Matt Mendez
Religion
Professor Heekin
February 25, 2013
Deep River
Shusaku Endo’s book, Deep River traces four tourists going on a spiritual journey to the country of India. These four Japanese people converge at the Ganges River, the holy river in Varanasi. This is where they want to reconcile themselves with their past experiences they had in their life. Isobe is a man that lost his wife from cancer and goes to India to try and find her reincarnated. Kigushi is another person traveling to India, who is a Japanese, World War 2 war veteran wanting to perform a ceremony for all the soldiers in Burma who died. These two characters endure a pilgrimage where a transformation is made in their life.
Isobe was a man who had a wife, Kieko and a daughter but focused on his job everyday. He did not give or show affection to his wife and had several affairs. He did not think of his wife as a companion but rather just as a figure in his life. As the narrator states, “He was the kind of man who was embarrassed to reveal his own feelings openly in words or on his face, the kind of husband who hoped for a relationship in which his would understand him even if he did not utter a word” (12). His world changes when his wife gets diagnosed with a severe case of cancer and ends up dying. Keiko’s last words to Isobe are that she wants him to find her after she dies because she knows that she will be reincarnated. He can’t cope with the loss of his wife and finally realizes how much Keiko meant to him. Isobe carries the burden of not loving his wife as much as she loved and cared for him.
Kiguchi finds himself in India seeking his guilt of all the soldiers that fought and died in Burma during World War 2. When Kiguchi was in Burma, he catches malaria where his friend Tsukada stays behind with him to help him. The narrator describes the experience, “Just as a wounded bird or insect would die quietly in this jungle, he too would expire here and disintegrate and return to the earth: that was how he felt (89). They end up eating the flesh of a human corpse left on the ground of the road. His friend decides to drink himself to death, leaving Kiguchi with the guilt of that on his shoulders for the rest of his life. Kiguchi thinks that Tsukada suffered for him. He travels to India to have a Buddhist ceremony for the soldiers who died but finds there to be very few Buddhist to be in India, therefore he says a prayer for the soldiers left dead in Burma at the holy river of the Ganges.
The Ganges River is where people of the Hindu faith purify themselves and reincarnates their loved ones. This is the place where the four characters in the book bring their sorrows to the holy place. Another symbol that has been significant in the novel is the Ginko tree that Isobe’s wife talked to. This tree tells Keiko that she will be reincarnated. Isobe’s wife was his “suffering servant” in the novel.
All of the main characters in the novel take a spiritual journey to find a quest of their beliefs and desires. They end up letting go their problems and get past the feelings they had in the past because of what they experienced.