Reviews for Scandal

The average rating for Scandal based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-11-28 00:00:00 Rod Mondaca One of the main themes of this book is that of the 'doppelganger' or double, a long-standing theme in great literature. We've seen it in Dostoevsky and Jose Saramago in books called The Double. It's in Conrad's The Secret Sharer and in Nabokov's Despair. Even Henry James got in on it in his relatively little-known novel, The Jolly Corner. In Scandal, our main character is a very famous Japanese novelist who, being Catholic, writes on moral and religious themes. (Much like the author himself, author of Silence, who is considered a Catholic novelist and sometimes called 'the 'Graham Greene of Japan.') The novelist starts to hear rumors that he has been seen hanging out with prostitutes in the red-light district of Tokyo. Not only that, but some of his supposed actions may have involved under-aged girls, a S&M crowd, semi-strangulation fantasies and orgies. At a literary award presentation he is confronted by a prostitute who claims she recognizes him from the district. A sleazy journalist is on his tail trying to get a compromising picture of him that he could use for blackmail or for a career-making story for the journalist that would ruin the novelist's reputation. Sex is the second major theme. In his career of writing novels, the main character has never written about sex. He and his life-long spouse have a very proper, old-fashioned relationship and they have never even talked about sex. Suddenly the novelist feels that he's missed out on something important all his life and left it out of his novels. It's as if he starts to believe "I'm a novelist. A novelist who has to dirty his hands in the deepest recesses of the human heart. I have to thrust my hands in, even if I find something in there that God could never bless." He also asks "What's the lesson that this realm of filth is trying to teach me?" He starts hanging out in the red-light district looking for his double. He meets a woman who was a friend of a prostitute who killed herself in a self-inflicted S&M fantasy. He and the woman start meeting for lunch and exchanging letters to discuss sex in which she shares her single (bizarre/horrifying) sexual fantasy with him. He finds himself thinking too much about a college-age woman his wife hired to clean his office. By the way, he's 65, a bit late for male mid-life crisis by American standards, but, hey, this is Japan, so maybe things are different. In fact, he's old enough that he and his old friends play the "who's going to go next game" when they meet. The novelist thinks: "When one of us novelists passes the age of fifty, we may be impressed by what our old friends write, but we are no longer influenced by their work." Back to the double - is it simply someone who happens to look almost identical to the novelist? Is it the novelist secretly leading a double life and pulling the "unreliable narrator" trick on us? Is it all a hallucination? Stay tuned… A good read and it kept my attention all the way through. Tokyo's red light district from dreamstime.com Photo of the author from Goodreads

Review # 2 was written on 2012-07-05 00:00:00 Stuart Isacoff 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.