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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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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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