River - By Shusaku Endo

¶ … River - by Shusaku Endo Striving: "...to devote serious effort or energy (like an endeavor)"; "...to struggle in opposition of something..." Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. It is good to have goals; every thinking child and adult has goals. And after all, everyone should establish "goals" in life, to provide something to work towards and something to look forward to. A child's goal may just to get through school until summer arrives, when life is all about fun and friends.

Any adult goals may or not be achievable and may or may not be realistic. But it is better yet to be striving to attain important goals that can help you to a better life, and bright enlightenment to your conscious mind, then just stumbling along fearing to confront the future, let alone the past. In writing his novel, Deep River, Endo Shusaku, who is considered by many scholars and critics to be the last of his generation's great writers, has intertwined the lives of four Japanese travelers.

The four have come to India supposedly with the goal of touring the Buddhist temples, but readers learn as the book goes along that the four are striving for something deeper. It is, for them, a personal reconciliation and a mystical or practical redemption, releasing them from the burdens of their lives. The four come from very different backgrounds, although all of them are deeply rooted in the Japanese culture.

Kiguchi was a Japanese soldier in WWII, and was a pilgrim of the "Highway of Death" in Burma at the conclusion of the war; he carries with him some powerful emotional baggage, and he wishes to commemorate his fallen colleagues. It's obvious that he hasn't handled moving forward in his life very well in that regard. So he has some redemption and reconciliation to strive for and that is a very poignant part of the story.

Isobe, a Japanese businessman, is hoping to locate his wife as a reincarnated person, since, at the time she was about to enter a coma she asked him passionately to search for her. He is striving to make up for the love he didn't express openly when his wife was alive; some of his passion is based on guilt, because she was very sweet and he misses her very much now.

The life of Numada is one of interacting with animals (cats, birds, and dogs), since recovering miraculously from a near-death sickness. Numada writes children's stories, and lives in a world that is child-like and innocent.

[It is worth mentioning that twice author Endo himself nearly died (in fact he was declared "clinically dead" by his doctors) on the operating table during surgery.] The fourth traveler is Mitsuko, who is not able to love, and she is sorry she made fun of Otsu for his Christian beliefs, and hopes she might find him in India.

She has come to believe that her life is following along a stream of life similar to a character in Francois Mauriac's novel Therese Desqueyroux, which shows that Endo is not shy about borrowing a character from another writer's novel to help provide color and context for his own characters. The way Deep River builds its characters is interesting, and could be seen as even a little hackneyed, by cynical readers.

For example, readers know Isobe's wife believed in reincarnation and that Isobe is looking for her reincarnated soul; and there he is in a gift shop, believing that he was pushed there by some "invisible power" (his dead wife?) and he sees Out on a Limb by Shirley MacLaine, and Children Who Remember Previous Lives by Professor Stevenson, both reincarnation books of course, and he buys them without thinking twice.

In this novel, the strivers are confronted not only with their own weaknesses and their own burdensome flaws and foibles, they are confronted with the Ganges River realities - loveliness and ugliness; hope and despair; death and life; bloated bodies floating along in darkness and living persons bobbing along happily. The contrasts are metaphors, it would seem, for the price one has to pay to gain that coveted redemption and reconciliation with the past. For the Kiguchi character, his striving pays off.

A much-needed reconciliation with his past is manifest when he reaches the Ganges; he has been plagued with his remembrances of that terrible walk through Burma, when "...they dragged their legs along in utter exhaustion." An "exact replica" of himself walking alongside himself kept saying, "Walk! You must keep walking!" The double of himself yelled, "Walk! Keep walking!" And now, at the great river in this nation of India with its mysticism and Buddhism, he is released from the grip of those horrific images of the Burma walk; like good and evil, like life and death, the two aspects of his conscious being are bonded, and they stand "back to back with each other, and they can't be separated the way you can cut things apart with a knife" (200).

For Mitsuko, something similar has happened in her life that has happened to Kiguchi, in that she has a dueling power - an alter ego of sorts - alongside her too. One impulse urges her to.