Scandal has justly become one of the most internationally successful novels by Shusaku Endo, not only because of the fascinating image it offers of the pleasure districts of Tokyo, but also because of the depth with which it paints the issue of individual identity, as well as the allusion to Edgar Allan Poe's black cat or the presence of anonymous phone calls, which have made rivers of ink flow and which have been identified as antecedents of certain motifs in the most current Japanese narrative. Through the story of Suguro, a Catholic writer (like Endo himself), and his encounter with Naruse, a middle-aged widow who used to be sexually aroused by her husband's accounts of brutalities during his time as a soldier in China . Shusaku Endo confronts the reader with an astonishing conception of sadomasochism and sexual life in a very broad sense.
