SCANDAL
Shusaku Endo, Van C. Gessell, trans.
Dodd, Mead & Company, 1988
261 pp., $18.95
The work of Shusaku Endo has often explored the darker side of human life. In one of his earliest novels, translated as The Sea and Poison, a young intern named Suguro collaborates in brutal laboratory experiments on American prisoners of war and is haunted in later years by the secret submerged in his heart.
In his latest novel, Scandal, Endo explores the dark side of a character unmistakably modeled on himself. The protagonist is, like Endo, an aging Japanese author, a Catholic who has undergone massive surgery as a result of tuberculosis, a writer now firmly ensconced among the literary elite of Japan. Like Endo himself, this author has explored religious themes, particularly the nature of sin and the experience of Christians in Japanese culture, and has been viewed, in spite of his own intentions, as a champion of the Christian faith in this non-Christian land. Like Endo, he has written a life of Jesus, and the titles of his novels are easily recognizable as Endo's most successful works in the thinnest of disguises. At one point, he begins work on a novel to be titled Scandal: An Old Man's Prayer.
Endo has named this aging look-alike Suguro. The allusion to the guilt-ridden doctor of his earlier novel suggests a dark side to the novelist himself and alerts the reader to a major theme of the book: This is a novel that builds upon Endo's earlier writings, an author's retrospective judgment of his own work that challenges some of its basic assumptions. At one point Suguro mentions how, in writing about his characters, an author takes on some of their characteristics. In naming his own look-alike after the protagonist of the earlier novel, Endo evokes that identification between author and work. He has already used the name for a number of semiautobiographical characters in his short stories dealing with themes of human weakness, sin, and salvation. While there are clear continuities between these earlier characters and the Suguro of Scandal, Endo has pushed this look-alike much further into the realm of darkness.
The Dangerous Double
Where does Endo stop and Suguro begin? Similar questions arise throughout the book. This is a book about doubles and identity. Suguro is plagued by a double, a look-alike using his name who frequents the sleaziest sections of Tokyo, who is a patron of the kinkiest sex parlors and has gone to bed with two young lesbian artists involved in sadomasochism. Clearly, such a double could be extremely embarrassing for an upstanding Christian writer and family man.
As the novel begins, Suguro is basking in glory and relative self-assurance. His health is failing, and the inevitability of his own death is a constant companion, but he can look back at his professional career with satisfaction. His latest novel is a masterwork, which has brought together all the themes he has explored through a lifetime of literary productivity, and Suguro is being honored with a major award. A bit overdue, but satisfying nonetheless.
The award is presented by Kano, the least threatening of
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