Miracles

Starting with the life of St Maximilian Kolbe, Sono Ayoko tells a story from the point of view of a journalist investigating the details of sanctity. What makes any particular person a saint? Even after examining detail after detail, the journalist narrator can’t figure it out, it eludes her, yet it remains hovering just within the horizon of her vision. Kolbe is a saint, she is sure of that, but why? Her spiritual sensitivity transcends gumshoe activities of her journalistic practice. A profound novel, showing why spiritual realities can be plain, and yet inexplicable, ineffable. Highly recommended!

This is a strange novel, a Japanese "I" novel, where a flighty Japanese woman who seems almost daft, unserious, heretical in her private opinions, somehow burrows her way into the mystery of sanctity and reveals something marvelous. The conventions of this novel will strike most American readers as just plain odd, and the result will be wholly salutary. Emily Dickinson said a good poem should knock one's head off. This good novel is perhaps not quite so violent, and yet its peculiar, eccentric and, again, strange qualities will at once fascinate, shock, and edify any reader who entrusts himself to its unreliable, wandering, but accidentally profound, narrative.

Sono Ayako was a Catholic writer whose accomplishments were dimmed by the popularity (entirely justified) of Shusako Endo (Silence, The Samurai, et al). Miracles is her third novel translated in English, the other two novels -- Watcher From the Shore and No Reason for Murder -- published in 1989 and 2003. Miracles, beautifully translated by Kevin Doak, is the story of an unbelieving and youthful Japanese journalist traveling to Poland to investigate the life and death of the Polish martyr Maximilian Kolbe, the "saint of Auschwitz." This journey is full of surprise twists and turns and never turns into a standard hagiography. One of the most compelling moments in the novel is a reflection on the sadism of the Nazi guards at the concentration camps like Auschwitz where Kolbe offered his life is save another prisoner from a death sentence. Sadism, it is argued, is impossible without a belief in God. Highly recommended!