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Translated from the Japanese by Van C. Gessel
Suguro is an eminent Catholic novelist, about to receive a
major literary award. So when a drunk woman he has never met
before approaches him at the award ceremony, claiming she
knows him well from his regular visits to Tokyo’s red-light
district, she must surely be mistaken?
But with a scurrilous press campaign damaging Suguro’s
reputation, his sleazy doppelgänger appears more and
more, as if deliberately trying to discredit him. He is sighted
touring the love hotels and brothels of Shinjuku; a leering
portrait of him appears in an exhibition — and Suguro
is forced to undertake a journey into Tokyo’s seedy heart
in order to discover the dreadful truth.
Well known for his novel Silence, which is to be filmed
by Martin Scorsese, Endo here abandons his characteristic
understated style in order to write a dark metaphysical and
psychological thriller that is reckoned to be one of his best
— and most original — works.
WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY DAMIAN FLANAGAN
Recent review in the TLS: Shusaku Endo (1923-96) was one of Japan's best-known
literary exports, a Catholic praised for his rigorous explorations
of sin and salvation. But with the publication of Scandal
in 1986, the "Japanese Graham Greene" took a
different turn, shifting from the historic past of martyrdoms
and forced conversions to present-day Tokyo and a protagonist
with a distinct resemblance to his author.Suguro is an
eminent Catholic novelist. But despite depicting "the
black, dark, ugly realms within his characters", he
has not penetrated his own heart of darkness. He lives
an orderly and blameless life, shuttling between the womblike
room where he writes and the home he shares with his elderly
wife. All this changes when, at an awards ceremony, he
sees his own face sneering at him.
The vision unsettles him, but then he learns that his double
has been sighted by colleagues (and by an investigative journalist
with an axe to grind) and he realizes the dangers of such
an appropriation of his identity.The false Suguro visits
the red-light district where he displays an impressively
deviant range of sexual tastes, from throttling prostitutes
to coating winsome teenagers in his saliva. Desperate to
preserve his reputation, Suguro pursues his malign twin into
the depths of Tokyo's underworld, to the bars and love hotels
of Kabuki-cho. There he encounters Motoko and Madame Naruse,
a sadomasochistic pair whose behaviour thrills him as much
as it repels him. In them, he recognizes the urge to violence
he has long suppressed. Faced with increasingly compelling
evidence that the doppelganger's proclivities are in fact
his own, Suguro plunges into an existential crisis that threatens
to destroy him.Endo seems to believe he is the first novelist
ever to grapple with such dark materials, employing a crudely
drawn psychologist to provide exhaustive explanations of
such phenomena as masochism and the doppelganger. However,
Suguro's dreamlike wanderings through a Tokyo shrouded in
snow and fog lend the novel an eerie beauty, which is matched
by the chilly clarity of Endo's prose in Damian Flanagan's
translation. At once a sinister thriller and an elegant disquisition
on identity and the nature of evil, Scandal represents Endo's
determination to turn the novelist's gaze inwards. It is
not enough, he suggests, to look fiercely into the outer
world; if the writer fails to recognize his own capacity
for evil, he is ultimately a fraud.– Olivia Laing, TLS
'Endo's Catholicism and tireless grappling with the
nature of guilt, sin, love and redemption, as well as the
effortlessly
luminous quality of his prose, meant that the writer he was
most routinely compared with in the west was Graham Greene.
But with its unsettling, dreamlike mood, playful self-referentiality
and ingeniously engineered plot mechanics - Suguro is shown
at his writing desk "hunched like a watchmaker" -
Scandal might more usefully be compared to one of Paul Auster's
metaphysical detective stories. ' ***** - Independent
on Sunday
‘A remarkable work . . . Endo is one of the best novelists
in the world.’ — Francis King, Spectator
‘Endo is a great thriller writer . . . Spine-chilling,
erotic, cruel, full of intellectual games . . . very
powerful.’ — Sunday Telegraph
‘Scandal is a subtle, eerie and fascinating book
by a writer of rare perception and disquieting honesty.’
— John Walsh, London Evening Standard
‘Endo’s most remarkable novel . . . a superb
dramatic triumph, a perfect plaiting of strands into a
single, most delicate crowned knot.’ — Independent
SHUSAKU ENDO is widely regarded as one of the greatest
Japanese authors of the late twentieth century. Born in
1923,
he won many major literary awards and was nominated for
the Nobel Prize several times. His novels, which have been
translated
into twenty-eight languages, include The Sea and Poison, Wonderful Fool, Deep River and Silence.
He died in 1996.
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