Atrocities, wars, genocide, racist attacks and hate, we live through it wondering why they are silent and that leaves humanity with a crushing feeling of helplessness. That the unconditional love of God is just as powerful as when they are silent.
The silence that Endo wrote so movingly about was connected to God. It’s a harrowing story but one which stays with the reader forever. Silence documents the beginning of Christianity in Japan during the 1600s and the ordeal of European missionaries sent to convert the masses (often in secret, in order to avoid detection and torture from the local daimyo or feudal lords). Here we choose four of Endo’s greatest works.Įditorial credit: Picador Publishing Silence (1966) They approached, with deft skill, themes of spirituality, Christianity, faith, guilt, empathy, life as an outsider and a frail and crumbling humanity which reflects profound experience and a poetic vulnerability.
The Tokyo-native, however, has been brought back into literary and cultural consciousness partly because of the cinematic adaptation of his tour de force Silence by Hollywood great Martin Scorsese in 2016.Įndo, a Roman Catholic and Francophile due to his time studying at the University of Lyon in the 1950s, wrote some of last century’s greatest Japanese novels. Sidelined, perhaps, due to the international acclaim for Japan’s Nobel laureates Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburo Oe and the popularity of superstar writers Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto, Endo sits quietly in the margins. The author of probably the 20th century’s most profoundly spiritual novels, Shusaku Endo is often overlooked in terms of his influence and impact on world literature.
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