Deep River

About

A group of Japanese tourists travel to India, each carrying a private wound. Isobe, a salaryman, is searching for his dead wife's reincarnation — her deathbed request. Mitsuko, cold and faithless, is looking for a man whose faith she once destroyed. Kiguchi cannot forget the wartime road in Burma where starving soldiers ate the dead. They converge on the banks of the Ganges at Varanasi, where a failed Catholic seminarian named Otsu carries the dying to the river — expelled from his seminary for believing God lives in all religions, not just his own. Endo, a Catholic in a country of almost no Catholics, spent his life asking whether Christianity could take root in Asian soil. This was his last major novel, and his most generous answer: the river accepts everyone. It was one of two books placed in his coffin.