Deep River.

Shusaku Endo New Directions, $19.95, 224 pp.

In two newly translated volumes, a novel and a story collection, Japanese Catholic Shusaku Endo reiterates and sometimes expands upon his major theme--the frustration of trying to fuse Western Christianity and Eastern culture.

The novel Deep River may take its title from the Negro spiritual that provides its epigraph, but the setting here is not the American South--it is India, the destination of a Japanese, tourist group, and the river is the Ganges, "so deep," in the words of the sometimes cynical character Mitsuko, "I feel as though it's not just for the Hindus but for everyone." This shift of locale from Japan, which provides the backdrop for most of Endo's fiction, offers the author an opportunity to move beyond his typical exposition of the East-West dichotomy, to explore how yet another culture and religion can rattle expectations and provide new self-revelations for his characters.

Among the tourists are Isobe, a nondemonstrative office worker who's recently lost his long-neglected wife, Keiko, to cancer; and, on the trip by chance, Mitsuko, a divorced volunteer at the hospital where Keiko died. Mitsuko's leisure-time do-goodism with patients seems at odds with her coldness and lack of faith, but the complexity of her character and the terrible loneliness with which she lives are convincingly revealed as the novel progresses. Also making the trip are Numada, a writer of animal stories who's often mistakenly ghettoized in the book world as a children's author, and Kiguchi, a former soldier obsessed with his experiences on the Highway of Death in Bunna during World War 11. What would otherwise be a central-casting stereotype--the photosnapping tourist from hell--is here transformed into a pivotal role in the person of Sanjo, an ambitious, obnoxious newlywed; even his wife is just another stepping stone in his well-orchestrated and utterly compassionless life-plan. Another interesting spin in the character mix is Enami, the guide from Cosmos Tour Company, who secretly despises the travelers he leads through this foreign land.

Most intriguing of all, however, is Otsu--not a member of the tour group but Mitsuko's former schoolmate who is now a Catholic priest living in an ashram. An outsider while a college student because of his religious fervor, Otsu ironically becomes another kind of outsider while studying for the priesthood because, for example, he cannot shed his Easter belief in the commingling of good and evil; this notion is dangerously "Jansenistic or Manichaeistic," he is told by more traditional Catholic teachers. He fulfills his priestly vocation in carrying the bodies of dead Hindu pilgrims, outcasts, to funeral pyres near the river Ganges for cremation. When asked how he reconciles the Hindu belief in reincarnation with Christianity, he explains, "Every one of [the disciples] had stayed alive by abandoning [Jesus] and running away. He continued to love them even though they had betrayed him. As a result, he was etched into each of their guilty hearts. He died, but he was restored to life in their hearts."

The letters between characters in this novel reinforce Endo's reputation as a marvelous epistolary writer; he would have given Paul et al. some stiff competition had he lived in New Testament times. And he once again proves himself the master of the quirky, unforgettable detail: when Isobe learns his wife has terminal cancer, he simultaneously hears outside the hospital window "the voice of a street vendor peddling roasted sweet potatoes--Yaki imo-o-o." Any reader acquainted with Endo's work knows of its highly autobiographical nature. This attention to sounds in his latest writing reminds us that Endo spent a good deal of time in his life listening to painful silences (or arguments) before his parents' divorce, to the unfamiliar Mass that his mother chose as his form of worship when he was a schoolboy in a Buddhist country, to the medical professionals who have operated on and muttered ominously over his lungs for too much of his life, to the French spoken during his adult years as a student in Lyon, where he willfully exposed himself to a culture imbued not only with that prickly Christianity but also a fierce national pride, and where he must have felt even more an outsider than as a Catholic in Japan.

Familiar themes also resonate throughout his second story collection. In the title story of The Final Martyrs, Endo again reveals his fascination with apostasy. In Shadows," an epistolary piece, we see a grown man writing to a priest, now separated from the church, who loomed large in the man's childhood after his parents had split up and his mother had arranged for herself and her son to convert to Catholicism (which his father refers to as one of those `Amen' churches"). Two stories here, "A Fifty-year-old Man" and "A Sixty-year-old Man," are march-of-time semisequels to "A Forty-year-old Man," which appeared in Endo's first story collection, Stained Glass Elegies (1987); the oldest protagonist in these stories is in fact the author of The Life of Jesus (1979), nonfiction that Endo himself wrote. "Japanese in Warsaw," which includes a tourist-loathing guide (this time Shimzu of the Orbis Travel Bureau), has certain parallels with Deep River and also with "Fudano-Tsuji" in Stained Glass Elegies. Both involve the Polish saint, Maximilian Kolbe, who at one point served in Nagasaki as a missionary and later sacrificed his life at Auschwitz. In "The Last Supper" we see Kiguchi, somewhat transformed from his role in Endo's latest novel, but still entangled in a tale of the Burmese Highway of Death. Indeed, the similarities between these stories and Endo's other works are too numerous to mention. Whether one considers the repetition among the stories, novels, drama, sketches, and memoir pieces intriguing or exasperating is up to the individual reader.

The historical novel Silence (1980), concerning the apostate Jesuit missionary Christovao Ferreira and his former seminary student Sebastian Rodrigues in seventeenth-century Japan (and reportedly being filmed by director Martin Scorsese), remains Endo's masterpiece, but these two new works, beautifully translated by Van C. Gessel, are welcome additions to the author's oeuvre in English. Let's hope that New Directions continues to publish the award-winning Endo in this country and that such publications spur more lengthy analysis of this writer's life and work.