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A review by readingtrying82
The Girl I Left Behind by Mark Williams, Shūsaku Endō
5.0
This was the most poignant novel I’ve read in years.
This is my favorite Endo novel so far. There is a simplicity to the charters and story which allows a transparency to the meaning and feelings Endo explores.
Much like I found Of Mice and Men to be Steinbeck's most moving book even as it was one of his simplest and least sophisticated.
On reading:
“The important thing in this life is to link your sadness to the sadness of others.”
my initial reactions was intellectual: but it’s just as important to share happiness with people….but then the idea worked on me through the novel and I came to feel that sadness allows an intimacy and earthiness which must precede deeper happiness which is transparent to all things. Not a happiness opposed to sadness/pain, but a happiness deeper then sadness yet able to contain it. At that level we can be with people simply, happily, and sadly. This is one of the many things I felt Morita Mitsu came to live in this novel toward the end.
The other main charter, Yoshioka Tsutomu, isn’t a particularly bad guy. In many other modern novels I could easily see him portrayed as the hero and this a nostalgic and bittersweet coming of age story. In fact that’s kind of what I expected given the title and the early chapters, but here he becomes more problematic as the book goes on. He too seeks happiness but not through empathy, but by seeking things and situations to get what he wants.
He easily separates people he has to be concerned about and people he can use/ignore. A kind of “how to influence people and make friends” + “the power of positive thinking” philosophy to life combined with a fairly amoral approach to interacting with people, especially women. He slowly gets most of what he dreams of getting in his life, including a certain level of contentment, but he is nagged by feelings of loneliness/discontent which he doesn’t understand.
A loneliness not because he is alone, but a loneliness that is his way of being with others.
He begins to realize: “[A]ll our dealings with others, however trivial, are not just destined to vanish like ice in the sun. I was unaware that, even though we may distance ourselves and banish thoughts of a fellow human being to the recesses of our minds, our actions cannot simply disappear without leaving traces engraved in the depths of our hearts”
Highly recommended!
This is my favorite Endo novel so far. There is a simplicity to the charters and story which allows a transparency to the meaning and feelings Endo explores.
Much like I found Of Mice and Men to be Steinbeck's most moving book even as it was one of his simplest and least sophisticated.
On reading:
“The important thing in this life is to link your sadness to the sadness of others.”
my initial reactions was intellectual: but it’s just as important to share happiness with people….but then the idea worked on me through the novel and I came to feel that sadness allows an intimacy and earthiness which must precede deeper happiness which is transparent to all things. Not a happiness opposed to sadness/pain, but a happiness deeper then sadness yet able to contain it. At that level we can be with people simply, happily, and sadly. This is one of the many things I felt Morita Mitsu came to live in this novel toward the end.
The other main charter, Yoshioka Tsutomu, isn’t a particularly bad guy. In many other modern novels I could easily see him portrayed as the hero and this a nostalgic and bittersweet coming of age story. In fact that’s kind of what I expected given the title and the early chapters, but here he becomes more problematic as the book goes on. He too seeks happiness but not through empathy, but by seeking things and situations to get what he wants.
He easily separates people he has to be concerned about and people he can use/ignore. A kind of “how to influence people and make friends” + “the power of positive thinking” philosophy to life combined with a fairly amoral approach to interacting with people, especially women. He slowly gets most of what he dreams of getting in his life, including a certain level of contentment, but he is nagged by feelings of loneliness/discontent which he doesn’t understand.
A loneliness not because he is alone, but a loneliness that is his way of being with others.
He begins to realize: “[A]ll our dealings with others, however trivial, are not just destined to vanish like ice in the sun. I was unaware that, even though we may distance ourselves and banish thoughts of a fellow human being to the recesses of our minds, our actions cannot simply disappear without leaving traces engraved in the depths of our hearts”
Highly recommended!