Reading Japan — Kyushu Edition: The Sea and Poison by Shusaku Endo
My Quick Take: This is a powerful novel that presents a short but profound examination of war, the individual during war, and the nature of complicity.
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“The sea today looked dark and threatening. Brown dust swirled up from Fukuoka and seemed to soil the clouds, which were the color of old cotton wool, and even the pale sun. Win the War, lose the War–it was all the same to Suguro. The effort it cost even to think about such things weighed oppressively upon him.”
This 1958 novel by Japanese writer Shūsaku Endō is set in Fukuoka, Japan during World War II and takes as its central character Dr. Jiro Suguro, a physician practicing in a small Tokyo suburb in a grimy, rundown house. He’s in mid-life when the book starts, has no bedside manner, but is brilliant at treating the unnamed narrator’s ongoing TB infection. Just who is this mysterious, odd Dr. Suguro?
Quickly, we’re transported to a small hospital in Fukuoka several years earlier during the war. Suguro is a medical intern in a hospital that is populated by doctors who just want to climb the leadership ladder. Indeed, it seems everyone’s out for themselves. On the TB ward, the patients are an afterthought, a means to advancement and skill-learning. Even the nurses are detached. Suguro himself is the focus of the first part of the novel, and he is someone who cares. Kind of. Rather, it feels like he wants to care, but he radiates a powerful sense of ennui bred of hopelessness and depression. One gets the sense that this is the wartime mentality: Fukuoka is bombed constantly, anyone could die at any moment, and Suguro is likely to be drafted into the army soon. Supplies at the hospital are inadequate, and most of their patients will die.
After this setting is established, the crux of the novel is the arrival of several American prisoners of War, and the hospital's plan to do medical experiments on them. There's a team of doctors and nurses who will be involved, and Suguro is one of them, albeit reluctantly.
This novel is marked by a particular tone. Everyone is depressed or detached, or hopeless. Each of the medical players is drawn to a pivotal operation in the surgical suite, experimenting on the body of one American soldier. It is one of the most emotionally fraught scenes I have read recently, which is saying a lot, given that this is such a short book. Endō develops each character so well that their individual reaction to the atrocity happening in front of them makes total sense.
Anger and helplessness are prominent in these pages. “No doubt it was a time when everybody was on the way out. If a man didn’t breathe his last in the hospital, he might well die that night in an air raid.” Most of the time, the sense of anxiety is transformed into violence. As usual, at the root of anger is a deep sense of fear and each of the characters demonstrates this in a different way. Suguro is hitting out at one of his tuberculosis patients, another physician is abusing a dog, and the head surgeon is terribly angry at the American prisoner he is about to kill.
The text is spare and precise, and I suspect Endō put thought into every word and sentence. I’m not great at knowing how to judge translations, but the 1972 English translation feels careful, and I imagine it reflects the author’s intent. Endō, born in 1923, was baptised a Catholic, and wrote from the perspective of a Japanese Catholic. According to the introductory essay by translator Michael Ghallager, “After a short period of military service at the end of the war, he went to France for further study. During his stay in France, he was much impressed by the extent to which European traditions were rooted in Christianity and the significance it therefore had even for those Europeans who are no longer formal believers. He began to contrast this with the situation in his own land and with his own attitude towards Catholicism, a religion that had been, to use his own metaphor, not so much something that was a part of him but rather like a suit of clothes that he had put on.”
Unlike the pantheism of the east, apparently Endō focused more on the western religious paradigm “between good and evil, flesh and spirit, God and the devil.” Indeed, I can see this as a theme in The Sea and Poison. There are good deeds and evil deeds here, and each character is pulled in different directions by these forces. However, there is an imprecise and uncomfortable middle ground that Endō doesn't ignore. This is where medical student Suguro exists.
Endō uses his story to present common moral dilemmas, and although we as the readers know right from wrong as we read, there is a lot of speculation on the question of what people will do in times of war, that is antithetical to their own values, or the values they display to others. Will one participate? Be a bystander? Look away? These questions make The Sea and Poison an uncomfortable book to read, yet absorbing. At the end, Suguro is talking with a colleague, Toda:
“'Still…someday we’re going to have to answer for it,”' said Suguro, leaning close and suddenly whispering. 'That’s for sure. It’s certain that we’re going to have to answer for it.'
'Answer for it? To society? If it’s only to society, it’s nothing much to get worked up about.' Toda gave another obvious yawn. 'You and I happened to be here in this particular hospital in this particular era, and so we took part in a vivisection on a prisoner. If those people who are going to judge us had been put in the same situation, would they have done anything different? So much for the punishments of society.'”
Structurally, I would have liked to see an epilogue that returned us to the 1950s, to answer the Prologue and provide closure, but it’s a small quibble. I think The Sea and Poison will deserve a re-read at some point because the text is so rich. I am looking forward to exploring more novels by Shūsaku Endō before I go to Japan.
“The sea today looked dark and threatening. Brown dust swirled up from Fukuoka and seemed to soil the clouds, which were the color of old cotton wool, and even the pale sun. Win the War, lose the War–it was all the same to Suguro. The effort it cost even to think about such things weighed oppressively upon him.”
This 1958 novel by Japanese writer Shūsaku Endō is set in Fukuoka, Japan during World War II and takes as its central character Dr. Jiro Suguro, a physician practicing in a small Tokyo suburb in a grimy, rundown house. He’s in mid-life when the book starts, has no bedside manner, but is brilliant at treating the unnamed narrator’s ongoing TB infection. Just who is this mysterious, odd Dr. Suguro?
Quickly, we’re transported to a small hospital in Fukuoka several years earlier during the war. Suguro is a medical intern in a hospital that is populated by doctors who just want to climb the leadership ladder. Indeed, it seems everyone’s out for themselves. On the TB ward, the patients are an afterthought, a means to advancement and skill-learning. Even the nurses are detached. Suguro himself is the focus of the first part of the novel, and he is someone who cares. Kind of. Rather, it feels like he wants to care, but he radiates a powerful sense of ennui bred of hopelessness and depression. One gets the sense that this is the wartime mentality: Fukuoka is bombed constantly, anyone could die at any moment, and Suguro is likely to be drafted into the army soon. Supplies at the hospital are inadequate, and most of their patients will die.
After this setting is established, the crux of the novel is the arrival of several American prisoners of War, and the hospital's plan to do medical experiments on them. There's a team of doctors and nurses who will be involved, and Suguro is one of them, albeit reluctantly.
This novel is marked by a particular tone. Everyone is depressed or detached, or hopeless. Each of the medical players is drawn to a pivotal operation in the surgical suite, experimenting on the body of one American soldier. It is one of the most emotionally fraught scenes I have read recently, which is saying a lot, given that this is such a short book. Endō develops each character so well that their individual reaction to the atrocity happening in front of them makes total sense.
Anger and helplessness are prominent in these pages. “No doubt it was a time when everybody was on the way out. If a man didn’t breathe his last in the hospital, he might well die that night in an air raid.” Most of the time, the sense of anxiety is transformed into violence. As usual, at the root of anger is a deep sense of fear and each of the characters demonstrates this in a different way. Suguro is hitting out at one of his tuberculosis patients, another physician is abusing a dog, and the head surgeon is terribly angry at the American prisoner he is about to kill.
The text is spare and precise, and I suspect Endō put thought into every word and sentence. I’m not great at knowing how to judge translations, but the 1972 English translation feels careful, and I imagine it reflects the author’s intent. Endō, born in 1923, was baptised a Catholic, and wrote from the perspective of a Japanese Catholic. According to the introductory essay by translator Michael Ghallager, “After a short period of military service at the end of the war, he went to France for further study. During his stay in France, he was much impressed by the extent to which European traditions were rooted in Christianity and the significance it therefore had even for those Europeans who are no longer formal believers. He began to contrast this with the situation in his own land and with his own attitude towards Catholicism, a religion that had been, to use his own metaphor, not so much something that was a part of him but rather like a suit of clothes that he had put on.”
Unlike the pantheism of the east, apparently Endō focused more on the western religious paradigm “between good and evil, flesh and spirit, God and the devil.” Indeed, I can see this as a theme in The Sea and Poison. There are good deeds and evil deeds here, and each character is pulled in different directions by these forces. However, there is an imprecise and uncomfortable middle ground that Endō doesn't ignore. This is where medical student Suguro exists.
Endō uses his story to present common moral dilemmas, and although we as the readers know right from wrong as we read, there is a lot of speculation on the question of what people will do in times of war, that is antithetical to their own values, or the values they display to others. Will one participate? Be a bystander? Look away? These questions make The Sea and Poison an uncomfortable book to read, yet absorbing. At the end, Suguro is talking with a colleague, Toda:
“'Still…someday we’re going to have to answer for it,”' said Suguro, leaning close and suddenly whispering. 'That’s for sure. It’s certain that we’re going to have to answer for it.'
'Answer for it? To society? If it’s only to society, it’s nothing much to get worked up about.' Toda gave another obvious yawn. 'You and I happened to be here in this particular hospital in this particular era, and so we took part in a vivisection on a prisoner. If those people who are going to judge us had been put in the same situation, would they have done anything different? So much for the punishments of society.'”
Structurally, I would have liked to see an epilogue that returned us to the 1950s, to answer the Prologue and provide closure, but it’s a small quibble. I think The Sea and Poison will deserve a re-read at some point because the text is so rich. I am looking forward to exploring more novels by Shūsaku Endō before I go to Japan.
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