SOURCE: "The Great Tide of Humanity," in The New York Times Book Review, May 28, 1995, pp. 1, 21.

[In the following review, Coles discusses the psychological aspects of Endo's Deep River.]

With the epigraph to his latest novel the Japanese writer Shusaku Endo not only signals his story's intention, but by implication dismisses those critics who have made much of his relatively unusual situation as a Christian intellectual (he was baptized a Roman Catholic at the age of 11 and educated by priests) living in a nation far from the West, and for a long time successfully resisting its ever probing cultural (not to mention economic and political) assertiveness. Mr. Endo calls on a "Negro spiritual" for that epigraph and, indeed, for his book's title: "Deep river, Lord I want to cross over into campground." He is suggesting that his story will tell of a universal vulnerability, and the yearning that goes...