Navigating Deep River

Book excerpt: "The power of pilgrimage permeates the world's religions, from Canterbury to Varanasi, and in April 1994, Peter Owen Publishers released Van C. Gessel's English translation of Deep River (Fukai Kawa, 1993), an emotional quest narrative in which four careworn Japanese tourists journey to India's holy Ganges in search of spiritual as well as existential renewal. The story's author, Endo Shusaku (aka Shusaku Endo [1923-1996]), had just marked his seventy-first birthday. Deep River would prove to be one of Endo's last novels. In June of 1996 he began hemodialysis, but passed away on September 29 of that year. Over 4,000 people in attendance at Endo's funeral services at the St. Ignatius Church in Tokyo placed flowers on the altar. Copies of both Silence and Deep River, the publications that meant the most to him, were placed in the casket. Today, almost twenty-five years after Endo's passing, this wide-ranging anthology offers the first, book-length discussion of Deep River. It evaluates as well as probes how Endo spent decades trying to find words to explain Transcendent Mystery, faith and doubt's difficult tension, the purpose of spiritual journeys, and the challenges posed by the reality of religious pluralism in an increasingly diverse world. Aimed at individuals working in Asian Studies, Catholic Studies, and the fields of Comparative Literature as well as Religion and the Arts, Navigating Deep River displays an engaged, patient contact with a major text in world fiction, and this interdisciplinary anthology promises to deepen academic appreciation for Endo, within and beyond the West"--