Gave me chills. Not the good kind.

It took a long time, but I finally finished reading The Sea and Poison by Endo Shusaku.

It’s not because it’s a long book, or anything like that - it’s more like a novella than a novel, only 167 pages - but I found that when I put it down in between bouts of reading it became harder and harder to pick it up again. So it stared at me from my bedside for a few months, waiting, until I finally decided that I had to finish this book once and for all and then plowed through the rest in two sittings.

The story takes place just prior to Japan’s defeat in WWII, and tells the story of how an American prisoner was vivisected at Fukuoka Medical School, in what was, horribly enough, hardly an isolated incident at the time.

The story is told from a total of four points of view. There is the unnamed man in the prologue, possibly intended to represent the author, who finds out that his doctor was convicted for human experimentation at Fukuoka. In flashbacks, there is the doctor, Suguro, an intern at the time; Toda, another intern; and Ueda Nobu, a nurse. All of them, for various reasons, find themselves participating in the murder of an American airman.

The Sea and Poison is a horror story, and it reads like one. The setting is bleak, the conclusion inevitable. I really appreciated that Endo did not portray any of his characters as deluded into thinking that the medical data they would obtain from the vivisection would justify the atrocity of it, and so turn the story into an aesop. He is more concerned with exploring the question of why people participate in things that they know are inexcusably evil.

This is Endo being Endo, so everything is symbolic of just about everything else. Surprisingly enough for Endo, Jesus does not make an appearance, as far as I could tell. I don’t know if this is idiosyncratic to Endo or to skilled Japanese writers in general, but there’s a lot of repetitive descriptions and imagery which, in its obviousness, is hardly amateur.

That said, it’s a shame that more people don’t try to translate Endo (or just about any other Asian authors), because this is definitely a translation that should be improved upon. Japanese as a literary language doesn’t fit comfortably into a Western style without major adjustments, and I don’t think the translator felt comfortable making them, hence a good deal of awkwardness. It could have been much worse, though, I’m not complaining too much. Definitely recommended, and for many more reasons besides the ones I’ve mentioned.

Небольшая повесть где обыденным языком рассказано, как вполне заурядные люди, гражданские медики, стали палачами - пусть это военное время, речь о пленных, приговор выносили не они, но реально убивали они, своими руками.

Я не вполне понимаю восторгов и премий вокруг этой повести - она качественная, но особо не потрясающая. Если, конечно, не считать сюжета, но ведь автор его не придумывал, он реальный.

Отдельно порадовало, что повесть не содержит натуралистических сцен - я начинал читать с опасением, что там будут какие-то мерзкие подробности, но это в общем можно и детям давать читать, если не считать людоедского смысла происходящего.

Grim and disturbing.

Based on true events Endo's story of the vivisection experements and of the staff involved is a bleak tale. Written nearly 60 years ago this is probably one of the first books written about the events and tried to understand them. Sadly since then there seems to have been little done to build upon this understanding.
Endo's book is a true masterpiece and really deserves to be read more widely.

For the premise of this book I expected something a bit more disturbing. While there were certainly some gruesome scenes my overall impression was that it was more of a drama. It's sort of like the literary equivalent to Grey's Anatomy meets World War II crimes against humanity to put it frankly, although that description is perhaps a little overly harsh. It is beautiful and sad in its own way, even horrific at times, and is undoubtedly not just an average piece of writing.