[In the following essay, Rimer discusses Endō's meaning for a largely Western reading audience.]

There is no question but that, in the United States at least, Endô Shûsaku has attained widely-recognized status as a world-class writer. His more recent books to arrive in English translation, in particular The Samurai and Scandal, have received lengthy reviews in such widely-read publications as the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other similar publications by which status is doubtless conveyed and measured in this country. Translations into other European languages have been effective as well in spreading real interest in his work.

The problem for Western reviewers, however, comes in finding an appropriate means to dismember Endô's unique and colorful psychic portraits and landscapes so as to force them into the appropriate Western-style frames; they don't always fit, and so for the careless reader, certain aspects of the author's vision risk being snipped away. The easiest, now most banal, method of dealing with Endô's work is to suggest that he is the “Japanese Graham Greene.” This is by no means an insult; Greene, as the recent testimonies that followed his death have shown, retains his high reputation as one of the finest British authors of our century. The reason for putting Endô in such a slot, however, has to do with the fact that, in addition to the Catholicism these two writers share, they show similar careers: both have composed a few plays, an impressive series of serious, often profound novels on the human condition, and a plethora of lighter “entertainments” as well. So, in some loose fashion, the model fits.

Endô, in my view, does show one important trait in common with Graham Greene that has been less commonly observed. Both writers have the ability, through their novelistic skill, first to make the reader comfortable, by providing a vision of contemporary life beautifully realized in significant details; then, once this atmosphere is created, to make the reader extremely uncomfortable by raising, in the midst of what still seems familiar, profound questions that pertain to both the deep exaltation and to the dark ambiguities of which the human spirit is capable. Mr. Greene must have recognized something of himself in Endô's work; after all, he wrote at one point that “Endô is to my mind one of the finest living novelists.”

Many of us would concur. How, in terms of reference provided by postwar world literature, does Endô achieve his level of excellence? First of all, I am inclined to make the obvious point, and one that goes too often unmentioned, that Endô is a superb literary craftsman. He can achieve any effect that he wishes: he can shift his tonalities, mix humor with pathos, broaden a theme to farce, then quickly narrow it to irony. Such verbal and literary talents are rare and precious enough in any period. Another of his skills that is perhaps less obvious to a reader unfamiliar with a wide range of modern Japanese literature is Endô's ability to create altogether believable non-Japanese characters. Just as there are few Western novelists who have found the ability to create perfectly delineated Japanese characters without descending to cliché or stereotype (we certainly have enough of those, starting with Madame Butterfly up through the brightly-tinted confusions of James Clavell), there are very few foreign characters in modern Japanese fiction whose portraits can strike a contemporary reader as altogether appropriate. Even such justly celebrated writers as Kawabata or Mishima use foreign characters sparingly, and those they create often teeter between pastiche and perhaps inadvertent parody. Endô, however, inhabits a more genuinely cosmopolitan world, and his Western characters are as touching, real, and involved as his Japanese protagonists.

Perhaps this cosmopolitan aspect of Endô's vision comes from his early experiences in France, where he made friends and involved himself in the everyday life, as well as in the thought, of his newly chosen surroundings. Psychologically and spiritually speaking, Endô as revealed in his writings is a complex man, with many tiers of cultural insight, some of them seemingly contradictory. In this regard he is more typical of our own time, but perhaps less typically Japanese in his mentality than many other significant Japanese writers in his generation, who have found themselves less exposed in any personal fashion to the daily challenges and confusions of living in another culture.

Related to this cosmopolitan strain is Endô's own openness to others, his refreshing lack of amour-propre as a writer. I have been particularly impressed with this aspect of Endô's character in reading portions of his new autobiography published in 1989 entitled Rakudai bôzu no rirekisho, which might be roughly translated as “The personal history of a failed rascal.” (Incidentally, this is a particularly delightful work of Endô's that should certainly be made available in English and other foreign languages.) As Marcel Proust has written with great eloquence in one of his essays, the reality of the personality of the writer lies virtually altogether in what he writes, not in the daily habits of his exterior life; with this conviction as a starting point, it can be argued that Endô's enthusiasms and refreshing modesty are, at least in literary terms, genuine indeed.

Thinking back to his years in Lyon shortly after the war, Endô remarks in his autobiography that:

I had not been in communication with my friends in France for such a long time. I'm sure that none of them ever dreamt that their Japanese student friend, to whom they taught slang and salacious popular songs, would have become a novelist.

Two years ago, I received a letter from France. Along with it came a photo of an older woman I had trouble recognizing; she was standing by an older gentleman, holding a baby.

“Do you know who I am? I am the same Monique, who, in 1951 and 1952 was in our group with people like A, P, and M, and you. Quite by accident I mentioned your name to a Japanese company official who happened to be in Lyon. He explained to me that you had become a novelist. How surprised I was! Can you understand why? Yes, I was truly amazed. After all, at that time in your life, you never so much as mentioned the idea of writing a novel.”

Could this older lady be the lovely Monique? And the old man near her was H, a man I had known. The baby was their grandchild.

Perhaps I should be ashamed to admit it, but looking at this photograph, my eyes filled with tears. I had grown old, but, then, so had they.

When Monique wrote that she never imagined that I might become a novelist, she was quite right. I certainly never had any such confidence in myself; and even if I had harbored such feelings, I would have been ashamed of myself, and would certainly never have dared mention anything to my friends there in France.¹

Endô writes that, once he received the letter, he put himself immediately back in touch with the group in order to learn of their own subsequent careers. His friend A sent photographs and wrote back:

You remember G, I'm sure. Unfortunately, he has cancer and is in a hospital in the suburbs. Recently four of us went to see him. We took along with us the French translation of Silence. He too was so happy that you had become a writer.²

A touching incident, and the author's gentle satisfactions are simply but artfully conveyed.

Most of us, when we first travel abroad, count among our most significant experiences the development during our travels of our own self-awareness: we are pushed into realizing who we are ourselves, personally, spiritually, nationally. Endô's sojourn in France apparently struck the same chords in his psyche.

Endô's major novels chart a process of understanding and of self-understanding. For him, the question, as it has been for so many in this century, both Japanese and others, remains how to achieve openness while retaining and developing one's own sense of personal authenticity. Endô is eloquent on the point. In his new introduction to the translation of his 1965 novel Foreign Studies, first published in England in 1989, Endô writes that:

During the first year of my studies [in France] I was able to experience at first hand everyday life in post-war France, and I made some progress in my study of the language. I devoted all my time to my subject of study, twentieth-century Christian authors (focusing in particular on some of the grands écrivains of French literature like Mauriac, Bernanos, and Julien Green). I was also able to establish friendships with several of the French students at my university. Optimistically I began to believe that I had taken the first steps towards acquiring an understanding of Europe.

And yet, in about the middle of my second year, I learnt that towering beyond the hill I had scaled lay an enormous mountain. Further on lay an even more imposing mountain. I now found myself wondering whether there was any way that a visitor from the Far East could ever comprehend France. As a Japanese confronted with the tradition, the rich cultural heritage and confidence of Europe, I came to sense an unfathomable distance.³

Eventually, out of this experience, came the growth of a greater sense of self.

Some time during the second year of my stay, I gradually became more aware of my identity as a Japanese. The more I came into contact with European art and culture, the more aware did I become that they derived from emotions and a sensibility that remained alien to me.⁴

Of what does this self-understanding consist? To answer the question fully, one would have to read and contemplate all of Endô's work, but one thing seems clear from a perusal of his major writings to date: what gives Endô's work its moral resonance and contemporary social relevance is the fact that with self-understanding comes the inevitable realization that evil exists in the world. An unhappy truth, perhaps, but for Endô, an essential one. Again, a look at his autobiography reveals several examples of this insight gained from the years he spent in France. In his case, as for so many in his generation, the images he retained are those of war, evil, loss.

In front of our dormitory a rickety train went creaking by. Every day, when evening came, we could see a middle-aged woman standing near the train stop, chewing on the brim of her hat.

“Ah, I feel so sorry for that woman,” A, my best friend in the group, said to me. “Her husband was killed in the war, but she still can't believe it. Every day, she waits for him at the hour when he should be returning home.”

Even now, I can remember all this. The clanging sound of the little electric train. And the woman, standing absolutely still, like a small stone statue, holding her bag in the darkening shadows of the buildings.⁵

War brought evil.

Once, when I was walking on Place Belcour, in the middle of the city, with my friends A and P, I saw a metal plate fastened to the side of a building. I read what was written there, word by word.

“In the basement of this building, the Nazis tortured French citizens.”

The three of us peeked into the cellar window, through its rusty screen and broken glass. I felt an infinite darkness. Not so much of the room itself; rather, I thought that I had peeped into the darkness that lies at the depth of the human soul.⁶

It was perhaps the sobering nature of this self-understanding that may have led Endô to seek the possible links that tie together all humanity, whatever the superficial and differing aspects of their culture. Perhaps, he posited in 1989, one must go down into the layers of the unconscious to find these links. The tradition of Japanese literature, he stressed, provided one means to do so.

The theme of the unconscious was prominent in Eastern writing long before it was taken up in Western literature. Since about the fifth century ad one of the sects of Buddhism divided the human soul into several levels, drawing a sharp distinction between the conscious and unconscious worlds. In contrast to this, Western Christianity has tended to view the world of the unconscious as belonging to the world of evil (a belief that has influenced the works of Freud) and, as such, heretical. Even the Spanish mystics, who touched on the concept of the unconscious world, failed to treat it seriously, and it was left to Buddhism to claim that it is the unconscious which lies at the heart of man.⁷

Endô's own eloquent remarks on his ambiguous sense of self show his commitment to this multilayered vision. In speaking of his own Catholic faith, Endô insists that:

There were many times when I felt I wanted to get rid of my Catholicism, but I was finally unable to do so. It is not just that I did not throw it off, but that I was unable to throw it off. The reason for this must be that it had become a part of me after all. The fact that it had penetrated me so deeply in my youth was a sign, I thought, that it had, in part at least, become coextensive with me. 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 “mud swamp” 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, like an idiot's constant refrain, echoed and reechoed in my work.⁸

If our unconscious being, that lowest layer we can sometimes sense but not define, is the stratum that unites all of us human beings together in some vast Jungian structure, then perhaps in some fashion a kind of human democracy can be established. One of the things that this hidden world of equals allows us to discover, indeed demands that we discover, is an acute consciousness of our own individual flaws. Endô's own fictional characters constantly seek self-definition, and there are few heroes among them. The whining, fawning Kichijirô of Silence is thus perhaps representative of all us human creatures, who, whatever our vaunts and boasts, can only cry for help when real difficulties come.

Such is one aspect of Endô's message, his insight into the basic nature of the human condition. It is a message that other great writers in many cultures have carried with them, among them Natsume Sôseki in Japan, Graham Greene himself in England, and the grands écrivains of modern France of whom Endô spoke.

Endô's work, I am convinced, shows three great themes which place him altogether in the mainstream of world literature, and these insights will give his work a permanent place among the greatest fiction composed during this part of our century.

First, as I have mentioned, is his conviction, revealed so clearly in a novel such as Silence or The Sea and Poison, of the need for humanity to acknowledge, and to take upon themselves, a full conviction of the existence of evil in the world.

Secondly, Endô would have us renew our understanding of the fact that God, and Christ, represent a core of understanding and forgiveness around which our human lives revolve. This message, woven through so much of Endô's fiction, is nowhere more clearly stated than in his Preface to the American edition of his A Life of Jesus. There Endô writes:

The religious mentality of the Japanese is—just as it was at the time when the people accepted Buddhism—responsive to one who “suffers with us” and who “allows for our weakness,” but their mentality has little tolerance for any transcendent being who judges humans harshly, then punishes them. In brief, the Japanese tend to seek in their gods and buddhas a warm-hearted mother rather than a stern father. With this fact in mind I tried not so much to depict God in the father-image that tends to characterize Christianity, but rather to depict the kind-hearted maternal aspect of God revealed to us in the personality of Jesus.⁹

For the West, now in the throes of rethinking many of its own traditional ideas, such a passage has a strongly contemporary and sympathetic ring. There are many devout Christians today who would find themselves responding with approval to Endô's emphasis, and, in the current climate of thought, Endô's insights can play a powerful role.

Thirdly, Endô has with great finesse separated out the strands represented by art, sensibility, and culture, in order to show that they do not represent or constitute, in and of themselves, a religious sensibility. In the Japanese case, as a book like Silence or even Wonderful Fool can suggest, there is a risk in confusing the religious and the artistic sensibility. As Endô remarks so succinctly in the Preface to A Life of Jesus:

… I do not think that my portrait of Jesus touches on every aspect of his life. To express what is holy is impossible for a novelist. I have done no more than touch the externals of the human life of Jesus.¹⁰

Such are these messages that Endô delivers to us, and they are messages that the world of literature should and must be able to assimilate, particularly in these troubling spiritual times. Indeed, it is precisely now that we most need to hear them, however uncomfortable these messages may make us.

What is more, Endô has found a way to deliver these messages in an astonishing variety of styles, sometimes in a stern and gloomy fashion, sometimes with impeccable lightness, humor, and grace. Indeed, these insights represent his gift to us, gifts that grow from his artist's sense of humility, of love, and of charity.

I have entitled this short essay “That Most Excellent Gift of Charity” because I believe that Endô's work at its best, when read and well-pondered, can give rise to this same spirit within ourselves. Brought up not in the Catholic faith but in the Episcopalian tradition, I myself find that this collect from the Book of Common Prayer, written for the Sunday before Lent, manages to capture something for me of the role that Endô's writing can play in the larger world, and hopefully, of course, for Japanese readers as well:

O Lord, who has taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth; send thy Holy Ghost, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of Charity, the very bond of peace and all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee.

Endô would have us alive, not dead; full, not empty. If we can accept his gift, then we too, from whatever culture we come, can move further in a search for our own authenticity. Could any writer dare more, accomplish more?

Notes

1. Rakudai bôzu no rirekisho (Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, 1989), pp. 88-89.

2. Ibid., pp. 90-91.

3. Foreign Studies (Ryûgaku) (London: Peter Owen, 1989), pp. 7-8.

4. Ibid., pp. 8-9.

5. Rakudai, p. 89.

6. Ibid., p. 90.

7. Foreign Studies, p. 10.

8. Silence (Chinmoku) (Sophia University and C. E. Tuttle, 1969), pp. 12-13.

9. A Life of Jesus (Iesu no shôgai) (New York: Paulist Press, 1973), p. 1.

10. Ibid., p. 10.