Shusaku Endo, Deep River (New York:  New Directions Books, 1994).

In this novel a group of Japanese tourists travel to India to see the Buddhist holy sights.  Told from the multiple points of view of several of the “pilgrims,” Endo includes musings about how religious beliefs affect self-understanding.  One of his major characters, Mitsuko Naruse, is a divorced Japanese nurse who has studied Western Literature like Therese Desqueyroux, and contemplates her inner waste-land sense of emptiness and lack of direction.  She finds herself drawn to images of Kali on her tour.  She is also attracted to an old college friend named Otsu, who has been trying (without success) to become a Catholic priest, and who ends up helping people, Mother-Theresa-like, to the death-ghats in Varanasi.  This novel makes a terrific literary introduction to 3 of the great world faiths:  Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity.  (see lesson plans for this novel).

In the following excerpts, Mitsuko encounters images of Kali, first in a tourist guide-book to the Hindu deities, and then in front of a statue of Kali herself.
 
“These goddesses were utterly unlike the European images of the Holy Mother Mary; some rode on water buffaloes and stabbed at the demon gods, while others depicted the savagery of the goddess Kali, who stuck out her long, snakelike tongue as she trampled on her husband Siva… On a separate page, the goddess Kali was gazing towards her, her arms outstretched, her eyes brimming with gentleness.  Her lips had—or had Mitsuko just imagined it?—curled into a smile.  On the next page, that smiling Kali sucked warm blood from the blood-soaked demon Raktavija.  She held up a freshly severed head, and blood flecked her lips as she poked out her long tongue.  Mitsuko flicked back and forth between the photograph and the painting, and felt that both images were herself.”  (115)

“Please have a look at an image of my favourite goddess… This goddess is called Chamunda.  Chamunda lives in graveyards.  At her feet you can see human corpses that have been pecked by birds and devoured by jackals… Her breasts droop like those of an old woman.  And yet she offers milk from her withered breasts to the children who line up before her.  Can you see how her right leg has festered as though afflicted with leprosy?  Her belly has caved in from hunger, and scorpions have stung her there.  Enduring all these ills and pains, she offers milk from her sagging breasts to mankind…” (139).