Experiments
Francis King
When I Whistle Shusaku Endo (Peter Owen E6.00) Of all Japanese novelists, Shusaku Endo is the most accessible to Western readers. This is not merely because he spent many years in France and has obviously been influenced by a variety of European writers, but because he is also a Roman Catholic. Anyone who has taught English literature in Japan will know of the bewilderment that the average Japanese student experiences when faced with some situation in a novel by, say, Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh; and the average English reader experiences the same bewilderment when faced with some situation in a novel by, say. Kawabata or Mishima. Whether we are Christians or not, a heritage of Christianity permeates all our thinking; but that heritage is wholly alien to all but a small section of the Japanese population.
Once again, in When I Whistle, Endo returns to the theme, already used by him in his masterly The Sea and Poison, of human vivisection. Like the English, the Japanese are both stoical about illness and abnormally obsessed with it. Endo is no exception — with good reason. As a student in Lyons. he contracted tuberculosis, at a time when that disease was both extremely common in Japan and often fatal in its outcome. He underwent three operations, in the last of which he had a whole lung removed, and spent three years in hospital. (He makes a characteristically macabre joke about this experience in his Preface: 'My doctor has ordered me to stop smoking. But lung cancer occur S because people have lungs, and someone like me who has only half as many lungs as the ordinary person should be able to smoke twice as much, n'est-ce pas?'). In The Sea and Poison Japanese doctors experiment on American prisoners during the war; in this novel they experiment on a Japanese woman patient today.
The villain of the story is a ruthless, ambitious young doctor. Eiichi. who is determined to achieve success despite the fact that his father. Ozu, an unsuccessful businessman, has neither wealth nor influence to help him. Eiichi first betrays one of his colleagues. who on his own initiative has taken a tuberculosis patient off a useless drug that the consultant has prescribed merely because he hopes for a research grant from its manufacturers; and he then betrays another colleague, who happens to be his rival for the hand of the daughter of the great consultant. It is this rival who. when a scandal breaks over the use of an experimental drug on a woman cancerpatient. Aiko, without her permission, is obliged to carry the can both for Eiichi and their superiors.
Aiko, who eventually dies in gruesome circumstances, turns out, by a coincidence, to be part of Ozu's past. During his schooldays. Ozu's closest friend, an unprepossessing youth nicknamed Flatfish, nursed an unrequited, absurd and yet oddly noble passion for Aiko; and he clung to this up to the time of his death in the war. Aiko and Flatfish represent for Ozu a past in which life may have been poorer and harsher but in which it also had a significance that now it has lost for him. This world of lost innocence and happiness is perpetually contrasted with the sophisticated corruption of the world of the present-day hospital.
The one flaw of the novel lies in the Iago-like character of Eiichi, whose evil is so calculated and complete that it is difficult to believe in him. Graham Greene, to whom critics like to compare Endo, would have shown some faint illumination of grace even in a heart so dark. Ozu on the other hand — unintellectual. ordinary, decent, hardly understanding his attachment to the memory of his dead school-friend — is a beautiful creation. His basic goodness is shared by the colleague whom Eiichi betrays because he will insist that a doctor must regard his patient as something more than a watch in need of repair.
In describing Aiko's illness and, death. there are moments when Endo seems to escape sentimentality only by a hair's breadth; but each time he withdraws from the edge just in time. There is a terrible sadness in his account of the war years and their humiliating aftermath; and the story of the doomed woman, who has already lost both her child and her husband in the war, is profoundly depressing. Ozu goes back, after her death, to the district around Ashiya (between Osaka and Kobe), as I myself did some two years ago; and there, like me. he finds, to his horror, that the old houses have been replaced by modern apartments, the Sumiyoshi River has become a reinforced concrete drainage ditch, and the sea itself seems to have vanished, reclaimed for yet more dwellings. 'Beautiful things, things from the treasured past were now disappearing from all over Japan.' One senses in Endo a profound hatred of change: the beautiful things that are disappearing are not only trees, rivers and old houses but also such intangibles as decency. humanity and idealism. Eiichi, with his destructive egotism, and his efficiently soulless hospital are symbols of a new Japan that frightens and awes the author.
Weaving back and forth in time, this book suffers from none of the feebleness of construction so common in even the best Japanese fiction. Saner than Mishima, closer to us than Kawabata and more universal than Tanizaki, Endo is one of the half-dozen leading novelists of the post-war period.
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