiện bà tổng thống Indira Gandhi bị ám sát đẩy niềm tin tôn giáo lẫn thực tế xã hội với bất đồng, bất bình đẳng lên đỉnh điểm. Dẫu là người đàn bà ăn xin rụng hết ngón tay hay bà thủ tướng bị ám sát cũng đều trở về với dòng sông Hằng, nơi đón nhận cả điều tốt đẹp lẫn nhơ bẩn.
Và hành trình tìm kiếm của nhóm khách Nhật ấy cũng khép lại. Điều họ tìm thấy chính là việc phải tiếp tục tồn tại với một tâm thế khác.
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Emilia P
1,705 reviews · 49 followers
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August 9, 2012
Dang, yo.
Shusaku Endo wrote this book I read called SILENCE. It's about Catholic missionaries to Japan in like the 1600s and it's kinda boring and pretty one-note but also well written and about an important culture clash. Shusaku Endo, a Japanese Catholic, is an intriguing character himself, and so one is impelled to read more of his work. Especially since it's featured in Season 6 of Lost. And with good reason.
Silence was written in the 60s and Deep River was written in the 90s. The openness and full-heartedness of the latter belies a man with the wisdom and sadness and understanding of a whole life between these books - but it's still very clearly the same dude -- a person who cares about faith and the soul, in a way that is very Japanese and un-Japanese at the same time.
I tried to explain this to my cooly-Japanophile husband - to say this book was about how Japanese people are so focused on appearing calm and collected on the surface but are tumultuous and sad and beautiful underneath, and that perhaps that calm exterior itself signals, hints at, a profundity of soul which we openly emotional Westerners can only dream about. So that's what I thought this book captured really well -- everyone suffers, and here is a story about how four or five (or six or seven!) emphatically Japanese people suffered, in their own cultural context, mostly in silence and bitterness, and how they dealt with it by tapping into the life-force which connects us across cultures, ages, faiths (there's a Japanese Catholic priest who dresses up like a Hindu to carry bodies to the creamation grounds, to wit) , etc, while on a trip to the Ganges, the river of rebirth, in India. It sounds hippy-dippy, but it isn't. It's about how big our small little lives are -- it's a character study above all, no big sweeping things happen in it, in the end. It's about accepting and bearing suffering, and trying to love. It's kind of sad. But it's sweet.
There's a quote on the back about how Endo is unsentimental, yet sympathetic, and that's a mark of great writing. I have to agree. This is a wonderful book. Read it, yo.
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Nick
489 reviews · 36 followers
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November 22, 2011
A group of Japanese tourists travel to India to visit historic sites from the life of the Buddha, without realizing that there are few modern Buddhists there. They wind up in Varanasi, by the side of the sacred, polluted Ganges, where people go to die. The group includes Isobe, who is looking for his reincarnated wife, who he ignored when she was alive and Mitsuko, who has found emptiness in a series of personae: hedonistic student, wife, volunteer at a hospital. Least affecting is Numada, a author of children's books and haunted by the fate of animals. Kiguchi's story is riveting, as he struggles not just with the memories of surviving the war in Burma, but of the soldier who sacrificed everything to save him. A thoughtful, meditative book, focussed on the struggle to define what truly matters, but not without a sly humor, as the fastidious Japanese try and mostly fail to cope with the overwhelming mass of humanity that is India, along with the comic foils, a pair of married tourists, her wishing to be in France, he trying to establish himself as a photographer. A book that lingers in the mind.
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A.K. Kulshreshth
7 books · 54 followers
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April 27, 2020
This is a great work. I listened to the audio book and will also read the print version.
Four very diverse characters, all Japanese, end up on a visit to the holy city of Varanasi, on the banks of the sacred river Ganga. Each of them has a different motive. In my interpretation, they get what they wanted to varying degrees, with none of them finding easy answers.
This is a book that works at many levels - from its range of settings in India, Japan, France, Burma and Manchuria, to its chronicling of events from Second World War Burma to Indira Gandhi's assassination and its characters and story arch. Two of its characters - Mitsuke and Otsu - are particularly fascinating.
It is necessary to mention that there are plenty of bloopers in this work. For example, the harmonium is not similar to a harmonica, contrary to Mr. Endo's assertion (assuming the translator is not to blame). In the audio book, Ganga is pronounced Gaan-Jaa. That is wrong, which is bad enough, but Gaanjaa also has a meaning. It means Opium in Hindi (and in other Indian languages)...
I put down the bloopers to poor quality control, and still rate this work highly because of its many strengths.
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Aubrey
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December 18, 2015
There is death. Yet, there is also life. There are long emotionally dead passages. Yet, there are also moments so charged with feeling they consume all in their path, carry them along for a bit and then leave behind ones willing to do anything to catch up. You have the search for reincarnated love ones, the search for emotional fulfillment, the search to reconcile death with life, the search for atonement, each person ever searching for something omnipresent in its never clearly defined state. And on it goes, this one period of time accepting all parts of life into its midst; the river mentioned in the pages embodies this, and will take everything in without spitting out any straightforward conclusions of its own. This is definitely a novel that won't get very far with a reader without some interpretation on their part; it is only fully enjoyed if one can see their own life experiences within the pages, and leave with a new understanding of just what it means to exist.
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Kristel
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December 7, 2019
This is the second book that I have read by Roman Catholic, Japanese Author Shūsaku Endō. His books, Silence and Deep River are both included on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. Endō explores religion, especially Catholicism and the Japanese culture in his writings. In this book, set during the time period when Indira Ghandi, prime minister of India, was assassinated examines the lives of 4 Japanese who are on a tour to India to visit Buddhist sites.
1. Osamu Isobe, a man looking for his reincarnated wife.
2. Mitsuko Naruse, a former housewife who takes a trip both as a pilgrimage and to see her ex-boyfriend Otsu as atonement for mistreating him
3. Numada, a bird watcher who wants to set a bird in his possession free.
4. Kiguchi, a former WWII Imperial Japanese Army soldier.
These characters are on a journey, a pilgrimage and it is the story of their individual pilgrimage. The deep river is the Ganges where all peoples are taken in and flow together.
This was an interesting book and look at both Japanese and Indian culture. One point the author makes; I think, is that all Gods are the same God and that in seeking God, no matter which God, that Jesus is born again in that person. Another point in the book is that peoples, cultures, and religions are at odds with each other and in the best circumstances, conflict remains. I personally did not enjoy the descriptions of the river but also believe that the author did an excellent job of painting the picture of the river bank and of India (without using the camera). This book did not inspire me to want to visit India.
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Pip
428 reviews · 7 followers
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January 11, 2018
I found this novel so much more powerful that Silence, which was about a group of Portuguese missionaries who were tortured in Seventeenth Century Japan. Endo, a practising Catholic, returns to the theme of forcing a Christian to deny one's faith, an idea which seems quaintly anachronistic now, but which he must feel strongly about to reintroduce it again. This time he tracks a group of Japanese on a pilgrimage to Buddhist Holy Sites in India. One of them had ignored his wife until her dying plea for him to look for her reincarnated self allowed Endo an opportunity to explore the idea of reincarnation. Another protagonist is a children's novelist with an affinity for animals who believes that a mynah bird sacrificed himself so that the author could live. Although he is not Christian the sacrifice of Jesus is mirrored in his story. A third pilgrim had suffered atrociously in Burma. His life was saved by a comrade who ate human flesh in order to survive (another Christian symbol) but became an alcoholic because his guilt was terrible. The fourth protagonist is a woman who believes she has no capacity for love. She seems to be following a student friend whom she had seduced and then dumped after forcing him to deny his faith. That he should also be in Varanasi, striving to live a meaningful life by helping the Untouchables carry bodies to the Ghats, and that he should die saving a clueless tour member who is insensitively trying to photograph the funeral pyres, stretches coincidence to the limits, but the whole works because it is a nifty way to talk about contrasting religious beliefs.
I listened to an Audible version, read by David Holt. He was a pleasure to listen to, my only carp being that when he spoke as the clueless Japanese tourist he used an English dialect which seemed forced to me, but that was a minor quibble. The Deep River of the title was the Ganges, of course, but it also was the river of humanity, flowing on, absorbing individuals ceaselessly despite their various beliefs and idiosyncracies.
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Wen Cof
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November 17, 2014
Shusaku Endo’s book Deep River is about a journey to the river Ganges with a collection of tourists immersed in their own private spiritual struggles. Each character presents a face of spirituality as a whole. The characters face uncomfortable spiritual questions that aren’t always neatly answered. I loved the book because it brings together ideas of Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism.
Not only are the questions uncomfortable, so are the characters. The young woman Mitsuko, is so cruel, I almost stopped reading the book. But I’m glad I continued, because I realized that what she displays on the outside, so many of us are really hiding on the inside. She comments that the chaos and disorder of India is comforting to her, while the neatly organized gardens of Paris are disconcerting. There is something comforting about the chaos of India to Mitsuko, and there is something comforting about the chaos of the book to the reader. It jangles and fits together at odd angles. The ending is not a neat bow on a package, but is left open the reader to write their own conclusion.
So why did I love this book with ugly characters and an inharmonious plot? Because it didn’t try to explain or mollify their questions – it just took me on a journey as a reader through their process, and allowed me to draw my own conclusions about right, wrong, good, evil, life and death. It allowed me to also travel to the Ganges and observe and reflect.
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Christopher
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July 23, 2012
Another book I started with high hopes which failed to live up to my expectations. Endo's characters all end up seeming contrived and sometimes ridiculous in their actions and dialogue as the stories progress and they make their pilgrimages to the Hindu and Buddhist holy sites along the Ganges. I was hoping for some insight into Christianity as it is viewed and experienced in Japan and the Orient but was instead treated to an individual's ecumenistic dreams. And I think maybe he sets up some of his characters as straw men to let us all know what he thinks of modern materialistic Japan. The character's backgrounds are all somewhat interesting and I think Endo writes very well (or has been translated very well). However, no great events happen, no deep thoughts are offered, no great revelations are found, and ultimately, the book ends up being a rather boring read. I saw another review somewhere before I started reading this that said: "Deep River, Shallow Story" - I agree. It's not your everyday pulpish junk, so I bumped up the 2.5 stars to 3. I can't imagine spending time on another Endo work again.
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Long On Air
104 reviews · 37 followers
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January 31, 2020
Một quá trình cuốn hút bằng đậm đặc câu chuyện, đậm đặc trải nghiệm. Cái kết hay cụ thể hơn là câu trả lời cho trường hợp của từng nhân vật đều rất hay, ý nghĩa nhưng có phần hơi ngắn gọn. Khi đọc về cuối, thoáng qua mong muốn tác giả sẽ viết kĩ hơn, sâu hơn về tâm lí, cảm xúc từng nhân vật như ở phần đầu.
Nhưng có thể đấy là dụng ý của Endo Shusaku. Nhiều khi cách mà chúng ta đi qua mỗi trải nghiệm đã là một câu trả lời rồi, nên đến cuối cùng không cần phải diễn giải quá nhiều chăng?
Đặc biệt yêu thích cấu trúc của cuốn sách. Cách tác giả sắp xếp để từng nhân vật, từng câu chuyện xuất hiện rất thú vị. Các giá trị văn hoá, tôn giáo, tâm linh được truyền tải tinh tế, vừa vặn, không gây sự choáng ngợp hay cảm giác khó tiếp nhận cho độc giả.
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Melissa
1,067 reviews · 72 followers
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January 30, 2018
A very interesting study in faith as seen through the eyes of a group of Japanese tourists to India as they recall pivotal moments of their lives, experiences, and their personal struggles as they try to reconnect with past acquaintances, past loves, and reconcile past traumas through the lens of different faiths and depths of faith as they visit the intersection of Asian faith, with Buddhism, Catholicism, and Hinduism.
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Book Wormy
1,340 reviews · 18 followers
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December 26, 2019
For me this book was an interesting exploration of religious beliefs and how they are more alike than different when you break it down and look into it. We start by exploring Christianity and the idea of sacrificing yourself for a higher good before moving on to look at Buddhism and the ideas of reincarnation eventually we end up in India with Hinduism and the caste system which while there is a strict hierarchy kept in life in death everyone is equal and the River Ganges accepts all souls with no questions asked.
The Japanese tourists on the pilgrimage all have different reasons for going to India and while some personal quests are successful others (on the surface are not) everyone in the group is changed by the experience.
I liked the way the back stories of everyone on the trip are slowly revealed and how they all have subtle connections to each other. India is also beautifully bought to love in all her beauty and all her ugliness
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Joanne Fate
318 reviews · 3 followers
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January 22, 2021
This isn't my first Shusaku Endo book, and it won't be my last. The book starts with chapters that could be short stories in and of themselves. The main characters are all Japanese. Endo brings most of them to India on a tour. There's a lot about religions in this book. Endo was Roman Catholic, living in a mostly Buddhist country. When they travel to India they tour many religious places.
Parts of this book are sad. There's talk of death and the afterlife. The writing transcends all that. It is beautifully written and profound.
I'll stop there. I'm listening through the alphabet, partly to try to get to some books that have been in my library for a while.
I loved the narration as well. It suited the book.
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Emma Much
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April 15, 2022
very nice
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Ana Rita Ramos
140 reviews · 2 followers
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December 28, 2021
Lindíssimo.
Pessoas com motivações e histórias de vida muito diferentes partem para a Índia para se encontrarem dentro de si mesmas e/ ou para buscarem alguém. É-nos feita através dos seus olhos uma visita à Índia pobre e ao rio Ganges onde todos os indianos anseiam terminar a sua existência.
Um livro forte no conteúdo e no significado cheio de mensagens profundas e ensinamentos.
Quando terminei fiquei com a sensação de querer mais.
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Brent
91 reviews · 1 follower
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June 18, 2020
Unreliable narrator is a term many people are probably familiar with from literature class. It doesn't quite cover what is happening in this novel though, as it is written in third person. So the narrator is giving you, the reader, a (fairly) accurate view of the thoughts and actions of the characters (or at least an accurate view of the thoughts and the actions that each character finds to be important), but the characters in the story are, to varying degrees, rather unreliable.
They have incorrect knowledge that informs their thinking and decision making. They have prejudices and desires, and these prejudices and desire color the events they chose to focus on in the story. Many of the reviews have comments as, "Endo says..." or "the author is saying."
Endo is not saying anything in this book the way the statement, "Endo says..." would imply. Yes he wrote the story, and collected sections out of the lives of his characters, but it is his characters that are saying and doing things. Endo means something and it is our job as a reader to try and understand what he means by selections of events and thoughts that he choose to weave into a story.
For example, characters make statements about the various religions in the book, that as far as their knowledge and understanding goes, they believe to be true. Some of these statements are true and some of them are demonstrably false. As a reader you can choose two options, Endo didn't bother to do his homework and made some mistakes (or some variation there of), or he knew the statement was false, but allowed his character to say it because it was something his character believed.
Depending on which option you choose, it will change how you interpret the book. There is also a risk involved because if you the reader does not know that the character is mistaken, you are less likely to ask further questions of the text.
In the story there is one, and possibly two, character(s) who believe that Mary is a Goddess in the Roman Catholic Church. This is a common confusion that many people have, even other non-Roman Catholic Christians can misunderstand who Roman Catholics believe.
But Endo was a Roman Catholic and he knew what he believed. So why would his characters state the Mary was a Goddess? If it is something that other Christian misunderstand about Roman Catholics, think how confusing it must be for someone who doesn't come from a Christian background (as most of his characters don't) to try to understand Mary's place in Roman Catholic theology.
That is just the Christian misunderstanding his characters have. Some of them make equally incorrect statements about Hinduism and Buddhism. And here is where part of the problem may be, Western readers are probably as ignorant of Hinduism and Buddhism as Asian readers are likely to be of Christianity. So when someone is reading along, and they come to a Hindu goddess named in the work, they are likely to think, "Oh okay, that is how it is. Good to know," and keep reading. But a large part of the story is the incongruity of the beliefs his characters hold (what they think Catholics believe about Mary), and what is true (what Catholics really believe about Mary). What the characters believe cause them to misinterpret many of the actions of others in the book. One of the characters, a Japanese tour guide in Indian, even muses on how his fellow Japanese probably don't understand what the meaning of religious practice is to Hindus, while he is (if I am reading the text properly) misunderstanding the practice himself.
So if you think Endo was a sloppy writer, you may come to the conclusion that the book is about all religions lead to the same place and we should all get along. But if you think Endo was purposeful in his craft, then that leads to some more interesting questions.
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George
2,116 reviews
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December 12, 2022
3.5 stars. An original, intelligent, character based novel about Japanese tourists undergoing varieties of life crisis, visiting the river Ganges, at Varanasi, India, during the week of the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister. All the characters seek reconciliation, self acceptance or fulfillment.
One character is a World War 2 veteran haunted by memories of his experiences in Burma, another, Isobe, is coming to terms with his wife’s death from cancer and her comments on reincarnation. Otsu, a Japanese Catholic, never fully accepted by the church elders, has followed his faith in God, to India. Misuko is a woman seeking forgiveness for once seducing Otsu in a frivolous attempt to undermine his faith when she was a student.
This book was first published in 1993.
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David Rush
333 reviews · 30 followers
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December 17, 2017
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Matthew 5:5
Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles 1 Corinthians 1:22-25
I wonder at the faith and Christianity of Shusaku Endo a thoughtful, reflectfull Japanese Christian. Did he feel as at odds with his faith and heritage as the central character, Otso, of Deep Rivet?Did he feel himself as outcast as Otsu who identified with the lowest caste of India?
I will draw a conclusion that Endo found the essence of Christ in the suffering sacrifice rather that the victorious resurrected champion of the prosperity gospel. I think Endo saw “true” Christianity in the comfort of the poor and meek.
I think more people would NOT like this book than do. In Endo's world the avenues of success only bring a hollow happiness. In my (American) world the general feel I get is that the Christianity brings a victorious uplifting life full of prosperity. Endo would have none of that. For him you only get to the truth by embracing the poor and outcast.
So....do you think this life is a project of empirical pluses and minuses and the point is to end up with a positive when you die? And the “authentic” life is one that discounts anything that is not measurable, and religion is at best an illusion and at worst the bane of humanity?
If so, this book will be nonsense to you.
Are your religions beliefs secure and do they provide reason and stability that explains everything? If so, this book will be nonsense to you.
There are a number of “themes” involving connecting with something. First, for Otsu, is the notion that Christ is found most clearly in the rejected. Which leads him, as a Catholic priest, to be shunned by his order and end up adopting the clothes of a Hindu untouchable who's only task is to carry other discarded, poor, and dying people to the river Ganges just before they die.
And then there is this idea that our existence is actually a river of humanity and we are all trying to connect with it. I think Endo is saying we use most of our energy avoiding the very things that really do give us the connection to everything else we need.
For Miss Naruse she wants to experience actual love, not the kind that is actually a role that people adopt with enthusiasm.
For Mr Kiguchi it is honoring his fellow Japanese soldiers who suffered a burtal retreat in WWII in Burma.
For Mr Numada it is a mystical connection with nature embodied by a Myna bird.
And finally for Mr Isobe, he is only recognizing his connection with his wife after she dies after telling him to look for her to be reborn somewhere in the world.
If I were to write a high school report about it I think I would come up with something about the Deep River of the the Ganges is much like life itself. And that the road of death Mr. Kiguchi was on is also much like life itself. In that we will all die sometime.
If you are sure of yourself, in your belief or non-belief...then you will think this book is nonsense. But for those of us you inexplicably think what the world tells us about itself is most likely wrong...well, you might end up loving this book.
Quotes...
After living nearly five years in a foreign country, I can't help but be struck by the clarity and logic of the way Europeans think, but it seems to me as an Asian that there's something they have lost sight of with their excessive clarity and their over abundance of logic, and I just can't go along with it....in the final analysis, the faith of the Europeans is conscious and rational, and these people reject anything they cannot slice into categories with their rationality. Pg117
But an Asian like me just can't make sharp distinctions and pass judgment on everything the way they do. Pg118
Every time I look at the River Ganges, I think of my Onion (Christ). The Ganges swallows up the ashes of every personas it flows along, rejecting neither the beggar woman who stretches out her finger-less hands for the murdered prime minister Gandhi. The river of love that is my Onion flows past, accepting all, rejecting neither the ugliest of men nor the filthiest. Pg 185
The Onion had died many long years ago, but he had been reborn in the lives of other people. Even after nearly two thousand years had passed, he had been reborn in those nuns, and had been reborn in Otsu. And just as Otsu had been taken off to a hospital on a litter, the nuns likewise disappeared in the river of people. Pg 215
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Chinook
2,242 reviews · 19 followers
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January 24, 2018
For a short book, Deep River covers a lot. It’s interesting to be gazing through a window at the lives of these Japanese men and women as they themselves gaze through a window at Europeans (mostly French) and Indians. The main themes of the book are religion and grief - characters contemplate rebirth, Japanese Buddhism, the differences between Japanese Christianity and European Christianity, Hinduism and a few personal constructions, like the man who thinks of God as being in communion with nature and a woman who eventually decides that humanity is all connected in their river of sorrows.
But the book also touches on the horrors of war, on marriage, of generational gaps in Japan, on sex and love, on work and its discontents, on travel and being respectful of new cultures. It is heavily influenced by two books, Moira and Thérèse Desqueyroux, which influence and mirror one woman’s choices.
Japanese novels tend, for me, to be somewhat hard to understand at a fundamental level - there always seems to be something presented as a universal feeling or action that baffles me. In this novel it’s the bullying of Otsu, which seems to the students to be inevitable and amusing. The tour guide later takes a similar attitude towards the tourists, one of wanting to have revenge against them for no reason that makes sense to me. It’s also sometimes hard to wrap my mind around the male-female relationships presented in Japanese novels.
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Tereza
139 reviews · 13 followers
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February 1, 2020
Moje první seznámení s Endóem (paradoxně s jeho poslední knihou) a hned láska na první začtení. Příběh o ztrátách a hledání, pošetilých tužbách srdce, o pomíjivosti času - to všechno na pozadí uměřeného Japonska, pořádkumilovné Francie a barevné, nespoutané a neuchopitelné Indie. Přečtěte si ji!
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Brennan
178 reviews · 2 followers
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November 13, 2021
Endo's infamous final novel, that had many quibbling over whether he finally abandoned the strict perimeters of Catholicism for a more generous pluralism/ecumenism. After all the reading I did for thesis, it seems inconclusive. His wife Junko indicates in a reflection a few years after his death that the pluralist beliefs of Otsū in Deep River are Endo's own. But a 1994 interview (the year of the novel's publication) with his close friend (and translator) William Johnston, Endo is recorded as saying "I have no doubt that dialogue is a very fine thing. But it has its limits. After all, when we Christians talk to Buddhists and learn from them, we must know where to draw the line. I would like to hear something about that." All that to say we can't really know. Nor should we.
I enjoyed the novel, but its cast of characters fell flat for me. I did not find them meticulously drawn or movingly real. Their monologues and dialogues were stilted. I always wonder what is lost in translation. Certain decisions by Gessel are odd--words like "pendulous" and "pestilential" stick out sorely. I did find the novel's cliffhanger ending reminiscent of Mark's gospel, an indication that Endo's spirituality remained Christocentric. Better than Volcano, worse than The Sea and Poison.
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Nguyet Minh
168 reviews · 95 followers
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August 22, 2021
Sông Hằng - một dòng sông linh thiêng của người Ấn giáo, là nơi mà dòng chảy của nó đón nhận tất cả những sinh mệnh bất kể đẳng cấp hay địa vị, là nơi mà dù xa đến đâu, dù bằng nhiều phương tiện khác nhau, người Ấn giáo nhất định phải tìm về để chết, để chờ chết hoặc để ngụp lặn tắm rửa trong đó với niềm tin sâu sắc rằng dòng nước thiêng ấy sẽ rửa sạch mọi tội lỗi và nghiệp chướng, tro của người qua đời được rải xuống sông sẽ giúp họ thoát khỏi kiếp luân hồi.
Nhóm du khách Nhật với những nghề nghiệp, hoàn cảnh và câu chuyện khác nhau cùng tham gia một tour du lịch đến Ấn Độ với những mục đích riêng nhưng có vẻ như đều liên quan đến việc kiếm tìm. Đó là ông Isobe mất đi người vợ và lời trăn trối của vợ về việc sẽ tái sinh và mong muốn ông hãy đi tìm bà. Đó là Mitsuko, nữ hộ lý vô thần dù đã kết hôn nhưng chưa bao giờ tìm thấy cảm xúc hoặc tình yêu đích thực của đời mình, cô là người đàn bà mà “ngọn lửa ân ái chẳng bao giờ cháy lên được.” Trong sự trống rỗng đó, cô luôn nghĩ đến Ootsu, một người bạn cũ với đức tin to lớn với Chúa và chỉ mong trở thành linh mục để tận hiến cho đức tin ấy. Cô đi tìm anh tại một tu viện ở Vasanari. Đó là ông Numata, một người chuyên viết chuyện đồng thoại, thế giới đồng thoại ông tạo ra sẽ dẫn ông thoát khỏi những mâu thuẫn và sự tàn bạo của cuộc sống với bệnh tật và mất mát. Đó là ông Kiguchi - một cựu chiến binh ở chiến trường Miến Điện năm xưa với ám ảnh khôn nguôi về đồng đội đã chết, về việc chứng kiến cảnh ăn thịt người của nhau để tồn tại và có sức giúp kẻ khác. Và đó là cặp vợ chồng nhiếp ảnh gia Sajou, tiêu biểu cho lớp trẻ chuộng chủ nghĩa thực dụng. Họ chỉ đơn giản đến Ấn Độ vì tò mò và mua sắm vài thứ kỷ niệm với thái độ khinh miệt nền văn hoá này.
Trưởng đoàn là anh chàng hướng dẫn viên Enami, người gắn bó với Ấn Độ nhiều năm và am hiểu văn hoá của nó đủ để bảo vệ nó khỏi sự khinh miệt từ khách Nhật. Anh có một khái niệm lạ lùng về thiên nhiên Ấn Độ, đó là vẻ “dâm tính” của nó, luôn “có cái gì đó cứ kích thích dục tính, âm ỉ trong cái không khí nóng bức của xứ Ấn”, xứ mà thiên nhiên mang hai mặt: sáng tạo và phá hủy. Khi sống lâu trong một nền văn hoá nào đó, người ta dễ trở nên sùng bái nó và định kiến với những quan điểm khác.
Tất cả họ tìm đến Vasanari, một thành phố rất Ấn Độ trong lòng Ấn Độ để trải nghiệm không gian thánh địa linh thiêng, nơi các dòng chảy giao nhau nhưng cũng là nơi mà tín ngưỡng và thực tế tạo thành những mảng đối lập của sạch sẽ và dơ dáy, từ bi và tàn nhẫn. Người ta tìm về Ấn Độ bởi hy vọng khám phá khởi nguồn của Phật giáo nguyên thuỷ nhưng những âm hưởng và tàn dư còn sót lại đã bị che lấp bởi Ấn giáo khổng lồ. Vậy nên, những vị khách ấy đã trở nên thất vọng và thờ ơ. Ông Isobe không ngừng thầm gọi vợ trong niềm mong mỏi gặp lại “tái sinh” của bà dọc bờ sông Hằng. Mitsuko vô tình gặp lại anh bạn linh mục trong một hình hài khác như một người Ấn giáo thực thụ với những xác chết vác trên vai đưa họ về dòng sông Ấn giáo, về với Chúa trong tâm thức của riêng anh. Những đám người ăn xin bị bệnh phong cùi, những xác động vật trôi sông, sự nóng bức ngột ngạt từ những giàn thiêu lộ thiên cùng mùi người sống, mùi tử khí tạo nên một bức tranh hỗn độn không thể tìm được ở nơi nào khác trên thế giới khi mà sự trật tự và ngăn nắp đã trở thành tiêu chuẩn.
Ông Numata chưa bao giờ cho rằng thiên nhiên là tàn bạo, ngược lại nó hẳn là cầu nối sự sống và con người. Ông đi tìm mua một con nhồng hoang để phóng sinh nó trở về với tự nhiên, là cách ông trả ơn cho việc giữ được sinh mệnh của mình qua bệnh hiểm nghèo. Còn Kiguchi chỉ mong mỏi tìm đến một ngôi chùa để cầu siêu cho các chiến sĩ tử trận năm xưa. Với tín đồ Ấn giáo, hữu ngạn sông Hằng mới chính là nơi linh thiêng nhất, còn tả ngạn biểu tượng cho sự dơ dáy.
Xuyên suốt câu truyện là những quan điểm tôn giáo và trăn trở về thần học trái ngược nhau của những người cùng dân tộc. Trong đó có cả Kito giáo, Phật giáo, Ấn giáo và cả vô thần. Đức tin như một tấm thảm được trải ra cho tất cả mọi người. Có kẻ chọn đi lên nó, có kẻ thích đi ở bên ngoài bằng đôi chân trần của mình. Niềm yêu kính một tôn giáo là thứ tình cảm tự nguyện và bền chặt của một cá nhân với đức tin đó, còn kẻ vô thần là một vị khách đứng bên ngoài quan sát bằng đôi mắt khách quan. Cũng có lúc, khi cuộc sống vắng bóng tâm tình hay chẳng còn gì để bấu víu vào nữa, người ta định hướng lại lối sống, chọn cách quay về với nơi họ từng thờ ơ, để tìm những kết nối tâm linh lấp đầy lại cảm giác cô đơn trống rỗng.
Cuộc đời đã sắp xếp sẵn mọi việc một cách thứ tự mà người sống trong đó chẳng thể biết trước được. Người rời bỏ thế gian sẽ không bao giờ có cơ hội được biết người còn sống sẽ phải đối diện với điều gì. Ý vị thâm sâu của đời sống chỉ có thể đến khi có nhiều đánh đổi và mất mát. Chỉ tình yêu son sắt mới khiến người ta chôn sâu ước nguyện được tái sinh để gặp lại người thương, để tiếp tục tha thiết và gắn bó.
Dọc bờ sông Hằng, họ ném đi ảo ảnh và tìm thấy thực tế chồng chất lên nhau, “tái sinh” hay hoàn toàn biến mất đều là thứ trực cảm tâm linh nằm trong sâu thẳm mỗi người. Vợ chồng nhiếp ảnh gia Sajou không đại diện cho bất cứ hình thức tâm linh nào, bất chấp mất mát đau buồn của người khác để thỏa mãn cho những đòi hỏi tầm thường của bản thân, vô tình đưa chàng linh mục Ootsu cận kề cái chết khi vừa phải bảo vệ sự trong sạch cho người chết đến thói hám danh của kẻ sống. Cuối truyện là sự kiện bà tổng thống Indira Gandhi bị ám sát đẩy niềm tin tôn giáo lẫn thực tế xã hội với bất đồng, bất bình đẳng lên đỉnh điểm. Dẫu là người đàn bà ăn xin rụng hết ngón tay hay bà thủ tướng bị ám sát cũng đều trở về với dòng sông Hằng, nơi đón nhận cả điều tốt đẹp lẫn nhơ bẩn.
Và hành trình tìm kiếm của nhóm khách Nhật ấy cũng khép lại. Điều họ tìm thấy chính là việc phải tiếp tục tồn tại với một tâm thế khác.
tác-giả-nhật
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Emilia P
1,705 reviews · 49 followers
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August 9, 2012
Dang, yo.
Shusaku Endo wrote this book I read called SILENCE. It's about Catholic missionaries to Japan in like the 1600s and it's kinda boring and pretty one-note but also well written and about an important culture clash. Shusaku Endo, a Japanese Catholic, is an intriguing character himself, and so one is impelled to read more of his work. Especially since it's featured in Season 6 of Lost. And with good reason.
Silence was written in the 60s and Deep River was written in the 90s. The openness and full-heartedness of the latter belies a man with the wisdom and sadness and understanding of a whole life between these books - but it's still very clearly the same dude -- a person who cares about faith and the soul, in a way that is very Japanese and un-Japanese at the same time.
I tried to explain this to my cooly-Japanophile husband - to say this book was about how Japanese people are so focused on appearing calm and collected on the surface but are tumultuous and sad and beautiful underneath, and that perhaps that calm exterior itself signals, hints at, a profundity of soul which we openly emotional Westerners can only dream about. So that's what I thought this book captured really well -- everyone suffers, and here is a story about how four or five (or six or seven!) emphatically Japanese people suffered, in their own cultural context, mostly in silence and bitterness, and how they dealt with it by tapping into the life-force which connects us across cultures, ages, faiths (there's a Japanese Catholic priest who dresses up like a Hindu to carry bodies to the creamation grounds, to wit) , etc, while on a trip to the Ganges, the river of rebirth, in India. It sounds hippy-dippy, but it isn't. It's about how big our small little lives are -- it's a character study above all, no big sweeping things happen in it, in the end. It's about accepting and bearing suffering, and trying to love. It's kind of sad. But it's sweet.
There's a quote on the back about how Endo is unsentimental, yet sympathetic, and that's a mark of great writing. I have to agree. This is a wonderful book. Read it, yo.
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Nick
489 reviews · 36 followers
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November 22, 2011
A group of Japanese tourists travel to India to visit historic sites from the life of the Buddha, without realizing that there are few modern Buddhists there. They wind up in Varanasi, by the side of the sacred, polluted Ganges, where people go to die. The group includes Isobe, who is looking for his reincarnated wife, who he ignored when she was alive and Mitsuko, who has found emptiness in a series of personae: hedonistic student, wife, volunteer at a hospital. Least affecting is Numada, a author of children's books and haunted by the fate of animals. Kiguchi's story is riveting, as he struggles not just with the memories of surviving the war in Burma, but of the soldier who sacrificed everything to save him. A thoughtful, meditative book, focussed on the struggle to define what truly matters, but not without a sly humor, as the fastidious Japanese try and mostly fail to cope with the overwhelming mass of humanity that is India, along with the comic foils, a pair of married tourists, her wishing to be in France, he trying to establish himself as a photographer. A book that lingers in the mind.
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A.K. Kulshreshth
7 books · 54 followers
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April 27, 2020
This is a great work. I listened to the audio book and will also read the print version.
Four very diverse characters, all Japanese, end up on a visit to the holy city of Varanasi, on the banks of the sacred river Ganga. Each of them has a different motive. In my interpretation, they get what they wanted to varying degrees, with none of them finding easy answers.
This is a book that works at many levels - from its range of settings in India, Japan, France, Burma and Manchuria, to its chronicling of events from Second World War Burma to Indira Gandhi's assassination and its characters and story arch. Two of its characters - Mitsuke and Otsu - are particularly fascinating.
It is necessary to mention that there are plenty of bloopers in this work. For example, the harmonium is not similar to a harmonica, contrary to Mr. Endo's assertion (assuming the translator is not to blame). In the audio book, Ganga is pronounced Gaan-Jaa. That is wrong, which is bad enough, but Gaanjaa also has a meaning. It means Opium in Hindi (and in other Indian languages)...
I put down the bloopers to poor quality control, and still rate this work highly because of its many strengths.
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Aubrey
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December 18, 2015
There is death. Yet, there is also life. There are long emotionally dead passages. Yet, there are also moments so charged with feeling they consume all in their path, carry them along for a bit and then leave behind ones willing to do anything to catch up. You have the search for reincarnated love ones, the search for emotional fulfillment, the search to reconcile death with life, the search for atonement, each person ever searching for something omnipresent in its never clearly defined state. And on it goes, this one period of time accepting all parts of life into its midst; the river mentioned in the pages embodies this, and will take everything in without spitting out any straightforward conclusions of its own. This is definitely a novel that won't get very far with a reader without some interpretation on their part; it is only fully enjoyed if one can see their own life experiences within the pages, and leave with a new understanding of just what it means to exist.
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Kristel
1,503 reviews · 40 followers
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December 7, 2019
This is the second book that I have read by Roman Catholic, Japanese Author Shūsaku Endō. His books, Silence and Deep River are both included on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. Endō explores religion, especially Catholicism and the Japanese culture in his writings. In this book, set during the time period when Indira Ghandi, prime minister of India, was assassinated examines the lives of 4 Japanese who are on a tour to India to visit Buddhist sites.
1. Osamu Isobe, a man looking for his reincarnated wife.
2. Mitsuko Naruse, a former housewife who takes a trip both as a pilgrimage and to see her ex-boyfriend Otsu as atonement for mistreating him
3. Numada, a bird watcher who wants to set a bird in his possession free.
4. Kiguchi, a former WWII Imperial Japanese Army soldier.
These characters are on a journey, a pilgrimage and it is the story of their individual pilgrimage. The deep river is the Ganges where all peoples are taken in and flow together.
This was an interesting book and look at both Japanese and Indian culture. One point the author makes; I think, is that all Gods are the same God and that in seeking God, no matter which God, that Jesus is born again in that person. Another point in the book is that peoples, cultures, and religions are at odds with each other and in the best circumstances, conflict remains. I personally did not enjoy the descriptions of the river but also believe that the author did an excellent job of painting the picture of the river bank and of India (without using the camera). This book did not inspire me to want to visit India.
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Pip
428 reviews · 7 followers
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January 11, 2018
I found this novel so much more powerful that Silence, which was about a group of Portuguese missionaries who were tortured in Seventeenth Century Japan. Endo, a practising Catholic, returns to the theme of forcing a Christian to deny one's faith, an idea which seems quaintly anachronistic now, but which he must feel strongly about to reintroduce it again. This time he tracks a group of Japanese on a pilgrimage to Buddhist Holy Sites in India. One of them had ignored his wife until her dying plea for him to look for her reincarnated self allowed Endo an opportunity to explore the idea of reincarnation. Another protagonist is a children's novelist with an affinity for animals who believes that a mynah bird sacrificed himself so that the author could live. Although he is not Christian the sacrifice of Jesus is mirrored in his story. A third pilgrim had suffered atrociously in Burma. His life was saved by a comrade who ate human flesh in order to survive (another Christian symbol) but became an alcoholic because his guilt was terrible. The fourth protagonist is a woman who believes she has no capacity for love. She seems to be following a student friend whom she had seduced and then dumped after forcing him to deny his faith. That he should also be in Varanasi, striving to live a meaningful life by helping the Untouchables carry bodies to the Ghats, and that he should die saving a clueless tour member who is insensitively trying to photograph the funeral pyres, stretches coincidence to the limits, but the whole works because it is a nifty way to talk about contrasting religious beliefs.
I listened to an Audible version, read by David Holt. He was a pleasure to listen to, my only carp being that when he spoke as the clueless Japanese tourist he used an English dialect which seemed forced to me, but that was a minor quibble. The Deep River of the title was the Ganges, of course, but it also was the river of humanity, flowing on, absorbing individuals ceaselessly despite their various beliefs and idiosyncracies.
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Wen Cof
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November 17, 2014
Shusaku Endo’s book Deep River is about a journey to the river Ganges with a collection of tourists immersed in their own private spiritual struggles. Each character presents a face of spirituality as a whole. The characters face uncomfortable spiritual questions that aren’t always neatly answered. I loved the book because it brings together ideas of Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism.
Not only are the questions uncomfortable, so are the characters. The young woman Mitsuko, is so cruel, I almost stopped reading the book. But I’m glad I continued, because I realized that what she displays on the outside, so many of us are really hiding on the inside. She comments that the chaos and disorder of India is comforting to her, while the neatly organized gardens of Paris are disconcerting. There is something comforting about the chaos of India to Mitsuko, and there is something comforting about the chaos of the book to the reader. It jangles and fits together at odd angles. The ending is not a neat bow on a package, but is left open the reader to write their own conclusion.
So why did I love this book with ugly characters and an inharmonious plot? Because it didn’t try to explain or mollify their questions – it just took me on a journey as a reader through their process, and allowed me to draw my own conclusions about right, wrong, good, evil, life and death. It allowed me to also travel to the Ganges and observe and reflect.
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Christopher
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July 23, 2012
Another book I started with high hopes which failed to live up to my expectations. Endo's characters all end up seeming contrived and sometimes ridiculous in their actions and dialogue as the stories progress and they make their pilgrimages to the Hindu and Buddhist holy sites along the Ganges. I was hoping for some insight into Christianity as it is viewed and experienced in Japan and the Orient but was instead treated to an individual's ecumenistic dreams. And I think maybe he sets up some of his characters as straw men to let us all know what he thinks of modern materialistic Japan. The character's backgrounds are all somewhat interesting and I think Endo writes very well (or has been translated very well). However, no great events happen, no deep thoughts are offered, no great revelations are found, and ultimately, the book ends up being a rather boring read. I saw another review somewhere before I started reading this that said: "Deep River, Shallow Story" - I agree. It's not your everyday pulpish junk, so I bumped up the 2.5 stars to 3. I can't imagine spending time on another Endo work again.
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Long On Air
104 reviews · 37 followers
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January 31, 2020
Một quá trình cuốn hút bằng đậm đặc câu chuyện, đậm đặc trải nghiệm. Cái kết hay cụ thể hơn là câu trả lời cho trường hợp của từng nhân vật đều rất hay, ý nghĩa nhưng có phần hơi ngắn gọn. Khi đọc về cuối, thoáng qua mong muốn tác giả sẽ viết kĩ hơn, sâu hơn về tâm lí, cảm xúc từng nhân vật như ở phần đầu.
Nhưng có thể đấy là dụng ý của Endo Shusaku. Nhiều khi cách mà chúng ta đi qua mỗi trải nghiệm đã là một câu trả lời rồi, nên đến cuối cùng không cần phải diễn giải quá nhiều chăng?
Đặc biệt yêu thích cấu trúc của cuốn sách. Cách tác giả sắp xếp để từng nhân vật, từng câu chuyện xuất hiện rất thú vị. Các giá trị văn hoá, tôn giáo, tâm linh được truyền tải tinh tế, vừa vặn, không gây sự choáng ngợp hay cảm giác khó tiếp nhận cho độc giả.
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Melissa
1,067 reviews · 72 followers
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January 30, 2018
A very interesting study in faith as seen through the eyes of a group of Japanese tourists to India as they recall pivotal moments of their lives, experiences, and their personal struggles as they try to reconnect with past acquaintances, past loves, and reconcile past traumas through the lens of different faiths and depths of faith as they visit the intersection of Asian faith, with Buddhism, Catholicism, and Hinduism.
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Book Wormy
1,340 reviews · 18 followers
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December 26, 2019
For me this book was an interesting exploration of religious beliefs and how they are more alike than different when you break it down and look into it. We start by exploring Christianity and the idea of sacrificing yourself for a higher good before moving on to look at Buddhism and the ideas of reincarnation eventually we end up in India with Hinduism and the caste system which while there is a strict hierarchy kept in life in death everyone is equal and the River Ganges accepts all souls with no questions asked.
The Japanese tourists on the pilgrimage all have different reasons for going to India and while some personal quests are successful others (on the surface are not) everyone in the group is changed by the experience.
I liked the way the back stories of everyone on the trip are slowly revealed and how they all have subtle connections to each other. India is also beautifully bought to love in all her beauty and all her ugliness
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Joanne Fate
318 reviews · 3 followers
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January 22, 2021
This isn't my first Shusaku Endo book, and it won't be my last. The book starts with chapters that could be short stories in and of themselves. The main characters are all Japanese. Endo brings most of them to India on a tour. There's a lot about religions in this book. Endo was Roman Catholic, living in a mostly Buddhist country. When they travel to India they tour many religious places.
Parts of this book are sad. There's talk of death and the afterlife. The writing transcends all that. It is beautifully written and profound.
I'll stop there. I'm listening through the alphabet, partly to try to get to some books that have been in my library for a while.
I loved the narration as well. It suited the book.
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Emma Much
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April 15, 2022
very nice
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Ana Rita Ramos
140 reviews · 2 followers
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December 28, 2021
Lindíssimo.
Pessoas com motivações e histórias de vida muito diferentes partem para a Índia para se encontrarem dentro de si mesmas e/ ou para buscarem alguém. É-nos feita através dos seus olhos uma visita à Índia pobre e ao rio Ganges onde todos os indianos anseiam terminar a sua existência.
Um livro forte no conteúdo e no significado cheio de mensagens profundas e ensinamentos.
Quando terminei fiquei com a sensação de querer mais.
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Brent
91 reviews · 1 follower
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June 18, 2020
Unreliable narrator is a term many people are probably familiar with from literature class. It doesn't quite cover what is happening in this novel though, as it is written in third person. So the narrator is giving you, the reader, a (fairly) accurate view of the thoughts and actions of the characters (or at least an accurate view of the thoughts and the actions that each character finds to be important), but the characters in the story are, to varying degrees, rather unreliable.
They have incorrect knowledge that informs their thinking and decision making. They have prejudices and desires, and these prejudices and desire color the events they chose to focus on in the story. Many of the reviews have comments as, "Endo says..." or "the author is saying."
Endo is not saying anything in this book the way the statement, "Endo says..." would imply. Yes he wrote the story, and collected sections out of the lives of his characters, but it is his characters that are saying and doing things. Endo means something and it is our job as a reader to try and understand what he means by selections of events and thoughts that he choose to weave into a story.
For example, characters make statements about the various religions in the book, that as far as their knowledge and understanding goes, they believe to be true. Some of these statements are true and some of them are demonstrably false. As a reader you can choose two options, Endo didn't bother to do his homework and made some mistakes (or some variation there of), or he knew the statement was false, but allowed his character to say it because it was something his character believed.
Depending on which option you choose, it will change how you interpret the book. There is also a risk involved because if you the reader does not know that the character is mistaken, you are less likely to ask further questions of the text.
In the story there is one, and possibly two, character(s) who believe that Mary is a Goddess in the Roman Catholic Church. This is a common confusion that many people have, even other non-Roman Catholic Christians can misunderstand who Roman Catholics believe.
But Endo was a Roman Catholic and he knew what he believed. So why would his characters state the Mary was a Goddess? If it is something that other Christian misunderstand about Roman Catholics, think how confusing it must be for someone who doesn't come from a Christian background (as most of his characters don't) to try to understand Mary's place in Roman Catholic theology.
That is just the Christian misunderstanding his characters have. Some of them make equally incorrect statements about Hinduism and Buddhism. And here is where part of the problem may be, Western readers are probably as ignorant of Hinduism and Buddhism as Asian readers are likely to be of Christianity. So when someone is reading along, and they come to a Hindu goddess named in the work, they are likely to think, "Oh okay, that is how it is. Good to know," and keep reading. But a large part of the story is the incongruity of the beliefs his characters hold (what they think Catholics believe about Mary), and what is true (what Catholics really believe about Mary). What the characters believe cause them to misinterpret many of the actions of others in the book. One of the characters, a Japanese tour guide in Indian, even muses on how his fellow Japanese probably don't understand what the meaning of religious practice is to Hindus, while he is (if I am reading the text properly) misunderstanding the practice himself.
So if you think Endo was a sloppy writer, you may come to the conclusion that the book is about all religions lead to the same place and we should all get along. But if you think Endo was purposeful in his craft, then that leads to some more interesting questions.
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Daniel Warriner
18 books · 57 followers
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March 16, 2020
Shusaku Endo's 1993 novel Deep River (深い河, or Fukai Kawa) follows a group of Japanese tourists on a tour of Buddhist sites in India. Each is searching for some form of spiritual understanding or healing. Isobe lost his wife years before and ruminates on reincarnation. Mitsuko, my favorite character in the novel for her type and how well Endo developed her, is a cynical nurse who believes she's incapable of love, and who mocks the priest Otsu for his devotion to Christianity and its "Onion," the name she feels more comfortable calling its god. Kiguchi seems forever stuck in painful memories of the war and Japanese withdrawal from Burma. While Numada, a writer who seeks salvation from nature, is certain that a myna died in his place so that he could live.
The novel pits a number of themes and philosophies against each other, such as East and West, Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity, and egotism and compassion. We're also given a wide array of perspectives, carefully laid out to us as the characters recount their pasts and question who they are. The tour takes place during the final days of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and Endo's rich descriptions of the atmosphere during that time, the Ganges, the religious sites, relics, and gods, as well as various strata of Indian society will leave lasting impressions. He's been called by some the Japanese Graham Greene, and I could see why as I read this book; it's more evident in Deep River than in other Endo novels. Overall, it's an exceptionally well-crafted story that'll make you think about humanity, love, death, devotion, and spiritual paths.
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Linda
4 books · 20 followers
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March 2, 2017
I found this to be a powerful book. The four main characters each have intriguing back stories and travel to India searching for freedom from grief and emptiness. Isobe, in a typical Japanese marriage of "usefulness," loses his wife and discovers a need to find her. Alientated Numada recovers from near death with the help of a mynah bird and wants to repay his debt. Kiguchi looks to the land of Buddha to heal his trauma from WWII and the death of the friend who saved his life during the war but could not stand to live afterwards. The empty-hearted Mitsuko and the steadfastly spiritual Otsu pull the story forward, though, with Mitsuko both drawn to and repelled by pierrot Otsu and his struggle with his beloved "Onion" God. The stories interconnect in clever ways using symbols and metaphor. Each character finds an end to his own story, although may not seem to realize it, and some readers may not be satisfied by the Mitsuko-Otsu story ending that seems to be hanging.
Maybe due to translation, I was surprised by the emotion and poetry of the writing, something I haven't seen from other Japanese authors I've read. The Sanjo newlyweds are one-dimensional representatives of shallow modern society, and other characters tend to be mouthpieces for Endo's messages, but I thought expressed well through the tragic stories. Atheists probably will hate this book, though. Descriptions of India and the Ganges are colorful and philosophical. I felt the pathos of the characters and the current of the Ganges.
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Kenji
137 reviews · 3 followers
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April 16, 2018
A melancholic and beautiful book. Amidst a backdrop of the heaviness of the human experience, Shusaku Endo remains delicate. His message is gentle and compassionate; not at all like the heavy-handedness of most spiritual literature. In this book, a random group of heavy-souled Japanese tourists come to India and discover facets of their spiritual journeys. This book is about grief. It is about shame. It is about pantheism. It is about seeing Jesus from western and non-western perspectives. It is about mercy. It is about the pain and the beauty of living. This book is not for everybody. I recommend this book for people who are interested in general spirituality, the Japanese mind, and non-western perspectives of Christianity. I think students of world cultures would love this book too. I do not recommend this book for people who have trouble viewing another culture or worldview on its own terms or for people that are not accustomed to picking up subtleties in literature. I especially do not recommend this book for people who are uninterested in getting their paradigms of Christianity sincerely challenged or questioned.
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Andrew
1,975 reviews · 689 followers
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January 29, 2018
Having written Silence, it's hard to come back and write something just as stunning, but Deep River isn't far off. It's hard to pin down -- Shusaku Endo is writing heavily in the vein of forgotten French Catholic writers, like those who get name-checked in the story, Francois Mauriac and Julien Green.
And indeed, Endo got a lot of comparisons to writers like that, as well as Graham Greene, but that's missing a large part of the picture. For example, a lot of the coincidences and reunion moments that come off as cloying, forced efforts in Western novels (Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund, prime example) somehow work in a Japanese context -- much in the same way I didn't find myself questioning the motif of the reborn soul in Mishima's Sea of Fertility, the consistent reappearance of Otsu, the sad-sack nonconformist priest in Deep River didn't bother me either (although Mitsuko declaring that she wants to destroy his faith, that made my eyes roll). Somehow the mystical tone that Endo sets makes everything work.
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Jim
2,029 reviews · 666 followers
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February 13, 2015
Shūsaku Endō is that rarity: a Japanese Catholic -- but with a difference. In Deep River, he looks at the members of a Japanese tour group that visits North India. The beginning of the book takes most of the characters in turn, showing how there is some lack in their lives that they hope to remedy by the side of the Ganges.
In the end, the various members of the group take baby steps. Only Ohtsu, a renegade Catholic priest that one of the group knew in Japan, has found himself. Dressed in a dhoti, he carries the dying to the ghats along the river where there bodies will be burned.
I found Deep River to be a sincere attempt to study the need for a spiritual dimension in this life, but Endo takes a difficult route to this end and comes up wanting. Still, I like Endo and I like his book.
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Anna
110 reviews · 54 followers
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January 11, 2018
*Zero stars* Deep River was quite possibly the worst book I have ever read in my life. To make it worse it was assigned in my English class so I couldn't just return it to the library like I've done with other bad books. The characters were bland and the plot was non-existent. People tell me this book is about spiritual journeys but I saw no journey. Confrontation maybe, but there was no journey. There was no conclusion to the book. If the author had died mid sentence and so the editors had to finish the sentence and then immediatley print that might explain the unfinished ending. Even still, I want to pettition the school to have the students read a better book for this unit. There are so many good religious commentary books out there and yet we are subjected to this torture. The students deserve better from our English department. Nothing has made me less excited to learn about other religions, and to read more assigned books, than Deep River has.
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Jordan Tomeš
147 reviews · 9 followers
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March 14, 2018
It would be easy to criticize Endo for pushing his religious views on the reader too much in this book. I personally choose to be thankful for this. In terms of function, it has been a long time since a book touched me and affected me so deeply (maybe the cans of IPA's I drank while reading this helped, too).
I loved the backstories of all the characters. Endo's writing style is rich, vivid, and powerful. It really made all the characters stand out for me. Yes, the characters sometimes did something that seemed a little off to me, and the ending was sweeter than Charlies Chocolate Factory on its best day. But overall -- I really enjoyed this and feel like returning to this book again.
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Jamie Barringer (Ravenmount)
859 reviews · 35 followers
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February 14, 2017
This book reminds me of the Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), and of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder. Like those books, Deep River is a collection of character sketches tied together by a situation, in this case a group of Japanese tourists on a tour of India. The author explores themes of death and rebirth, faith and religions(especially Christianity and Buddhism), and suffering in its various forms.
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Gloria Chen
144 reviews · 4 followers
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December 24, 2016
I really liked Deep River. On the surface, it's just a story about a Japanese tourist group. There is a tour guide, schedule and some annoying passengers. But the tour group is also in India, and is there during the assassination of Indira Gandhi. The different stories of the main protagonists were all interesting (and sad) to me, and the more I thought about them the more impressed I was by their hidden similarities. Would definitely read again!
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Sue Dix
520 reviews · 20 followers
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January 15, 2018
This book tells the stories and backstories of a group of Japanese tourists in India and centers around the river Ganges and the varying views of religion by the tourists and the peoples of India. It is an intriguing and enfolding novel with vivid depictions of disease, war, poverty, and the ways in which the characters are affected by what they see and experience.
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Dani
137 reviews
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August 28, 2014
It was amazing. I will need to buy this for my own collection.
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Brian Wilcox
1 book · 649 followers
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June 24, 2018
Favorite novel I've read. Profound.
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X_g_xi
31 reviews · 2 followers
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August 10, 2021
Là một người “vô thần”, nhưng đối với mình quyển sách này khá thú vị, nhẹ nhàng, chậm rãi . Mình có thể hiểu thêm một vài kiến thức về các tôn giáo, cũng như tín ngưỡng của một vài nhân vật. Mặc dù có vài ba luồng kiến thức mình không thể thông suốt được.
Câu chuyện là sự chuyển đổi từ bối cảnh của Nhật Bản u buồn sang hình ảnh Ấn Độ hỗn độn. Theo bước chân của đoàn khách Nhật mình được du lịch Ấn Độ một cách hay ho qua từng trang sách. Thật ra hiểu biết của bản thân mình đối với Ấn Độ rất mơ hồ, ngoài cái kiến thức toán học từ thời xa xưa của mình “Ấn Độ là nước dùng chữ số 0 đầu tiên trên thế giới”, thì thật sự khi nói đến Ấn Độ mình chẳng nghĩ đến được điều gì cả, tất nhiên là mình vẫn biết sông Hằng hay đạo Bà La Môn nhưng những khái niệm này như ở chiều không gian nào khác trong đầu mình í… Sau khi đoàn du khách đi đến sông Hằng thì mình cũng lên google để chiêm ngưỡng con sông một cách trực quan nhất, nhưng đáng buồn rằng toàn hình ảnh sông mùa covid với quá nhiều thi thể được thả sông và sự ô nhiễm ở mức báo động. Thật sự nếu không có Enami - người hướng dẫn viên cho đoàn khách Nhật thì mình chắc cũng như cô vợ của Sanjou chê bai và thảng thốt trước những việc lạ lùng ở nơi đây quá, mình có chăng sẽ trở thành loại du khách đáng chán nhất của anh chàng này - một người Nhật đem lòng mến mộ một Ấn Độ đau thương và hỗn độn. Ừ thì mỗi người có một đức tin riêng.
Qua trang sách, Ấn Độ còn đọng lại trong tâm trí mình là cái nóng hầm hập của mùa hè, sự nhầy nhụa của mồ hôi bên dưới lớp áo, mùi con người đầy ắp trong không khí và sự u minh tịch mịch của những khu rừng, của những lớp bóng đêm chất chồng lên nhau hết lớp này đến lớp khác, như những khổ sở cùng cực chất chồng lên số phận của người mang thân phận tiện dân sống trong đất nước này vậy.. Những khổ sở, đau thương đó sẽ được dòng sông sâu thẳm nhận vào mình, sẽ mang đi hết? (này cũng do tác giả dẫn đi đâu thì mình đi đó :3)
Thêm một điều nữa là các nữ thần trong Ấn giáo không phải đúng như nghĩa của từ “nữ thần” mà ta có thể hình dung “đầy mẫu tính và dịu dàng”, đó là những người phụ nữ với gương mặt dữ dằn, mang trên mình đau thương, bệnh tật, họ gầy gò ốm yếu, trơ xương, nhưng vẫn “ cho loài người những giọt sữa từ bầu vú héo hon”. Hóa ra có một cách gọi khác của các nữ thần Ấn Giáo trong tiếng Việt, thay vì gọi nữ thần Chamunda, có thể gọi là Bà Chằng Chamunda :v Thì ra từ bà chằng còn mang sắc thái ý nghĩa như vậy :3
Sau tất cả, Mitsuko thật là một người phụ nữ khó hiểu, và mình cũng thấy rằng, không có một sự nhiệt tình, không có một sự yêu thích đặc biệt với bất cứ gì, không hiểu rằng mình muốn gì cũng là một loại đau khổ nhở?
Ừ thì sống trên đời, ai ai cũng cần một cái gì đó, một ai đó để nương tựa, để bấu víu, để tin tưởng và để yêu thương, dù đó là bất cứ điều gì đi nữa. Mình tin vậy!
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Erin
107 reviews · 4 followers
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December 13, 2008
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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Heather
1,245 reviews · 52 followers
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January 6, 2016
Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence is my favorite book. I’ve read his short stories in Stained Glass Elegies, which got kind of repetitive, and his novel Scandal, which had some similar themes, but was harder for me to get into.
I like Silence more than Deep River—the scope is epic, the plot is faster-paced, and it bowled me over with its ultimate revelation. Deep River, however, helped me to get the themes in Silence more, and in my opinion is also an excellent book. There are books that people understand, but Silence and Deep River are books that understand me.
Deep River takes us through several chapters covering the background of each character, then unites them all in a tourist group visiting the Ganges River in India. Some reviewers found the novel to be boringly optimistic, or only saw a theme of all religions being one, but there is more here. All of the characters experience some sort of emptiness (Isobe with his wife dying of cancer, Mitsuko trying to fill her life with relationships with men, Numada who’s never been able to confide his deepest problems to another human being, Kiguchi who lived through the Highway of Death in Burma and his friend Tsukada who survived by eating human flesh, Otsu who is rejected by his peers both in college and in seminary and seeks God).
First, there is that theme of emptiness and seeking. We see each character seeking and trying to fill themselves, then see what each of them ultimately finds as they meet up in India. It makes for a slow pace, but is an interesting structure that works.
Then there is what the characters find. Mitsuko finds meaning in a statue of the Hindu goddess Chamunda, with her withered breasts and diseased body, who somehow still manages to feed people with her milk. She contrasts her with the Virgin Mary, whom she sees as a sort of mother goddess of the Western world, perfect and immaculate. To me, this is symbolic of what love has to look like in the real world versus the ideal love in “religion,” which on the outside can look like supposedly more “perfect” people deigning to help those “other people.” In reality, however, we are all suffering. We suffer because we’re alive. In order to love others, we have to put aside our own suffering long enough to focus on them.
Otsu confronts this in his religious peers who are so focused on what is the “right” doctrine that they refuse to advance him further in his seminary program. At one point, Otsu says something about other religions being valid, but that he still follows Christ. Sometimes this is exactly how I feel. I don’t pretend to know exactly how God deals with people or what is going to happen to whom after we die, or whether there isn’t some truth in other religions. I just know that there is something about Jesus above other religious figures that draws me.
The jist of this theme is that putting others above oneself is contrary to human nature. Human nature is to fight over who’s right and over each other’s basic resources. Otsu’s “Onion,” as he calls God so as not to offend Mitsuko in the book, flips that upside-down. Otsu discovers that the only way to fight the horror of our world is to cast himself into it, and, if necessary, to let it swallow him whole. Is that hopeful? I guess so. Is that sweet? As a Christian and a human being, I find it pretty horrific actually, but also true. Will I actually ever be in a situation requiring me to sacrifice myself for someone else? The human in me says, “God, I hope not.”
Another theme is the consumption of human flesh, which is a metaphor for the Last Supper and the acceptance of Christ’s sacrifice. Kiguchi’s friend Tsukada suffers horribly over having eaten human flesh to survive in Burma and only feels better when abusing alcohol. It’s only on his deathbed that he’s absolved. A foreign hospital volunteer named Gaston tells him a story of some plane crash survivors whose dying companions begged them to eat their bodies. They did, and lived because of it. Knowing that he is not the only one to have committed what he sees as such an abomination brings Tsukada peace at last before he dies. The tourists’ visit to the Ganges also reflects this theme in a sense. The Japanese people are appalled at the Hindus coming to the Ganges to die, and their ashes being scattered in the river where people bathe to purify themselves. Towards the end of the book, Mitsuko also bathes in this river full of the ashes of human corpses and finds meaning in it.
Isobe and Numada’s stories are more subtle. Isobe’s wife dies begging him to find her reincarnated self, which leads him to India. He doesn’t find her—he only finds this river that carries away so much humanity and wonders if she was reborn. Numada remembers a myna bird who saved his life in the hospital by listening to him talk about his suffering, which then died when his wife accidentally left its cage on the roof. He buys a myna bird in India and releases it into the forest, considering this payback for the original bird’s sacrifice and thinking that he will continue to write his lighthearted animal stories as a way of combating the darkness of life.
Sanjo, a photographer, and his wife don’t get their own chapter, but Sanjo plays the part of the unworthy asshole whom Otsu jumps in the way of a mob to save. Otsu imitates his Onion to the end, and his ultimate survival is doubtful.
All of that, ultimately, is my only understanding of true Christianity—to accept the fact that a long time ago, a person was brutally murdered by the very evils of the world that we often find ourselves engaging in (desire for power, status, wealth, and being right). In that sense, we too killed him and continue to do so (a.k.a. sin, or doing and thinking things with selfish motivation). If we honestly accept that, then the only appropriate thing to do is to do our best to renounce those things, which can quite possibly mean our own social, material, and in some places in the world, physical destruction. Really accepting Christ in this way yields no prospect of fame, fortune, or personal happiness, but Endo reveals in his writing that this strange love can save individuals and the world, even if it’s in the futile-seeming act of carrying one corpse at a time to burn and dump into a river flowing as deep as the human spirit.
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Hang
2 reviews
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September 12, 2020
Những con người đến bên dòng sông Hằng để tìm kiếm một điều gì đó mà chính họ cũng không cất thành lời được. Gấp cuốn sách lại tôi cũng tự hỏi: Điều mình mong mỏi nhất là gì? Mình sẽ tìm thấy nó chứ?
Cuốn sách như một buổi trà đạo kiểu Nhật, không dành cho những người dễ sốt ruột và vội vã. Bạn không nên đọc cuốn sách này nếu không cảm thấy thiết tha với việc ngồi xuống và đọc sách một cách thư thái.
Phần tôi thấy mình như bị cuốn vào từng trang sách, đi quanh vài nơi ở Nhật Bản hơi sắc u buồn rồi chu du qua Ấn Độ nhộn nhịp, lộn xộn mà đầy sức sống.
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Hải
263 reviews · 61 followers
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April 13, 2022
Với những cuốn sách nghiêng về tâm linh, huyền bí như vầy, mình đọc chủ yếu chỉ vì thói quen thích đọc. Những câu chuyện, sự kiện... được viết và giải thích theo kiểu: "à, như thế, ai tin thì tin...". Sở dĩ mình cho điểm 3/5, không phải vì mình không tin nên đưa ra điểm thấp thế, mà vì, tuy có những đoạn tác giả gây cho mình sự hứng thú, tò mò, nhưng nhìn chung kết cấu truyện khá rời rạc, lỏng lẻo.
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Kathleen
133 reviews
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October 31, 2020
I love Endo’s writing and storytelling. What else can I say.
Dhanaraj’s review, on the other hand, says it all. ❤️
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Anh Vũ
16 reviews
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January 19, 2023
a rich story
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RayleneD
58 reviews · 1 follower
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June 28, 2022
This book was so good!
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Anh Nguyen
64 reviews · 3 followers
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March 29, 2023
Một quyển sách khá hay. Mình thích những đoạn miêu tả về Ấn Độ và Sông Hằng lắm lắm lắm. Ước gì tác giả viết nhiều hơn về Sông Hằng!
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Laurel Hicks
1,161 reviews · 96 followers
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July 5, 2019
Amazing writer.
2019-7
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Quỳnh Giang
108 reviews
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April 10, 2021
Đúng kiểu văn học Nhật, chầm chậm nhẹ nhẹ. Cũng không quá ấn tượng bởi cả kiểu hình nhân vật hay cấu tứ nội dung khá quen thuộc.
Cho 4* vì thích Ootsu.
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Maru
441 reviews · 50 followers
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October 21, 2019
Há há đọc xong không hiểu sao lại được nhiều người khen như vậy luôn đó =))
Mình thích câu chuyện của Ottos nhất. Hành trình đi tìm bản ngã của Mitsuko đang gắn liền với Ottos. Đúng hơn thì Ottos là người dẫn đường, là kim chỉ nam mà Mitsuko vô định đang dựa vào. Cũng có thể là Củ Hành trong Ottos.
Còn có thể đã chai lì, nên câu chuyện của những con người khác không đủ sức khiến mình ngẫm nghĩ.
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John Benson
1,251 reviews · 11 followers
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February 6, 2021
Shusaku Endo was a Japanese Christian novelist, known best for his book, SILENCE. Like that book, he once again explores religious issues. This book tells the story of four Japanese spiritual searchers who end up on a tour to visit the Ganges River at the time of Indira Gandhi's assassination. Each of their spiritual backstories are brought out well and all are very different, seldom falling into the confines of one religion. While he brings out some Christian spiritual issues, the other major religions of India and Japan are also explored, but mostly he uses these four people to explore the intertwining of religions. This is a good book about humanity's search for spiritual ideals within the lives of these different characters.
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Edward
150 reviews · 8 followers
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December 14, 2016
Maybe it's because I just read "The Sea and Poison," and re-read "Silence" (both of which are amazing novels), but I found this later work by Endo somewhat dissatisfying. I had no issue with the subject matter; a story blending ideas and beliefs from different religions, mainly Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. There are frequent references to reincarnation, and the Ineffable Spiritual Quest that drives many humans. It's just that Mishima already wrote this story much more effectively in the "Sea of Fertility" books (particularly "Temple of Dawn").
I'm not trying to be a snob. I still enjoyed this book, and many of themes from Endo's other stories reappear here. Endo spent his entire life wrestling with the incongruity of his Catholic faith and his Japanese cultural background. The character of Otsu is a stand-in, I suspect, for Endo himself. Through his dialogue it's possible to identify the evolution of Endo's beliefs as he approached the end of his life ("Deep River" was published in 1993, three years before he died). The message is one of tolerance and acceptance of all faiths--that every religion partakes in the divine to some degree, and that your relationship with other human beings matters more than your relationship with a god or gods. Rather, your relationship with other human beings IS your relationship with the sacred.
I agree with the conclusion, but the narrative tried too hard to enforce it. Instead of the gracefully effective, indirect presentation of his earlier novels, it felt clumsy and unfinished. Some of this might be attributable to poor translation, but not entirely. The story really shines when it focuses on Otsu and his wanderings, his struggle to reconcile a "western" faith with his "eastern" mind. Are religious beliefs determined mostly by place of birth, by what one's parents and surrounding society believe? If so what does that say about the supposed universality of truth?
Endo's perspective on these issues is unique since his religion, Christianity, is a minority within Japan. As Christianity continues to erode in the West, where it once reigned supreme, Christians of European/American background would do well to read his works and consider these same questions. What is it about Christianity that is true once all the trappings of power and influence are stripped away?
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Derek
26 reviews · 9 followers
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December 14, 2014
Deep River is an existential and theological exploration through the stories of the lives of four Japanese tourists to India. The stories are straight forward and compelling, but the existential conflicts are almost overwhelmingly complex. These stories all converge in Varanasi, a Hindu holy spot on the sacred Ganges; the "Deep River" of the title.
The book drips with symbolism, and the deep river seems to be a place deep enough for the Hindu, the Buddhist and the Christian to find comfort there. "There are many different religions," Endo quotes Mahatma Gandhi, "but they are merely various paths leading to the same place. What difference does it make which of those separate paths we walk, so long as they all arrive at the identical location?"
If the commonality of religions is a significant theme, then I think too many pages dote on Christianity. The Pierrot/clown that signifies Christ (Endo so much as tells us this) shows up as the priest-candidate Otsu, as Gaston the hospital volunteer, and as Namuda's treasured pet bird. This leads to the cringe-worthy comparison between Jesus and Namuda's bird because of the nuisance "Jesus had been to the rabbis of his day." There are a lot of awkward moments like this and a lot of heavy-handed coincidences and symbols, but it becomes easier to accept as you realize that this book is often more symbolic portrait than literal narrative.
But, you really see that Endo has done something masterful as the stories converge at Varanasi. Within four simple and straight-forward stories, Endo has introduced many complicated moral and theological conflicts and concepts. In Varanasi, those conflicts begin to mix and swirl with the traditions of Buddhism, Christianity and Hinduism, like the swirling tributaries to The Ganges. At the foot of the ghats, Endo blends the questions and answers to our deepest mysteries with the vast array of colors, odors, and sounds that make up the unlimited aspects of humanity.
It should be noted that while Endo's book is a colorful tapestry of three religions, it is not an exhaustive comparison. Most notably Islam is not included. Even so, Endo has done much here, and Deep River is bold, enlightening and often beautiful.
09-after-goodreads
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Tranhieu0410
137 reviews · 25 followers
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April 7, 2019
Những con người với những hoàn cảnh và câu chuyện khác nhau cùng đi trên một chuyến hành hương đến đất nước Ấn Độ và đặc biệt là thành phố Varanasi với con sông Hằng chứa đựng đầy bí ẩn. Những người Nhật mang trong mình những bí mật khác nhau trải qua các thế hệ của Nhật. Như tượng trưng cho sự bí bach, u ám của xã hội Nhật. Nhưng ở tác phẩm này mình thấy nhẹ nhàng hơn vẫn có một chút gì đó ánh lên ở cuối truyện.
Tác giả kể truyện hay và dễ cảm nhận các nhân vật nhưng cảm giác vẫn thấy thiếu một chút, cần đi sâu hơn nữa vào các nhân vật theo cảm cảm nhận của mình.
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Jahn Kuiper
18 reviews
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March 27, 2019
There is such a divisive spirit to Endo's books, and never has that been more the case than in Deep River. You can tell the man has held the question, seeping from every pore, how can I reconcile my Christian faith with my Eastern identity. To explore this, the book shares characters deeply and maniacally at odds with faith, characters deeply steeped in other faiths of the world, and characters who don't give a thought to faith. But with each of these sects, known or unkown there is a deep, deep river calling them to something they cannot describe, something viscerally felt amiss in their lives. While there are very brutal portrayals of Christianity here, it would be wrong to think it is subversive of Christ. Some might say it's tolerance or even admiration of Buddhism and Hinduism pushes some universalism agenda, but that is a very poor and shallow reading. Most characters are Japanese travelers to India, each making their journey for a different reason. For each, we can see how God meets them where they are at, the spirit giving words through language they can puzzle through. In fact, it is this challenge to the status quo of normalized Christianity which is at the heart of Endo's question: how can I reconcile my Christian faith with my Eastern Identity. The result of which is a richer, more diverse way of thinking about our relationship with God--a way that should help give voice to those on the fringes of faith looking for where they might fit in.
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Jukka
305 reviews · 5 followers
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September 10, 2016
This month i've got a twin read:
Deep River (1993) - Shusaku Endo
-AND-
Deep Rivers (1958) - José María Arguedas
When you pair reads you can never be sure what will result, but it never has failed to add dimension.
These two with same name (OK almost), have a certain surface similarity. Both are from writers from outside of Europe and North America. They are also outside the dominant cultures where they grew up.
Endo born 1923 of Japanese parents lived until age 10 in Japanese controlled northern China, when his parents divorced and he returned to Japan and became Catholic.
Arguedas (b 1911) was of Spanish and Quechua descent raised in large part by Quechuan family servants. Arguedas strongly identified with the indigienous Peruvian culture, and wrote in his own idiosyncratic style where he mixed the two languages freely.
Deep River is set in India and follows a group of Japanese tourists.
Deep Rivers looks at the conflict in a young boy between his Indian and the Spanish cultures.
This should be fun.
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