A Frenchman in Tokyo

Abstract

The article examines Endō Shūsaku’s Wonderful Fool (1959) through the lens of disability studies to argue that the novel’s protagonist Gaston Bonaparte—a Frenchman and failed seminary candidate prone to misadventures in Tokyo—subverts cultural structures of ableism in postwar Japanese society. Described as a horse-faced man with a monstrous physicality, Gaston embodies a disabled Christ figure whose presentation integrates numerous transcultural characteristics. The article situates the novel during postwar Japan, in relation to the beginning of disability movements in 1960s Tokyo, to suggest Endō’s implicit criticism of ableism—a perpetuating, defining cultural feature of postwar Japanese society giving rise to exclusionary treatments of physically and culturally dissimilar bodies. Endō’s novel not only promotes a Christian-oriented inclusivity as a solution to postwar Japan’s social brokenness but also a theology of disability—namely, a recognition that embracing Christ and Christian virtues entails an interdependence with all disabled and foreign bodies. Wonderful Fool uses a disabled folkloric-Christological figure—a paradoxical, transnational union between the East and West—through whom Endō envisions a cultural shift toward disability acceptance and Christian evangelization in Japan.