11/27/2023 0 Comments Wonderful fool shusaku endoWhether he is in a car, the streets, a neighborhood restaurant, a brothel on the seamy side of town or a pachinko parlor, where rowdy young customers play a sort of horizontal pinball game, Gaston gives Mr. And while he's floundering in the vastness of Tokyo, sometimes in the company of his host and hostess, sometimes with his dog or alone, he becomes a vehicle for the novelist's satirical presentation of Westernized Japanese society. Gaston slowly discovers his true motive for traveling fourth class on the good French ship Vietnam to the distant country he has known only through Takamori's letters. Life is never the same for these polite but befuddled siblings or a number of other characters, including a French-educated hit man suffering from the last stages of tuberculosis, whom the novelist ironically names ''Endo'' an avaricious land surveyor from the north called Kobayashi, who, as it turns out, is a war criminal with a great deal to hide and even a stray dog the gentle Frenchman adopts. Gaston, the longtime pen pal of a young Tokyo clerk named Takamori, arrives by ship in postwar Japan to visit him and his sassy sister, Tomoe. Gaston Bonaparte, a hulking, horsefaced Frenchman, a former seminarian and the ''wonderful fool'' of the title, certainly plays a role we've seen before - the innocent, virginal, redemptive and even Christ-like interloper who appears in the midst of a decadent but probably salvageable society. In ''Wonderful Fool,'' the Western reader, like the Catholic missionaries who arrived in Japan in the 16th century to convert the Japanese to their faith, may at first find a lot of material that can be fitted into familiar paradigms. ![]() Endo's readers soon discover how inexact any comparison is. Endo, a French-educated convert to Roman Catholicism, didn't seem to make any headway at all with the Western reading public until Graham Greene praised his fiction - and suddenly he could be sold as ''the Japanese Graham Greene.'' There's nothing new about such cross-cultural reductionism, but Mr. Endo's only work to get from Japanese to English quickly itĪlan Cheuse is the author of ''The Bohemians,'' a novel, and ''Candace & Other Stories.'' was published in Tokyo in 1980 and in London and New York in 1982.Īt least as prolific as those modern Japanese novelists whose work has been more regularly published in this country, Mr. ''The Samurai,'' another historical novel of great intensity, seems to be Mr. Endo's other 1959 novel, ''Volcano,'' and its English translation. ''Silence,'' the historical novel that has been his best-known work in the United States until now, was published in Japan in 1969 but not in an English translation until 1979. Endo's American readers have been given an odd notion of his career right along. ![]() ''WONDERFUL FOOL,'' only now appearing in translation in this country, was available in England nine years ago actually, it was one of Shusaku Endo's earliest novels, published in Japan in 1959. New York: Kodansha International/Harper & Row.
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