SOURCE: "Good Girls," in The Times Literary Supplement, October 28, 1994.

[In the following review, Tuohy recommends reading Endo's The Girl I Left Behind, but asserts that Deep River will disappoint Endo's devotees.]

With a dozen or so of his books translated into English, Shusako Endo must now be the best known Japanese novelist in the West. In his own country, however, his reputation is hedged around with qualifications, some of which may be reactions to the very things which attract and interest the foreign reader. These doubts on the home front would have prejudiced Endo's chances of becoming what his countrymen like to call a "Nobelist". Instead, this year's prize has gone to Kenzaburo Oe, a more avant garde writer, less successful but possibly for that reason more quintessentially Japanese.

V. S. Naipaul once wrote that "the Japanese are possessed of a way of looking—that curious literalness which...