SOURCE: Mathy, Francis. “Shusaku Endo: Japanese Catholic Novelist.” In Catholics on Literature, edited by J. C. Whitehouse, pp. 69-77. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, originally published in The Month in 1987, Mathy discusses Endō's Catholicism and surveys his writing career.]

Shusaku Endo's latest novel Scandal (1986) begins with Suguro, the hero of a number of Endo's semi-autobiographical novels and stories, about to receive still another literary prize. As he listens to a fellow novelist make the presentation speech, Suguro, now in his late sixties, reflects with great satisfaction upon his long career as a novelist. He feels that with this latest novel everything he had been aiming at all through the years has been achieved. His life and his writing have at last reached a point of harmony.

Now entering his sixty-fifth year, Endo himself must be feeling a similar satisfaction. In the first place, he has been by any standards an eminently successful writer. He has written over thirty full-length novels, even more books of non-fiction, including several biographies, over a hundred short stories, a handful of plays, and newspaper and magazine articles too numerous to count. And he has been richly recompensed for his work. His books have sold well and many of them have gone through many editions. A large number of his novels and stories have been made into movies and television dramas. Being shown in Japanese movie theatres at this moment is the movie made from one of his earliest novels, The Sea and Poison, which the movie critic for one of the Tokyo English newspapers called ‘the most powerful Japanese film of the year (1986)—indeed, for considerably longer’.

Endo has also been rewarded by critical success. His very first novel, White Man, received the coveted Akutagawa Prize, a prize for new writing that has often launched its recipients on to successful writing careers, and since then he has received many additional literary prizes. He is currently president of the Japan PEN Club and is even considered by many to be the writer most likely to receive a Nobel Prize in literature, should the Nobel committee train its sights upon Japan again in the near future.

Abroad too his reputation is steadily growing. Beginning with the English translation of Silence in 1969, a number of his works have been made available in English: The Golden Country (1970), The Sea and Poison (1972), Wonderful Fool (1974), A Life of Jesus (1978), Volcano (1978), When I Whistle (1979), and most recently Samurai (1982) and Stained Glass Elegies (1984). The latter two are now available in Penguin Books.

The novelist mentioned in the first paragraph begins his presentation speech by referring to Suguro's uniqueness in being a Christian writer in a country like Japan, whose cultural climate is so resistant to theological thought. ‘From the first, Suguro agonized over how to get Japanese, who had no ears for it, to listen to the story he most wanted to tell—the story of God.’¹ Suguro wrote a number of stories based on materials from early Japanese Christianity: he dramatized the pitiful lot of the Christians as they were mercilessly pressed to abandon their Faith. For thirty years his constant theme has been: how can Christianity, a foreign import, be made to harmonize with the climate of Japan?

For the speaker, Suguro's most laudable quality has been that he has never sacrificed literature for religion. He has not made literature religion's handmaid. ‘As a writer, he was continued to probe those ugly, unpleasant, even hateful parts of man that his Faith must condemn. He has been able to discover meaning and value in what he calls ‘sin’. In every sin, he demonstrates, is to be found a hidden longing for life, a yearning to find a path out of the suffocating air of the world as it is today. It is here that the uniqueness of Suguro's literature is to be found’.

The above is undoubtedly Endo's own estimate of himself and his works. He considers himself a Catholic writer in the tradition of François Mauriac and Graham Greene, to both of whom he acknowledges a great debt of gratitude. (On a recent ten-day visit to London he spent most of his time wandering about the streets of the city, The End of the Affair in hand, retracing the steps of Sarah, and even a casual reading of Silence will reveal the great influence of The Power and the Glory. No wonder Greene has called Endo one of the greatest living novelists.)

Shusaku Endo was born in Tokyo in 1923 but spent his early years in Dairen in Manchuria. When his mother and father separated, Shusaku went with his mother to live in the house of a Catholic aunt in Kobe. There under the aunt's influence, Mrs Endo soon became a Catholic herself and also had her ten-year old son instructed and baptized. In university Endo majored in French literature and became especially interested in the works of twentieth-century French Catholic novelists. As one of the first post-war students to go abroad for study, Endo was able to pursue this interest further at the University of Lyons. Illness forced him to interrupt his studies and return to Japan, but it was while he was in France that he decided to become a writer. He already had in mind the plot of White Man, which was to initiate his career as a novelist. This novel, as mentioned above, won him the Akutagawa Prize and he began work immediately on his second novel, Yellow Man. Other works followed in quick succession. But his career was interrupted for several years while he battled with tuberculosis. He underwent a series of operations and had a close brush with death. It was after his recovery that he wrote his first short story that made use of early Japanese Christian materials, ‘Unzen’, and followed this up with the novel Silence and the play The Golden Country.

To understand what Endo was trying to do in Silence, and, in fact, in most of his work, it is necessary to take a closer look at his early experiences in Kobe and France and to see how the writer was shaped by them. Endo's baptism, like that of Suguro in ‘My Belongings’ in Stained Glass Elegies, had been a mere formality. As he has stated on several occasions, he soon became aware that, in being baptized, he had been attired in a Western-style suit that did not fit him and which he had not chosen. While in his teens, he had tried again to get out of it, but always unsuccessfully. Finally, he had decided to restyle it into a Japanese kimono more to his taste.

While in France, he became even more aware of how alien Western Christianity was to his Japanese temperament. In an early essay, he maintained that the Japanese are insensitive to God, sin, and death, and he wondered how it is possible to make Christians of a people who dislike extreme ways of thinking about evil and sin and who are totally indifferent to the question of the existence of God. Japan, he averred, is a moral ‘mudswamp’, a metaphor which was to pervade his works. When Fr Ferreira, the apostate priest in Silence, is trying to convince a young confrere to apostatize, he tells him that Japan is a mudswamp, that the Faith could never take root there. The seeds that are planted may germinate and grow, but soon the roots begin to rot and the leaves to turn yellow and wither. A Japanese official tells Ferreira, in The Golden Country, that he has been conquered by ‘mudswamp Japan’. ‘The Christian teachings’, he adds, ‘are like a flame and will set a man on fire. But the tepid warmth of Japan nurtures sleep’. Almost all of Endo's novels are concerned with this ‘mudswamp Japan’, and several of them contrast the tepid warmth of the mudswamp with the penetrating flame of Christianity. It is no exaggeration to say that one of the main concerns of his novels has been to show that there can be salvation also for the denizens of the mudswamp.

But the symbol of the mudswamp does not derive solely from Endo's speculative ruminations on the differences between East and West. It has more personal roots. Endo's mother could by no stretch of the imagination be considered a ‘mudswamp’ character. She was made of the stuff that saints are made of. A woman of strong will and passion, she threw herself with great energy into whatever she undertook. She began her life as a convert with this same passion.

A slightly fictionalized but generally accurate account of those early days in Kobe is given in Endo's short story ‘The Shadow Figure’. In her great desire for sanctity the boy's mother places herself under the direction of a young Spanish (in reality, German) priest of very much the same passionate temperament as herself. Learned, handsome, well-groomed, and with a very attractive personality, this priest soon becomes a powerful influence in the boy's home. ‘Like a nun’, the narrator writes, ‘she imposed on herself and on me a life of strict prayer. Every morning she took me to Mass and whenever she had time she said the rosary. She even began to act as if she were thinking of bringing me up to be a priest like you’.² (In fact, Endo has written somewhere that when he was a middle-school student he did for a time consider becoming a priest.)

The priest would come to the boy's home once a week and his mother would gather people of the neighbourhood to listen to his stimulating talks. The boy found these soirées boring and even painful. But more painful to him was the discipline that this priest began to demand of him. He was getting poor grades at school. (Endo writes that he himself began middle school in the top A class and fell one class each year until he wound up in D and graduated 116th in a class of 118). The priest, by way of imposing discipline on the boy, had his mother get rid of his beloved dog, who was for him the only being who could share a boy's inexpressible loneliness.

It was typical of you to act that way. Weakness, laziness, slovenliness—you hated these things more than anything. A man should grow strong. He has to make efforts. He has to train himself both in life and faith. You never said that in so many words, but you put it into practice in your daily life. Everybody noticed how zealously you carried out your mission work and how earnestly you devoted yourself to theological study. You were above reproach. Everyone (just like my mother) respected your noble character. I alone, mere child that I was, began to be irked by your irreproachableness … I could not conform physically to your ideal of life. I do not try now to excuse myself for those days. All I want to say is that your kindness and enthusiasm brought good results to the strong but were harsh on the weak, and at times meaninglessly inflicted suffering on them.³

A sickly boy, ungifted in studies, Shusaku could not but realize the tremendous gap that separates the naturally strong, like his mother and the priest, from the naturally weak. If as he grew older he had given up his Faith completely and accommodated himself to an easier life, it would not have been strange. In a magazine interview Endo once stated:

There were many times when I felt I wanted to get rid of my Catholicism, but I was finally unable to do so … The reason for this must be that it had become a part of me after all … Still, there was always that feeling in my heart that it was something borrowed, and I began to wonder what my real self was like. This I think is the ‘mudswamp’ Japanese in me. From the time I first began to write novels even to the present day, this confrontation of my Catholic self with the self that lies underneath has echoed and reechoed in my work. I have felt that I had to find some way to reconcile the two.

But this was not the only reconciliation that had to take place. Endo seems to have had a love-hate relationship with his mother's confessor. The man had become a kind of a father to him. When, after graduation from college, Endo did not immediately find a job, the priest took both Shusaku and his brother to help out with his new work as editor of the Japanese edition of Catholic Digest. So it must have been a great shock to Endo when this very strong priest, a veritable avatar of God the Father, left the priesthood and religious life and married a Japanese woman. How could such strength and such weakness in the same person be reconciled?

Endo's speculative concerns about the distance that separates East from West, and his more personal concerns outlined above, are at the heart of two of his early novels, Yellow Man and Volcano. In both, the moral apathy of the Japanese characters is contrasted with the ferocious struggle between good and evil that takes place in the spirit of a foreign priest, who eventually loses the struggle and gets involved with a Japanese woman. The Sea and Poison is also about the Japanese mudswamp: the moral apathy of a group of doctors and nurses who conduct fatal medical experiments on captured American airmen during the war. But it was when Endo began to do research on early Christianity in Japan that he came across material exactly suited to his purpose.

Endo admits frankly that from the first he was not interested in the kind of Christians who held firm to their beliefs and convictions and refused to apostatize. ‘My concern lay rather with the weaklings who compromised their convictions and stepped fumi-e because they were forced to do so’. Still more exactly to his purpose was the strong man Jesuit Provincial Christopher Ferreira, who had not only given up his Faith and married a Japanese woman, but who had also helped the persecutors in their attempt to stamp out Christianity. From this material Endo fashioned the novel Silence and the play The Golden Country. In stepping on the face of Christ, thereby apostatizing, both Ferreira (in the play) and his younger confrere Fr Roderigo (in the novel) discover a new and different Christ, an Oriental Christ, who understands their pain in sinning and continues to love them all the same. By stepping on the fumi-e Western priests become naturalized citizens of the Japanese mudswamp and all are saved by the all-understanding love of Christ. This, Endo seems to hope, is a Christianity that the Japanese will be able to understand and accept.

Catholics in Japan were greatly offended by the novel, not so much by the unorthodoxy of the climax, in which Christ himself urges the priest to go ahead and sin, assuring him that he understands his pain in stepping upon the face of the one who is dearest to him, but rather in the fact that the writer completely falsified history in warping it to his theme.

The missionary enterprise in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Japan was one the Church has a right to be proud of. In less than a century as many as 700,000 Japanese (out of a total population of only twenty million) from all strata of society became Christians, and their faith was strong enough to support an estimated fifty to sixty thousand in their choice of martyrdom over apostasy.⁴ It had also been strong enough to preserve itself in hidden settlements until the end of the 19th century when the missionaries returned to Japan. Endo, with no historical basis and solely for the purposes of his theme, suggested that this early Christianity had not been a true Christianity but an Oriental deflection from it. ‘The God the Japanese pray to in our churches is not the Christian God, but a god of their own making’, asserts Ferreira. ‘Our God, when he came to Japan, like a butterfly caught in a spider's web, retained only the external form of God but lost his true reality and became a lifeless corpse’.

In proposing his solution to the seeming incompatibility of Western Christianity and the Japanese sensibility, Endo became an elitist in reverse. It is the weak and sinful that have first crack at salvation—not, it is to be noted, the sinner who repents of his sin and attempts to do better, but rather the one who continues to sin but feels pain in doing so. These are able to reach a high level of love. The priest in Silence, after stepping on the fumi-e, reflects that he loves Christ now in a completely different way from before. ‘To come to know this love, everything that has taken place was necessary’. In short, sin born out of love leads to a higher sanctity.

It is not surprising that Endo should next have attempted a life of Jesus, depicting a Saviour who is completely powerless except to love, one who could work no miracles but continued to love. Perhaps to emphasize the overwhelming degree of Jesus' love, he involves all the apostles in Judas' betrayal: they are all equally guilty. But Jesus forgives and continues to love them. The final image of Jesus that emerges from the book is that of a joyless man with tired and sunken eyes, but eyes that overflow with love more profound than a miracle, even toward those who had deserted and betrayed him. Not a word of resentment passes his lips as he gazes with sadness at those who have hurt him.

One Japanese critic reviewing Silence had written that the face of Jesus on the fumi-e ‘is the mother's face in Japan. I know nothing of Mr Endo's personal experience with his mother, but their relationship is depicted in Jesus's face on the fumi-e’.⁵ This was a very shrewd observation. All the sadness Endo felt at having disappointed his mother (perhaps he even felt it a kind of betrayal), and the sad love she had continued to show toward him, found expression in his portrayal of Christ.

Further confirmation of this identification of Christ with mother is to be found in Endo's short story ‘Mothers’. Visiting an island where there is a village of hidden Christians not yet reunited with the Church, the writer-narrator, who is never given a name, has a dream of his mother. He is surprised that twenty years after her death she should still appear so vividly in his dreams. He recalls how often he disappointed her, especially after he stopped going to church even on Sunday. One day after such a disappointment, ‘she said not a word, but only looked at me. I watched her face slowly collapse and tears fall down her cheeks’. Until late that night, he could hear her sobbing in her room. He recalls with great sadness that even on the day of her death, at the very moment of her dying, he was engaged in an act that he is now heartily ashamed of.

When he meets the hidden Christians and is shown the ancient painting of Mary which they venerate, he recalls his mother's statue of the Sorrowful Mother. He had kept the statue with him in his hospital room. It has been greatly damaged in an air raid and ‘the face looked sad and seemed to be staring at me … The bombing and the passage of time had cracked the face and disfigured the nose so all that seemed to remain was the expression of sadness’. At some time or other he had come ‘to associate the expression on my mother's face when she came to me in a dream with that of the statue’.

At the end of the story, the narrator feels that the hidden Christians, who had been able to hold on to their religion only by stepping each year on the fumi-e, are in the same condition of heart as he is. Near the end of the story is this telling paragraph:

The missionaries long ago brought to this country the teaching of a Father God. But in the course of time, after the missionaries had been driven out and the churches destroyed, the hidden Christians gradually threw over all the elements of the religion that didn't suit them, replacing them with what is most essential in all Japanese religion, devotion to Mother. At that moment I thought of my own mother. She seemed to be standing beside me, a grey shadow. She was not playing the violin nor was she praying the rosary. She stood there hands folded, looking at me with sorrowful eyes.

Thus Christ, for Endo, in his tender, all-forgiving love for men is more mother than father. The weakest and most vicious dwellers in the mudswamp are ever looked upon by the loving eyes of Christ. He will never desert them, even while they are committing their crimes. It is the maternal love of Christ that makes it possible for even a Japanese to be a Christian, that rescues the Japanese from the mudswamp.

In a series of novels, Endo depicted characters who were Christ figures and showed how their great love effects changes in those around them, empowering them to take at least the first step out of the swamp. Typical of these novels is Wonderful Fool, in which Gaston, a kind of holy fool, rescues the killer Endo (sic) from death in an actual mudswamp and succeeds in turning him aside from his path of revenge.

Suguro in Scandal, as we have seen, considers his latest novel to be the culmination of everything he has tried to accomplish as a novelist. Here Endo is undoubtedly making reference to his own novel Samurai, a novel which does indeed represent a kind of culmination to Endo's career as a Catholic novelist.

In the early 17th century the Japanese feudal lord Masamune Date sent emissaries to Mexico to try to establish trade relations with that country. In return, Christian missionaries would be welcomed in the realm and given freedom to evangelize. The chief emissary was Rokuemon Hasekura, a low-ranking samurai, whose lands were literally swampland. (He hopes that if his mission is successful he will be given better land.) Accompanying the samurai are twenty or so Japanese and a Franciscan friar. Their mission carried them first to Mexico and then on to Spain and Rome. In Rome, the samurai received baptism. (In the novel the baptism is merely a political expedient; Hasekura never intended to become Christian). But the mission is unsuccessful. Moreover, when the samurai returns to Japan, he finds the political climate is completely changed. Masamune is no longer interested in trade with Mexico, and Christianity is now proscribed throughout the country. What finally became of the historical Hasekura is not known, though according to one account he died a martyr. In the novel, when it is learned that he received baptism, for whatever reason, he is apprehended and killed.

The point of view of the novel is equally distributed between the samurai and the Franciscan friar, so that here again we have the familiar dichotomy: the passionate Western priest fighting a furious battle against evil, and the apathetic mudswamp Japanese who wants nothing more than to enjoy an ordinary sort of contentment in life. In this novel both are victorious. In the words of Van G. Gessel, the translator of Samurai:

Here Velasco (the friar), once he has cast off his pride, is allowed to worship and serve a glorified Christ with a rational and aggressive faith, and his martyr's death is an undiluted reflection of his dynamic Western beliefs. In contrast, Hasekura accepts the companionship of Jesus in an almost passive way. His faith is primarily non-rational and thoroughly internalized … Endo in this novel grants both men a place in the eternal mansions of heaven.⁶

Endo himself says of his protagonists:

Velasco and Hasekura are like two men climbing a mountain from different sides and reporting to each other all the time. At the top they realise it's the same mountain. They meet in the last chapter, which I didn't write.’⁷

Thus it can be seen that Shusaku Endo is well deserving of the epithet ‘Catholic novelist’. From the beginning of his writing career until now, he has been literally obsessed with Christ. And through his life and work he has succeeded in interesting in Christianity many Japanese who would not otherwise have been reached. These include a number of intellectuals and fellow writers, several of whom have consequently received baptism.

All the same, it must also be said that the scope of Endo's Catholicism is very narrow. In Endo's religion there is no Church, no community, no sacraments other than baptism, no Vatican Council II, no empowering Spirit. In reaction to the sin-conscious, duty-oriented, Jansenist-tinged Church that he was introduced to in his childhood,⁸ Endo has created a Christianity in no need of Church or, indeed, as is well illustrated in the case of the samurai, of any intermediary between God and man.

This is not to fault Endo as a novelist, but readers should be aware of the fact that in Endo they are getting not the whole symphony but only the solo flute.⁹ As for the persistent claim that there is something in the Japanese sensibility that cannot receive Christ, thirty-four years of evangelizing in Japan have convinced me that this is false. The main obstacle I have encountered is the busyness of the Japanese, but once they can be led to inner silence, they very quickly hear the voice of the Holy Spirit and encounter Christ and his Church.

Notes

1. Translation of Endo, unless noted, are my own.

2. Japan Quarterly (Tokyo, Asahi Shimbun), Vol. XXXI, No. 3 (1984) pp. 169 (translation by Thomas Lally, Yumiko Oka and Dennis J. Doodlin.)

3. Ibid., pp. 169-70.

4. These statistics were given me by Fr Hubert Cieslik, SJ, an authority on the Christian period in Japan and the teacher to whom Endo went for information about the early Christians.

5. Quoted by Endo himself in his essay ‘The Anguish of an Alien’. Cf. Vol. XI, No. 4 (Fall 1974) of the Japan Christian Quarterly, p. 181. Endo acknowledges there the truth of the critic's observation.

6. Postscript to Samurai (New York, Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 271-2.

7. Quoted in Asia Week (October 21, 1983), p. 63.

8. The Catholic Church in Japan today still suffers from the harsh, joyless, penitential, individualistic brand of Christianity that the new missionaries of the 19th century brought to Japan. The 17th century Church was far more joyful and had a far greater sense of community.

9. Endo uses this same image. In a magazine interview he once stated: ‘It seems to me that Catholicism is not a solo, but a symphony. It fits, of course, man's sinless side, but unless a religion can find place for his sinful side in the ensemble, it is a false religion. If I have trust in Catholicism, it is because I find in it much more possibility than in any other religion for presenting the full symphony of humanity. The other religions have almost no fullness: they have but solo parts. Only Catholicism can present the full symphony. And unless there is in that symphony a part that corresponds to Japan's mudswamp, it cannot be a true religion.’