SCANDAL<i> by Shusaku Endo (Vintage: $8.95) </i>

Shusaku Endo’s brooding novel about sin and human nature mixes Freudian psychology with Christian and Buddhist theology. Suguro, an aging, respected Christian novelist, finds his reputation threatened by a mysterious doppelganger who haunts Tokyo’s pornographic shows and massage parlors.

His situation recalls the elderly Honda’s arrest for voyeurism near the end of Yukio Mishima’s “Sea of Fertility” tetralogy. But for Mishima, Honda’s humiliation is just another incident in a transitory existence that will dissolve into a Buddhist void. Suguro fights to protect his image as the epitome of moral probity, and Endo uses his struggle to explore the dark reaches of the human heart and the need for redemption. An intriguing meditation on contemporary Japanese culture that simultaneously exalts the most rarefied forms of beauty and consumes vast quantities of the most degrading sadomasochistic pornography.