SOURCE: "Passage to India," in The Washington Post Book World, June 25, 1995.

[In the following review, Greeley asserts that "Endo is one of the world's greatest novelists, a wizard with plot and character and description, who writes a simple story about simple people and packs it densely with drama, challenge and finally faith."]

A group of Japanese tourists comes to the town of Varanasi (once called Benares) on the Ganges River in India. Among them are a man mourning a wife to whom he had never admitted his love, a former soldier who ate human flesh on the "Highway of Death" in Burma, a writer of nature stories for children who feels his life was saved by a myna bird, and a woman (Mitsuko) who has had much pleasure in life and much wealth but no happiness. They are hardly what one would call pilgrims. Yet they all are...