Deep River By Shusako Endo| A Book Review

Deep River is soul searching book. A work of fiction that follows the stories of different characters circling mainly around a young man, Otsu, and his former girlfriend, Mitsuko. In it, you will find the soldier who has to live with the memory that his friend had to eat human flesh to save him, you will find a man who had to write animal stories to find solace for abandoning a dog when he was a child, you will find a new couple whose worldview is fixed and will not enjoy the honeymoon they embarked on. The book is a powerful description of the complexity of human life.

The key character is Otsu who has always been a target for Mitsuko. Mitsuko considers herself a feminine power that could lead Otsu astray from His God. However, she could not achieve that. Otsu considers her temptations and his failings as means with which God uses to reach him. The things that should have caused Otsu to throw down his faith made him believe more. Otsu comes to the conclusion and does not stop explaining, that God works in everything to bring man to himself. But you see, Otsu was not just a man who believed in theories. His life became a living demonstration of what he believed. He will be rusticated from the church, cast out by seminary school, and considered a heretic for all his life but yet when you reach the end you see that his was the true Christian life. All that Otsu lived and showed were the things he picked from the life of Jesus. His life became an enigma for Mitsuko, she simply could not understand why he chose to lay down his life to chasing things that don’t make sense to her. In the end, she is seen showing concern and anger at him. Otsu is struggling for his life after he had intervened to save the life of a stubborn tourist.

Deep River is a powerful narration of the human drama, its incomprehensibility of it, and the towering faith of Otsu! God does not invite us to live the perfect Christian life in comfortable situations and a predictable lifetime. Rather, He invites us to become a living demonstration of His love on earth.

Otsu and Mitsuko gave God another name in this book, they called Him “Your Onion”, in this case, Otsu’s Onion. Do you have a special name for God?

PS: On World Read Aloud Day, February 3, 2022, I read an excerpt from this book. You can find it on my Youtube Channel with the video link below. Click here 👇. Don’t forget to subscribe. And share this with a friend!