SOURCE: "The Various Paths that Lead to God," in Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1995, p. E4.

[In the following review, Harris complains that two of the main characters of Endo's Deep River "are the sort of people we bump into only in religious novels," but he asserts that the powerful images at the end of the novel redeem it.]

For Western readers, Shusaku Endo has long been one of the most accessible Japanese novelists, and not just because of his straightforward style and deft, economical plotting. Endo is a Christian. He deals with issues of faith and morality that we feel at home with, and even his occasional preachiness has a familiar ring.

Indeed, Endo has often seemed alienated from his own culture. Beginning with his most famous novel, Silence, about Japan's 17th Century Catholic martyrs, he has complained that the Asian mind is a "mud swamp" in which...