Wonderful Fool by Shūsaku Endō

First published:Obaka san, 1959 (English translation, 1974)

Type of work: Comic drama

Time of work: The 1950’s

Locale: Tokyo, Japan

Principal Characters:

• Gaston (Gas) Bonaparte, a bumbling French seminary student who comes to Japan as a missionary
• Takamori, Gaston’s Japanese pen pal, who becomes his befuddled host upon Gaston’s surprise arrival in Tokyo
• Tomoe, Takamori’s sister and bemused companion of Gaston during his misadventures in Tokyo society
• Endō, a gangster in the Tokyo underworld who kidnaps Gaston in order to force his compliance in a murder

The Novel

Set twelve years after the end of World War II, Wonderful Fool tells the story of Gaston (Gas) Bonaparte, a failed French seminary student and a bona fide descendant of Napoleon himself who decides to forgo formal church endorsement and travel to Japan as a missionary. Having met a native Japanese through correspondence, he embarks upon a spiritual adventure, hoping to use the home of Takamori, a clerk, and his sister, Tomoe, as his “base.”

While reading one of Gas’s poorly written letters in broken Japanese, Takamori realizes with some horror that Gas is coming to visit them. Unimaginative and unsentimental, they harbor no suspicions about his plans to spread, independent of his church, the news of faith and love to the long-neglected Orient. Instead they conjure images of a French nobleman or film star who will honor them with his visit. When Gas arrives in Japan on a third-rate steamer, they find it unusual and unsettling. Upon first acquaintance, both Takamori and Tomoe feel betrayed; a descendant of Napoleon should not be a bumbling, clumsy oaf, “a tramp with the body of a horse.” However well-intentioned, he clearly is utterly ineffectual, unable to speak or understand Japanese except in the most primitive way, and thus completely ill-prepared for cross-cultural communication.

Their trip to a sushi bar on the way home from the shipyard becomes emblematic of the way in which the gangly, uncoordinated Frenchman consistently scandalizes his hosts. Brandishing a Japanese loincloth—given to him by a malevolent sailor on the steamship—as a table napkin, Gas humiliates his hosts. In his simple, trusting manner, Gas later mistakes the advances of a prostitute for the simple congeniality of the Japanese people, marking himself as clearly a stranger in a strange land, a wayfarer whose language and thought processes set him apart from everyone. In a telling moment, Endō has Takamori observe, “All he’s done since he arrived is walk around and make friends with dogs and children,” moving Gas toward the Christ figure he is clearly intended to become. Tomoe is equally mystified at Gas’s presence, wondering if Gas could be a smuggler or a spy.

After a series of embarrassing episodes, Gas begins to sense that he is imposing on his gracious hosts and announces that he is leaving behind their polite but restrained hospitality, ostensibly “to meet more Japanese people,” but intending privately to embark upon a personal crusade to bring the love of God to the streets of Tokyo. Accompanied only by the mongrel of a dog that has befriended him, Gas moves through the squalor of Tokyo’s underworld as he steadily gropes toward his own destiny—toward his own Gethsemane and eventually his own Golgotha.

The key relationship in the novel emerges in an encounter between Gas and the gangster Endō soon after he has left the home of Takamori and Tomoe. Having taken up with the lowlifes of urban Tokyo, Gas finds himself in the company of the tubercular Endō, a professional killer who has in process a plot to murder the man he believes is responsible for his brother’s death. Kidnapping Gas, Endō tries to compel him to help him get revenge, but Gas repeatedly manifests an innocence and love uncommon in the streets of Tokyo and endears himself to the hardened and morally drained underworld figure. As the story moves to its swift conclusion, Gas thwarts Endō twice and eventually dies in saving both men from killing each other. His climactic and heroic acts on behalf of two criminals beyond redemption earn for him the reverence from Takamori and Tomoe which his tenderness and tolerance so clearly warranted. In a final scene, Gas, apparently drowned in his mission of mercy, is remembered as a “lone egret, flapping snow-white wings,” a traditional Japanese figure of peace and transfiguration.

The Characters

Wonderful Fool features as protagonist the bumbling Gaston “Gas” Bonaparte, who is far from the debonair, suave Frenchman Tomoe had imagined him to be while reading his correspondence. Physically awkward and culturally naive, he quickly becomes a burden for the sophisticated Japanese. As the story progresses, however, he evolves into a classic “fool for Christ’s sake,” whose selflessness and genuine love for his fellowman—and even for a mongrel pet—reflect the Christian attributes Shūsaku Endō wants his reader to recognize and embrace. Like Christ, Gas has “no place to stay” and finds his greatest joy in the company of children and the “unrighteous,” those who recognize their unredeemed state and lack a smug pretense of goodness. Gaston Bonaparte is thus a “fool” in a Shakespearean sense, one who may unexpectedly speak as well as dramatize the truth in a most poignant way with his own life.

Takamori and Tomoe emerge as “typical Japanese” in Endō’s view, oblivious to the “good news” of the self-giving love which Gas wishes to impart. It is only after Gas disappears that his redemptive personality and mission are revealed to Takamori and Tomoe and they are enabled to act in humanitarian compassion toward their fellows within their own land. Takamori, a young office worker with no particular ambition, comes to see his rejection of Gas as “abandoning the best part of myself.” Tomoe is herself a pragmatic career woman, lacking in personal commitment or sentiment and unable to recognize until the very end that while Gas may have been a fool, “he is a wonderful fool.”

In the long run, neither Takamori nor Tomoe is as well developed or as personalized as Gas; by contrast, Endō, the hardened criminal whom Gas lovingly confronts, is precisely drawn, an underworld character worthy of any Dickens novel. Endō becomes symbolic of the despondency and regret, deep-seated in Japanese society, that only a transcendent, divine love can penetrate and transform. That the novelist named this gangster after himself seems too much of a coincidence not to reflect the extent to which he himself has struggled with his identity as a Christian in a society whose Christian population numbers less than 2 percent.

Critical Context

Wonderful Fool may be seen as a transitional work between Endō’s earlier, lighter works set in contemporary Japan but untranslated into English, and his better-known and more serious historical fiction represented in Chimmoku (1966; Silence, 1969) and Samurai (1980; The Samurai, 1982). Wonderful Fool bridges these two periods of Endō’s work by demonstrating his versatility as a novelist with a penchant for combining humor and pathos in the pursuit of serious themes. In Wonderful Fool, Endō’s comic narrative style complements a maturing grasp of plot structure to elucidate Endō’s central themes. Its backdrop and, indeed, the backdrop of all Endō’s works, is the congenital failure of Japanese culture to nurture a transcendent faith and to recognize its eternal relevance for its people. In his oeuvre Endō attempts to craft an authentically Eastern vision of Christian faith obstinate enough to endure even in soils which have never been fertile for its growth.

The Christian vision of Shūsaku Endō revealed in Wonderful Fool thus has at its center a dramatically Eastern Jesus, the humble but single-minded “fool” who abandons all to reach those who are not so much hostile as they are indifferent, not so much faithless as they are cynical. This “foolish” Jesus—distinguished from the often bombastic and authoritarian Jesus imported from the West—drives his readers beyond the shallow, impotent Christianity lurking behind much of modern faith. To reach them, Endō is challenged to defamiliarize Christ in His conventionally distant and supernaturally holy character, portraying Him instead as a profoundly tender, self-sacrificing, and moral human being—an elder brother, not an omnipotent Lord.

Bibliography

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Mathy, Francis. “Shūsaku Endō: Japanese Catholic Novelist,” in Thought. XLII (Winter, 1967), pp. 585-614.

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