SOURCE: "The Tyranny of Our Incarnation," in Commonweal, Vol. CXVII, No. 20, November 23, 1990, pp. 700-02.

[In the following review, Beverly asserts that Endo's Foreign Studies is about what she calls "the tyranny of our incarnation" in which we are born into one existence and yearn to reach to each other as well as ourselves.]

Consider this book. The author calls it a novel even though it consists of one twenty five page long, perfectly realized short story, one swift historical account in twelve pages, and a long (one hundred seventy nine page) narrative that is primarily novelistic in impulse. The book was written in the mid sixties, in Japanese; finally, in 1989, the English translation appeared. In the preface, the author likens his former authorial self, the one who penned this novel, to "a pitiful younger brother." And the author is Shusaku Endo, the ardent and prolific Japanese Catholic whose...