SOURCE: A review of Deep River, in Kirkus Reviews, Vol. LXIII, No. 3, February 1, 1995, pp. 89-90.

[In the following review, the critic praises the strong and original characters in Endo's Deep River.]

Japanese writer Endo (The Final Martyrs, 1994, etc.) continues his exploration of faith and anomie—in a deceptively simple and well told story of spiritual inquiry that movingly explores all the big questions.

The opening pages briefly introduce four people who will shortly, for varying reasons, join a Japanese tour-group travelling to India: Isobe, a businessman whose deceased wife, believing she would "be reborn somewhere in this world," made him promise he would look for her; Mitsuko, a volunteer at the dead woman's hospital, who is troubled by her own past and her obsession with a former classmate; retired industrialist Kiguchi, still haunted by wartime memories of Burma's notorious Highway of Death; and Numanda, a gentle writer of...