Mitsuko's Failure In Deep River

In “Deep River” by Shusaku Endo, Mitsuko Narusea one of the main characters goes on a tour to India. She is hoping to find herself, she doesn’t know what she wants and hopes this trip will help her find out. The theme of failure is prevailed throughout the story. In “Deep River,” Mitsuko fails at her attempt to find herself and failed at making Otsu nonreligious. In Endo’s novel Mitsuko is portrayed as a selfish and atheist women. Mitsuko had a failed marriage and comes to the epiphany of her incapability to love. She decides to go to India to find herself, and the meaning of her life. She judges Otsu her schoolmate, whom she cruelly seduced for believing in God she refers to God as an onion. She doesn’t believe in God and doesn’t comprehend how someone can believe in God and waste their time praying being devoted and helping others. That is something she does not believe in and did not understand why Otsu did. Mitsuko tries her hardest to corrupt Otsu and make him change his beliefs but Otsu stood strong by his beliefs and did not change them. Towards the end of the novel Mitsuko realizes how she miserably failed, although she understands Otsu. Mitsuko understands Otsu’s beliefs and why he does certain
things. Ms. Naruse goes on the journey to India based on different reasons compared to the other characters. The other characters go to India based on religious matters and to find something that has meaning to them. Mitsuko feels lost and thinks that if she goes on this journey she can find herself. Mitsuko had no idea of what she wanted,” Just what the hell is it I want?” It was the only thought that filled her mind throughout her honeymoon”(Endo 68.) She is struggling with her inner emptiness and her incapability to love after her failed marriage. She is an unloving and hypocritical woman.
She hated affection and hated seeing affection being exchanged “She despised the sentimental affection a wife felt for her husband.”( 113)Mitsuko even states in her letter to Otsu her reasons for her divorce:” I cannot truly love another person. I have never once loved anyone. How can such person assert their own existence in this world.”(117) Thus, Otsu has a completely different view of affection “Love, I think, is the core of this world we live in, and through our long history this is all the Onion has imparted to us.”(119) Otsu strongly believes in love and the love God has for everyone. Feuerbach’s idea of love is key is portrayed by Otsu. Another idea that is portrayed is love is God not God is love. Mitsuko does not believe in God and she refers to him as “an Onion”.
She couldn’t believe Otsu would go to pray in the Kultur Heim she said “It makes me sick to think of man coming to a place like this and dropping to his knees to pray.”(Endo 39). Otsu’s actions bothered Mitsuko and did not accept them but she was not able to feel indifferent towards Otsu. Mitsuko did not tolerate the fact of how Otsu’s life revolved around God she stated … “he had everything snatched away from him by his Onion”(116). Mitsuko wanted to corrupt Otsu so he would change his view of God and wanted him to become an atheist like her. Mitsuko is a perfect example of Feuerbach’s belief of alienation, which is the projection of a part of self onto an imaginary fantasy called
God. Thus, Mitsuku Naruse had an obsession with separating Otsu from God and she ended failing as well as finding herself. Mitsuko had an equivalent view on God as Marx did they believed that people would be better of without God in their lives. No matter how hard she attempted on changing Otsu it was a failure as well as her trip to India. Although. She ended up understanding Otsu at the end of the novel when he sacrificed himself; “ At the end he sacrificed himself in order to protect Sanjo, an action that parallels with that of Jesus Christ.”(211). Otsu stood by his beliefs until the end and Mitsuko still remained with her inner emptiness.

Works Cited Endō, Shūsaku, and Van C. Gessel. Deep river. New York: New Directons, 1994. Print.