Mitsuko's Failure In Deep River

In “Deep River” by Shusaku Endo, Mitsuko Narusea one of the main characters goes on a tour to India. She is hoping to find herself, she doesn’t know what she wants and hopes this trip will help her find out. The theme of failure is prevailed throughout the story. In “Deep River,” Mitsuko fails at her attempt to find herself and failed at making Otsu nonreligious. In Endo’s novel Mitsuko is portrayed as a selfish and atheist women. Mitsuko had a failed marriage and comes to the epiphany of her incapability to love. She decides to go to India to find herself, and the meaning of her life. She judges Otsu her schoolmate, whom she cruelly seduced for believing in God she refers to God as an onion. She doesn’t believe in God and doesn’t comprehend how someone can believe in God and waste their time praying being devoted and helping others. That is something she does not believe in and did not understand why Otsu did. Mitsuko tries her hardest to corrupt Otsu and make him change his beliefs but Otsu stood strong by his beliefs and did not change them. Towards the end of the novel Mitsuko realizes how she miserably failed, although she understands Otsu. Mitsuko understands Otsu’s beliefs and why he does certain
She couldn’t believe Otsu would go to pray in the Kultur Heim she said “It makes me sick to think of man coming to a place like this and dropping to his knees to pray.”(Endo 39). Otsu’s actions bothered Mitsuko and did not accept them but she was not able to feel indifferent towards Otsu. Mitsuko did not tolerate the fact of how Otsu’s life revolved around God she stated … “he had everything snatched away from him by his Onion”(116). Mitsuko wanted to corrupt Otsu so he would change his view of God and wanted him to become an atheist like her. Mitsuko is a perfect example of Feuerbach’s belief of alienation, which is the projection of a part of self onto an imaginary fantasy called