WONDERFUL FOOL by Shusaku Endo, translated...

WONDERFUL FOOL by Shusaku Endo, translated from the Japanese by Francis Mathy (Peter Owen/Dufour editions: $28; 240 pp., paperback original) . Francis Mathy’s translation marks the first U.S. publication of this major novel by one of Japan’s greatest postwar writers. A relatively normal Tokyo household is turned upside-down by the arrival of the son’s former pen pal: Gaston Bonaparte, a lumpish vulgarian who traces his ancestry to Napoleon I. Shusaku Endo contrasts this addled Candide with what he sees as the decadent materialism of later 20th-Century Japan: The inept but kind and fiercely moral Gaston is nobler than his selfish hosts. His former correspondent reluctantly confesses: “But for such a man, a man both weak and cowardly, to bear the burden of his weakness and struggle valiantly to live a beautiful life--that’s what I call great.”