A Japanese Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Francis King
SCANDAL by Shusaku Endo
Peter Owen, f11.95, pp. 237
Ahighly successful and respectably married novelist is accused of sexual im- propriety by a woman who claims to have known him even though he himself denies ever having met her. A journalist, ambi- tious for fame and outraged by what he regards as the writer's hypocrisy, decides to investigate, with few scruples about the methods which he uses . . . A familiar story? Yet one would guess that Shusaku Endo — not merely one of the best of living Japanese novelists but one of the best novelists in the world — has based this haunting book, part psychological thriller and part allegory, on his own experience, not Jeffrey Archer's.
Like Endo himself, Endo's protagonist, Suguro, is 65 years old, a Roman Catholic, and the winner of many major literary prizes. One of Endo's best-known works, Silence, is about early Christians in Japan. Suguro has written a similar work, entitled The Voice of Silence. Both men have studied in France in their youth and both have frequently used Nagasaki as a setting. There are other parallels, too numerous and too trivial to detail.
Near the close of the book, Suguro tells his young editor of his plans to write a novel totally unlike any novel he has written before. 'There's something inside myself I want to shake up,' he says, going on to explain: 'I want to shake the founda- tions of the literature I have built up over the years, to find out whether the whole thing will collapse or not.' Suguro's title will be: 'Scandal: An Old Man's Prayer' the first word of which is, of course, the title of Endo's own novel. One can there-
fore guess that Endo wrote this book which has shocked and dismayed many of his admirers in Japan while also becoming a best-seller — with the same intention as Suguro. A man who has always seemed to look down on human evil from a pinnacle of rectitude, here slithers into it. The dispassionate surgeon strips off his rubber glove's and thrusts his naked hands up to the elbows into the very blood and guts of life.
In his bewilderment and shock at being accused of having frequently been seen in the pleasure quarters of Tokyo, with their short-stay hotels, pick-up bars, peep-shoWs and sex emporia, Suguro decides, without telling his loyal, long-suffering wife, to make his own investigation. Mysteriously, there exists a portrait of him — claimed by its woman artist to have been painted on one of his visits to the pleasure quarters for which he has no recollectibn of ever having sat. No less mysteriously, all kinds of people in the quarters recognise him and even greet him. What can be the explana- tion? Clearly, Suguro decides, he must have a double, who for some sinister reason has set about impersonating him.
However, this rational explanation even- tually cannot be sustained. Suguro then thinks of one less rational. Perhaps he has a doppelgiinger? He consults a professor of psychology, when the two of them for- tuitously appear on the same lecture plat- form. Yes, the professor tells him, there have been occasional reports of the phe- nomenon at medical conferences. In the last century, there was a famous case of a teacher at an elementary school who, on more than one occasion, was known to be in one place when her pupils claimed to have seen her in another. Clearly in her instance the usual explanation of hallucina- tion did not apply — unless the pupils had suffered a mass one.
Suguro's frantic and obsessive search increasingly becomes one within his own
psyche. Repeatedly in his novels he has written about sin, but it is only now that he comes to realise what is meant by evil — which is something different, stranger, far More disturbing. It is through two women, linked by shared sexual experiences, that this realisation comes to him. For one of them, the idea of extreme pleasure is to suffer near-strangulation at the hands of a gang of anonymous men, while burning candle-wax is dripped on to her head. The other is a sadist, who paradoxically now shows extreme tenderness as she nurses sick children as a volunteer in a hospital and now achieves sexual arousal by recall- ing her dead husband's stories of how, during the war, he deliberately set light to some huts in China in order to incinerate the women and children who had taken refuge within them. In learning the terrible secrets in these women's ,hearts, Suguro learns the terrible secrets within his own. The same lusts lurked inside himself. . . . Even guileless children bore, within their hearts the desire to taunt and torment the weak and the defenceless. In various parts of Japan children lynched their frail class- mates.' A devout Christian, he can nonetheless now imagine himself joining the crowd which gleefully taunted, stoned, and struck and kicked Jesus as he struggled beneath the weight of the Cross.
In one passage, Suguro/Endo speaks of the 'magma in the heart of everyone', resembling the magma at the core of the earth. In each case this magma, bursting out from its prison, can produce volcanic eruption beyond all control. Of this magma one is perhaps more conscious in Japan than in any other country of the world, since nowhere else is the contrast so extreme between gentleness and violence, kindness and cruelty, good and evil.
By the close (the book has by now completely undergone its transmutation from psychological thriller to allegory), Suguro realises that his double or doppel- ganger is the embodiment of an antithetical self, ferocious and depraved, which he has never before acknowledged. Through the experiences of that antithetical self, in particular the defilement of the body of a teenage girl, he has moved beyond the trivial 'sins' which have occupied his long and distinguished career as a writer, into a region where the possibility of salvation is far less certain.
Japanese writing, from Akutagawa to Mishima, has always been greatly influ- enced by Western literature of the per- verse: Sade, Poe, Huysmans, Dostoevsky, the Wilde of The Portrait of Dorian Gray. It is to this tradition that this Japanese Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde — its writer simul- taneously recoiling from, and being sucked into, a churning maelstrom of sexuality that Scandal belongs. It is a remarkable work, conveying, as though by lurid flashes of lightning, that Suguro, if not his creator, is a man not merely near the end of his life but near the end of his spiritual tether.
Previous page
