SOURCE: A review of Deep River, in World Literature Today, Vol. 70, No. 1, Winter, 1996, p. 240.

[In the following review, Schenk admits that there are some fascinating aspects to Endo's Deep River, but complains that "a faint air of absurdity hovers over the entire enterprise."]

Endo Shusaku is considered by many Japanese to be the last of his generation's great novelists, and indeed some expected him to be his nation's next Nobel Prize winner. Whether any Japanese critics or common readers entertain doubts about Endo's pseudophilosophic religiosity we shall never know, for Japanese critics are not there to criticize but to praise; anything less would be shitsurei or impolite. The fact remains that Endo is a Roman Catholic writer in a nominally Buddhist country. Up till now, his distinguished career has been entirely consecrated to the study of "the extraordinary difficulty that Christianity has had in taking root in Japan...