fin.

So I finished Deep River. A strange ending. It deals with the two ideas I mentioned last night -- religion and tourism.

A man on the tour - Sanjo - fancied himself as an aspiring professional photographer. Taking photos at the cremation grounds at the River Ganges is forbidden. Naturally, as an inconsiderate tourist, he tried to take some. When a group of Hindus saw him, they formed a mob to chase him down.

If you remember, the story of Mitsuko is one of religious confusion and seeking for something real inside herself. Otsu was a boy who she slept with to try to steer him away from his faith. He went on to France to become a preist, after which he ended up in Varanasi where he would go throughout the city picking up the sick and the dead to bring them to the River.

Otsu was working at the river when the Hindus formed the mob. He ran in between the mob and Sanjo, who escaped. The mob settled for Otsu, until Mitsuko, who was near, came screaming to say Otsu had done nothing. When they realized it was not who they wanted, the mob subsided and went back to their cleansing. Mitsuko stayed with Otsu until his friends who would help him carry the sick and the dead to the River came to take him to the hospital. Mitsuko yells to him as they are taking him away saying that all his beliefs are futile, and look what they have brought you to.

The book ends on the day they are leaving to return to Japan. Mitsuko askes Enami, the tour guide, to call the hospital to ask about Otsu. He does. The last line of the book is Enami saying, "He's in critical condition. About an hour ago he took a sudden turn for the worse."

I don't understand why it ends this way. For the last few chapters, you don't hear about Isobe. You learned that he never found his wife, but someone had comforted him by saying she was "reborn inside of him." This was an interesting conclusion to his story, but it never said whether he stopped drinking, which he had picked up intensively in his search for his wife.

I learned. Hopefully you learned something. I love the book! I suggest it! It leaves one contemplating things.

FAILURE!!

Deep River. I have one more chapter to go.

For one, it is such great writing. Secondly, I have learned a lot about tourism and religious tolerance. For now, a bit on tourism.

As the reader, we get to see inside everyone's head -- or rather, whoever the author wants you to see into. One person we get to know is the tour guide. He has spent much of his life studying India and Hinduism. He wants to continue to learn because he believes that, even though he has been learning for years, there is still more to learn! His frustration is that these wealthy Japanese tourists come for a week or two and see highlights of famous, relatively wealthy Indian cities, and then they return home and make like they understand the whole of India. I have always been somewhat convicted as a tourist of places. This is where people live. This is where people suffer and where they take pride as their home and where they have learned every good and ugly thing that they know. I love to travel and learn bits of history and culture. I think it is somewhat important to be a well-rounded person to have some sort of cross-cultural experience. But how do you accomplish this without either being hyper- or hypo-sensitive? Is a snapshot worth it? Is it good not to understand something fully? Or is it better to avoid any knowledge so that you are not offensive in your ignorance? How can there be an acceptable balance?