Scandal Book

There's a wonderful moment in Vladimir Nabokov's Strong Opinions. It's part of a transcript from an interview conducted sometime in the mid-1970s.Q: Would you care to comment on how the Doppelgänger motif has been both used and abused from Poe, Hoffman, Andersen... Which Doppelgänger fictions would you single out for praise?
VN: The Doppelgänger subject is a frightful bore.

If only Shusako Endo had felt the same way. His penultimate novel, Scandal, is so tightly woven around the concept that it hamstrings itself. Here's the story, roughly: A mid- 20th century Japanese Christian writer, not unlike Endo himself, whose novels are highly popular investigations of sin in modern man, is close to death when he realizes that he has neglected an entire aspect of human nature. That is, the dark, selfish, often cruel impulses that can overtake us in the midst of passion, desire, erotic pursuit. Author Suguro has so thoroughly expunged such darkness from his life and works that his critics say he is missing something elemental in his work.

But Suguro has paid a price for such deep Christian piety. So much so that his dark, carnal side has split off in a Jekyll-and-Hyde manner to go roving unchecked through Tokyo's pleasure districts. Suguro for most of the novel views this double as an imposter, someone who chance has happened to give the same physical appearance and voice as himself. And granted, in this day of faux Rockefellers grifting entire affluent communities, it's believable. Through blameless association with a number of simultaneously depraved and compassionate individuals--paradoxes in Suguro's view--he is able to run his double to earth. Only when he does so, when he witnesses himself sexually abusing a young servant, does he acknowledge the terrible split rending his psyche.

The passages in which Endo considers human eroticism and kinkiness in light of Christian virtue are not without interest. Sadly, however, self forgiveness is something that Suguro seems incapable of, thus his suffering. There's something terribly sad about this. For nowhere in Surguro's self conception, so overwhelmed by his bête noire, "sin," is there room for self forgiveness. All Suguro can think of is how tainted he is, how he has failed morally, how he is in the end just like all the other human filth.

There are frequent passages of interest: such as when Suguro considers certain Buddhist and Freudian precepts that closely align with his Christian views. But he can never see the forest for the trees. He is too self involved. He cannot for the life of him understand how God can love beings simultaneously both so wretched and so beautiful. That is his failing, and in the end he seems ready to take it to the grave. Recommended with reservations.