SOURCE: A review of Foreign Studies, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 237, No. 13, March 30, 1990, p. 50.

[In the following review, the critic discusses the universal truth in Endo's Foreign Studies.]

Elegantly divided into three sections, this 1965 novel by the celebrated Japanese author of Scandal calibrates the dislocation of Easterners transplanted to the West. "A Summer in Rouen," set shortly after WW II, follows the recipient of a church sponsored scholarship that has brought him from Japan to France to study Christian literature; his interest in the West is returned by his well intentioned hosts' paralyzing inability to view him as more than a blank canvas for their own designs. "Araki Thomas" tells of the first Japanese student in Rome, a Christian sent there at the dawn of the 17th century who, realizing that the importation of the foreign religion brings with it certain death, renounces his faith after he returns home...