Wonderful Fool:
Gallagher, Michael
A fool around the house WONDERFUL FOOL SHUSAKU ENDO Translated by Francis Mathy Harper and Row/Kodansha International, $13.95, 240 pp. Michael Gallagher THIS early novel of Shusaku Endo differs...
...When the killer forces him to go the biblical one mile with him, Gaston goes two and still more, all the way to the distant northern province of Yamagata...
...But, nonetheless, very much present are the concerns that permeate Silence and The Samurai, both set against the background of one of the fiercest and most unrelenting persecutions Christianity has ever experienced...
...It's often comic and satiric...
...Gaston judges no one...
...He looks for the best in everybody, and when he finds the worst, his only reaction is a bemused and patient incomprehension...
...But just as Tomoe is reconciling herself to the idea of having a fool around the house, Gaston solemnly announces in his fragmentary Japanese that he can no longer stay with them...
...Gaston, therefore, while not too good to be true, is perhaps too good to be interesting, at least interesting enough to sustain a novel...
...Despite her modern airs, sharp tongue, and her shrewd playing of the stock market, Tomoe harbors a certain old-fashioned romanticism, though she'd die if anybody, especially her feckless brother, suspected it...
...It's a time when anything seems possible...
...Gaston's manner is as clumsy as his body...
...The letter is for Takamori...
...Stunned, Takamore searches his memory and remembers at last that he once had a French pen pal who was a descendant of Napoleon...
...He must go off on his own...
...Into this industrious, purposeful environment comes a sign of contradiction, an awkward foreigner, a shambling giant, whose good will far exceeds his intelligence and his meager ration of common sense...
...And in this Japanese setting, a holy fool who's also a "gaijin" is all the more disconcerting...
...Three rough and ready women of the streets take pity upon the hapless Gaston...
...Once she recovers, however, Tomoe's thoughts take a surprising turn...
...A gentle old fortune teller, a man who eases the lives of the poor and suffering with kindly revelations, gives him shelter...
...Portraits of the real article don't impress her much, but photos of Charles Boyer and Daniel Gelin in the role are much more congenial to her fancy...
...He has a knack for doing the wrong thing in a land that places a premium upon doing the right thing...
...The time is twelve years after the 1941-45 war, a transition period when Japan's current level of gaudy prosperity and awesome industrial power is still to be attained but when, for the young at least, the desolation of the immediate postwar years is only a bad memory...
...Two young Tokyo sophisticates, Takamori and Tomoe, a brother and sister, find their lives disrupted by a strange letter in wretched Japanese that arrives one pleasant Sunday morning in spring...
...Whereas evil, distasteful as it is in reality, is often fascinating in fiction...
...I urge you, then, to read the introduction last...
...For those who have read and appreciated Endo's other work, Wonderful Fool is a must, though it does have its flaws...
...Alas, Gaston in the flesh puts to flight all such yearnings...
...Eventually, Tomoe does begin to come around to her brother's view...
...When Tomoe and Takamori meet his ship at Yokohama, they have to descend into its very bowels to find him...
...Certainly not as a tourist...
...Wonderful Fool, written in the early fifties and now available in Francis Mathy's fine translation, is set in the present...
...He stands out in a land where the ideal is to remain as inconspicuous as possible...
...And so he does, the very night of the announcement, followed into the darkness by the faithful old mongrel that he has adopted and who has adopted him...
...It's giving nothing away, of course, to say that Gaston is Endo's version of the holy fool, a Christ figure much like Dos-toyevsky's Prince Myshkin...
...There follows a series of picaresque adventures set against the background of the night side of Tokyo - a panorama of hustlers, prostitutes, and wretched poverty...
...The major difficulty has to do with the problem pointed out by Simone Weil: fictional good, as opposed to good in real life, is difficult to make attractive...
...Gaston indeed has a secret, one that Endo saves until the end, but one that Julian Moynahan unfortunately chooses to tell us all about in his perceptive but busy introduction (in which he makes astounding reference to the decision of the "Emperors of Edo" to suppress Christianity, a compound error that even a casual knowledge of Japanese history would have prevented...
...It comes from Singapore and informs him that one Gas-ton Bonaparte, a young Frenchman, will arrive in Yokohama in three weeks...
...It's what the Japanese - like that other island people, the English - fear most: something without precedent...
...The holy fool disconcerts those given over to the things of this world, and, if the disconcerted are open to grace, makes them see things differently...
...A vicious professional killer dying of tuberculosis forces him to accompany him on a mission of vengeance...
...Now the descendant is about to descend upon them, playing havoc with their busy, gainful routines...
...Then, too, this buffoonish giant, for all his simplicity, has an air of mystery about him...
...Why did he come to Japan...
...Takamori, however, takes Gaston pretty much in stride, insisting to his furious and discomfited sister that the foreigner has a good heart...
...She does some research on Napoleon...
...Michael Gallagher THIS early novel of Shusaku Endo differs considerably from the later historical novels that first brought him - the rarest of the rare: a Japanese Catholic intellectual - to the attention of perceptive critics outside of Japan...
...And when she first glimpses his long face and hulking figure, it's only with an effort that she keeps the word "horse" from passing her lips...
...What gives Wonderful Fool its undeniable vigor, therefore, is the skill with which Endo brings to life the underside of Tokyo and draws his cast of secondary characters-Takamori and Tomoe, the prostitutes, the fortune teller, and the dying gangster...
...Prosperity might not yet have arrived in full force, but the appetite for success and the material possessions that symbolize it is already vigorous and flourishing...
...All of which, by the way, involved that turning away from traditional values that drove Endo's friend and fellow novelist, the brilliant and flamboyant Yukio Mis-hima, to the ultimate protest of seppuku in 1970...
Vol. 110 • November 1983 • No. 19
