Anthony Greco

RST 203 F

Dr. Elena Precario-Foley

Spring 2002

 

Critical Analysis

 

            Through Shasaku Endo’s great work of literature, Deep River, each of the characters is used to portray a different meaning of religion that is unique to his or her individual experiences and observations.  The fascinating stories of these diverse people from different upbringings are all combined into one deep search for meaning through a trip to India, where each character reveals his or her own expectations for the trip and relates in some way to the various religious ideals presented through the tour.  Otsu, a character introduced from the point of view of a classmate, Mitsuku, speaks freely about his religious beliefs and attempts to explain through his relationship with Mitsuku how he feels about a concept such as religion and his faith towards God. 

            Several ideas explored through the works of scholars such as Martin E. Marty, of the University of Chicago, are related to the character of Otsu as seen in this novel.  One of Marty’s main points is that, “Religion, however defined, helps explain many human activities” (Marty, 20).   Otsu uses a similar belief when prompted by Mitsuku to explain why he is drawn to his God, or his “Onion.”  Even by reducing the entity that he worships to a mere object, Mitsuku still cannot understand how religion can cause a person to alter his or her way of life and how it caused Otsu to choose the path that he did.

            Early in the novel, Mitsuku takes pride in the fact that she draws Otsu away from God with her actions towards him in college.  “’So, what do you think?’ she said to the scrawny man.  ‘You’re completely powerless.  I win.  I think he’s pretty much jilted you.   He’s dumped you and come to my room’” (Endo, 48).  However, Mitsuku’s rejection of Otsu leads him to once again turn back to his religion, and he forms a deeper relationship with God as he feels as if he has carried the burden similar to that of “the man who was rejected by all men.”   (Endo, 62).  Marty asks the question, “Is it religious faith that does the prompting? Or is it something else?”  In this case, Otsu shows how an event caused him to turn back to a life of faith, and it was this faith that kept him believing in God even with the rejection of the Church and his ideas being viewed as heretical.

            Jacob Neusner speaks about the various ways of teaching and learning religion and presents several theses that can be applied to the study of religion.  One of his main theses states, “Without trivializing difference, the study of religion has to discover the commonalities, in the human situation and in the shared challenges of social order, that religions exhibit” (Neusner, 21).  This thesis is very similar to the belief of Otsu which lead the people with which he was studying to become a priest with to reject him and to criticize his statements.  In a letter to Mitsuku, Otsu reveals a conversation with members of the Church he was studying at, where he said, “God has many different faces.  I don’t think God exists exclusively in the churches and chapels of Europe.  I think he is also among the Jews and the Buddhists and the Hindus” (Endo, 121).  Otsu is beginning to explain his belief in the commonality of all religions, and sees through the vast differences of these religions and focuses on their similarities, just as Neusner’s thesis does.

            Otsu remains steadfast to his beliefs, and while residing in a makeshift home provided to him by Hindu ashrams, he reveals:

“There are many different religions, but they are merely various paths leading to the same place.  What difference does it make which of those separate paths we walk, so long as they all arrive at the identical location?” (Endo, 191)

It is obvious that his experiences starting from college, continuing through his quest to become a priest, and now his current role in India of delivering the bodies of dying people to the sacred river Ganges, Otsu has carefully contemplated his theory of religion and it closely resembles the method of teaching that Neusner describes.  Although each path varies greatly, it is apparently essential to break through the variances and focus on the basic principles that are universal to all religions in order to appropriately study them at the academic level.

            In terms of Allan Andrew’s approaches to the study of religion, the teachings of Otsu most closely resemble those of a Humanistic point of view.  That is, what he has to say is based largely on concepts that are not concrete and cannot be seen easily, and therefore is not social scientific, and his words put together the ideas of many religions as one, without specific backup from Scriptures, and therefore is not normative (Andrews, 101-104).  Otsu relies greatly on his own experiences and uses symbolism to explain the actions that he takes, while also observing sacred customs and rituals such as the placing of bodies into the sacred river and not taking photographs around the holy area in India.

            The ideas of the superiors that Otsu is studying with in France are most similar to the Normative approach on the study of religion; this is why they see him as a heretic and not capable of becoming a priest.  His view, though, does not lead to reductionism as some of the other approaches tend to do, and does not turn down the beliefs of religions other than Christianity as those in France had done.  A rector had said to Otsu, “why don’t you go back to being a Buddhist? Wouldn’t that be a natural reversion to your way of thinking?” (Endo, 123).  This clearly shows how the rector did not accept the integration of several religions into one, and how he and those on his level only accepted Christianity as the correct and dominant religion, while refusing beliefs found in other religions.

            When presented with Otsu’s ideas and beliefs, Feuerbach would probably be strongly against the concepts he tries to depict through the “Onion” and his overall belief of religion.  Feuerbach sees religion as “the dream of the human mind,” (Feuerbach, 3) and could probably relate to how Mitsuku describes Otsu’s beliefs as something from a distant planet.  Feuerbach also believes, “…God is man’s ‘truth,’ i.e., he is what a ‘true’ man ought to be.  Therefore we ought to strive torwards godliness, for in and through God man aims at his true self.” (Feuerbach, 15).  With this in mind, he would describe the “Onion” as a projection of whatever qualities Otsu feels are important, and what he himself would like to become.

            Marx, upon meeting Otsu, would be likely to stand by his theories concerning dialectical materialism and feel that Otsu’s way of life is a result of what he has and the environment around him.  Marx believed, “Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions o your bourgeois production and bourgeois poverty, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made in to a law for all” (Marx, 487).  In other words, the ideas that a particular person had were the result of his or her environment and mainly what was possessed.  Since Otsu did not own much, Marx might suggest that his doctrine was created to make up for what was lost, and to help him make it through as someone without a lot of material possessions.  At the end of the novel, Otsu was among those of the lower classes of the caste system, and Marx would probably believe that living in such conditions and choosing to perform laborious tasks such as carrying bodies a great distance is what makes Otsu the character he is and makes him faithful to his “Onion.”

            While Otsu’s character is as deep as the river which is described in the novel, there are many similarities present that allow him to be related to writers of the past who formulated different theories on religion.  His faith simply gets stronger as the novel progresses, and he is more and more expressive about his theories and his beliefs.  Despite the negative responses he often receives, he is able to create his own thesis on religion, just as Marty, Neusner, Andrews, Feuerbach, and Marx created theses of their own, and “see between the lines” whenever he looked at the world to be able to understand that everything that happens can be related to religion.  Otsu’s condition at the conclusion of the novel suggests that everything he has done has been in vain, but even Mitsuku came to the realization:

“The Onion had died many long years ago, but he had been reborn in the lives of other people.  Even after nearly two thousand years had passed, he had been reborn in these men, and had been reborn in Otsu.  And just as Otsu had been taken off to a hospital on a litter, the nuns likewise disappeared into the river of people” (Endo, 215)

Having her come to such an understanding would have most likely made Otsu feel as if the time he spent with Mitsuku was not wasted, and that all of his actions were ultimately important as he helped just one person at a time cope with his or her dying and carried out their final wish of being carried to the sacred river.