SOURCE: Yamagata, Kazumi. “Mr. Shusaku Endo Talks about His Life and Works as a Catholic Writer.” Chesterton Review 12, no. 4 (November 1986): 493-506.

[In the following interview, Endō and Yamagata discuss Endō's Japanese-Christian upbringing and the unique perspective it gives his writing.]

Shusaku Endo (1923-) is one of the foremost contemporary writers in Japan. He is also Chairman of the Japan PEN Club and a graduate of Keio University who specialised in French Literature. He has been a member of the Catholic Church since his childhood. In his school-days, he wrote an essay entitled “Gods and God” (1945), and after graduation, he published an essay entitled “The Problems of Catholic Writers.” In 1950, he received a scholarship and went over to Lyons, France, to study contemporary Catholic literature in France. He stayed in France for two years and a half. After returning to Japan, he began to write profusely; he published “Metaphysical Criticism” (1954), “Christianity and Literature” (1954) and his first story, “To Aden” (1954). The following year, his story The White People, was awarded the thirty-third Akutagawa Prize (the most honourable literary prize in contemporary Japan), which launched Endo into the literary world. After that he published The Yellow People.

The following are the titles of his main works: The Sea and the Poison (1958) in which he depicts a vivisection actually done in war-time Japan. Obaka-san (Wonderful Fool, 1959) is a novel which entertainingly describes a wise fool. Chinmoku (Silence, 1966), his major work, which deals with loss of faith because of severe persecution. In 1973, he wrote On the Coast of the Dead Sea, a double-plotted story concerning a group of characters connecting Jesus and a group of Japanese pilgrims. The Resurrection of Jesus (1973) and The Birth of Christ (1978) are twin works about how Jesus was recognised as the Christ. The Samurai (1978) is a story of a Japanese knight who went over to Europe and was baptised. And Scandal (1986), a story in which the hero, a famous Christian writer, almost at the end of his career as a writer, suffers some very “evil” experiences.

.....

Yamagata: First, I should like to ask you a very fundamental question: How, in the relationship of Japan and the Western world, have you regarded yourself, first, as a Catholic believer, and secondly, as a Catholic writer? Would you speak to the readers of the Chesterton Review about how you as a believer and a writer have thought of the relationship between the Japanese mentality and European Catholicism?

Endo: As I am a Japanese novelist, by necessity I write in Japanese. And those readers who read what I write are generally Japanese. The Japanese language is not a language developed under the influence of Christianity; it is a language immersed in other ways of thinking. That is the first point. The second point is concerned with my readers. The number of Christians in Japan is about one million, and of this million Christians about four hundred thousand read, or are interested, in literature. Thus most of the Japanese readers of literature are indifferent to Christianity. Or, even if they know something theoretical about Christianity, they are not believers, or they were not brought up in the atmosphere of Christianity. We must write with those readers in mind. At the same time, I myself am a Japanese who has been living in such a situation, and naturally I have been long forced to be conscious that my Japanese sensibility is separated so far from Christian ways of thinking. The most important problem for me has been how I should communicate my novels to those Japanese readers who are indifferent to Christianity or who are without the Christian tradition. Anyway, it is quite natural that in my case the problem of Christianity versus the Japanese should come to the foreground.

As I often say, not speaking literally, of course, I did not become a Christian of my own will; I became a Christian because my mother was a Christian. I also sometimes say, speaking metaphorically, that I have often felt as if I were dressed in clothes which do not fit me. Of course, I was often tempted to forsake this dress, but my attachment to my mother was the grace that prevented me from doing so. This fact is very important to me, worth being underlined. This thought was later to become a very important element when I got to think of the “motherly” compassion of God. Anyway, because my attachment to my mother would not permit me to forsake Christianity, I made one decision. I wondered whether it was possible for me to reshape this Western dress that my mother gave me and make it fit the Japanese body; that is, whether it was possible to adapt Christianity to our mentality without distorting Christianity. And I decided that I should make this problem the main theme of my novels!

With this purpose in mind, I have been writing novels; but then, of course, I had first to deal with the problem of the identity of the Japanese people whose inherited ideas are quite different from Christian ideas. This situation presents a very complicated problem, a very difficult one, but I might say this. We have rather many Buddhists here, and whether they are Buddhists, or Shintoists, or non-believers, the Japanese have an underlying sense of religion; that is, they feel that a Cosmic Life operates in various forms in man and in other beings. This feeling is not firmly dogmatic as we find Christianity to be, but I think it is a feeling like religion, because this very feeling makes connections between man and what is beyond man. This is the feeling shared by Japanese Buddhists, Shintoists, and non-believers in their deep psyche, the subconscious.

Were you conscious of this Inner Life even when you began to write novels?

Yes, I was, because it was in my school-days that I wrote my first essay on “Gods and God.” Gods of course, represents pantheism which means an attitude of finding a god, a Life, in everything, but, at that time, I did not clearly understand how Japanese pantheism was different from Greek pantheism. Pantheism, for us, means that the Japanese feel in their subconscious the possibility of communication or communion between man and other beings on the common ground of the great Life. I came to be aware of this feeling even more strongly since I became a Christian.

Did you feel this way before you became a Christian?

Yes, of course, but vaguely. But, since as a child I was constrained, as it were, to become a Christian, my Japanese mentality was highlighted from the Christian side, just as in a picture the foreground is highlighted by the background. The problem I was at most pains to solve was that the Christianity which I was taught, that is, the Christianity of fifty years ago which was under the shadow of the end of the nineteenth century and of the beginning of the twentieth century, seemed to indicate that God was outside man. We felt as if we did not look within to find God, but looked out of ourselves up to God. We found this feeling of “outside one-self” in Christianity to be the concept on which the image of God was somehow built. Secondly, the image of God which the old Christianity seemed to present was that of a God of punishment and anger.

And of justice?

Yes, a God of justice—this aspect was emphasised, and the God who came to Japan was rather without the sense of tenderness or of co-suffering. The God in Japan from the Meiji Era to the time of my baptism was exactly like that—no need to refer to the Protestant God in this respect. These two points are the main elements that made up the situation in which the Western dress I put on was unsuitable to me. That which is beyond self, can it be within self and envelop self? The great Life outside self, can it harmonise with the Japanese mentality? Secondly, is the angry and punishing God the only God? Whenever we imported a foreign religion, we accepted that religion by transforming it in accordance with our spiritual climate. Buddhism came to Japan via China and Korea in the form of the co-suffering and forgiving Buddha, not in the form of the just, angry, and punishing Buddha. This transformation made it possible for Buddhism to be established in our country.

I have been dealing with this problem in some of my novels, wondering if this transformed version is truly the original Christian doctrine. I have been speaking of Japan as a sort of “marsh” by which I mean that Japan is a country which transforms the religions that it accepts; if the just God continues to be exclusively emphasised, Christianity, when imported to Japan, will have its roots, rotted in this marsh; if it is to survive here, it must indeed be transformed in order to emphasise God's compassion. This I once said through the mouth of the character, Inoue Chikugono-kami in my novel Chinmoku (Silence.). But as the readers of the Chesterton Review know, Christianity itself in Europe and in America has greatly changed since that time of which I speak. That is, European Christianity became tired of the logic of Western Christianity.

Then we may say that European Christianity is not the Christianity, but only one version of it?

Yes, yes. It was no other than the Europeans themselves who became aware that their form of Christianity had developed in the European ways of thinking, and that that version was not all that Christianity represented. The European people, especially European Catholics, have begun to look at Oriental Christianity in the past twenty years. They have also shown interest in Zen-Buddhism, in other forms of Buddhism, and in Hinduism. American people, as well, have turned their eyes to the East. In this way, in the past twenty years, an approach to the East has been made from the Western side, and something revolutionary has been happening in the self-consciousness of Christianity.

You say that such a phenomenon began to appear twenty years ago. Then, can I say that, since you began to write novels more than twenty years ago, you anticipated this phenomenon?

Yes, I think you can, though I myself cannot say so.

Perhaps here I should have mentioned Mr. Schmude. Reading his article about you, I say only this: it seems that people like Schmude are aware of this obsession of yours, and have sensed in your novels painful efforts to transform Christianity in order to make it possible for it to take root in Japanese soil.

Ah, yes? So, I should be grateful if you emphasise that point, because the concept and image of God have changed within Christianity. Through its approach to Oriental religion, Christianity came to present not God-outside-man but God-inside-man, that is, a great Life enveloping man.

The presentation of Christianity has changed; but in essence it remains the same?

That's right. The Bible has already said the same thing: Jesus says that the kingdom of God is inside a person. Jesus emphasises this because until His time the people spoke too strongly as if God were outside man.

Indeed, too strongly.

I think so. I judge that such an emphasis happened under the influence of Judaism. I think Jesus transformed Judaism to show that God is inside man. Another influence of Judaism was seen in the angry and punishing God. I think that Jesus showed instead that God was forgiveness and love, a principle which distinguishes decisively the New Testament from the Old. Nevertheless, Christianity grew up in the West, and then it came to be preached in Japan. So, I discovered that another aspect of Christianity in Japan coincides, not totally but greatly, with Oriental Buddhistic ways of thinking. And those Europeans who became aware of this fact approached the East, showing interest in Eastern Christianity. Let's take Mariology as an example to show the difference between the two versions of Christianity. Whereas in the East devotion to Mary was warmly accepted, in the West it seems to me to have been accepted only as a peripheral devotion; and only in comparatively recent times has it been given official approval. As this example shows, Western Christianity had the tendency to emphasise rigorous justice and to disregard motherly love. And it was Europe itself that became tired with this version of Christianity. And moreover, in Christianity, consciousness has been emphasised as rational, as reasonable, in theology; what goes beyond consciousness, what is subconscious, has been refused with fear, with anxiety.

That is shown in the repudiation of Freud by the Church?

Yes, yes, but for the past twenty years the tendency to reconsider the subconscious, that is, what is beyond reason and logic, has been appearing in various forms in professional fields. This trend is now detected in linguistics as well as in religion. Christianity, of course, must needs be influenced by this tendency. Christianity as a rational religion, Christianity as a religion which can be expressed by language, is changing into Christianity which goes beyond reason and language. And we find this version is exactly what the Eastern people have been thinking about—the problem I raised in my novel Chinmoku (Silence). I could later put that problem in a hopeful, bright situation, because I discovered that there were in Christianity elements congenial to the Eastern mind.

Oh, I see. At first you were, as it were, afflicted—torn between pantheism and monotheism when you wrote “Gods and God.” But in this Eastern pantheism, which is the “marsh” itself, you have discovered the illogical. Is it true?

Yes, it is.

Then, what could only be represented as pantheistic now emerged gradually as a positive element, and when Christianity came to Japan and underwent this transformation, it was connected with this positive element. Am I right in understanding it this way?

Yes, you are. I mean that there is in Christianity that which can aufheben [uphold] pantheism; we can find in Christianity Omnipresent Life.

I see. How positive Eastern pantheism has become!

Indeed, it has. Christianity has the power to aufheben pantheism. This upheld pantheism does not present God as outside man, but God as inside both man and other beings; and the important thing is that the latter God aufheben the former God. Pantheism is said to be one-dimensional, but I have come to think that it has the power to bring forth things which are many-dimensional.

I understand. To go back a little, why did you come to write novels? At first you used to write critical essays. After a little while, you wrote a story, “To Aden,” in which you described your response to things European. After this came a story The White People, which suddenly launched you into the world of letters. This was the period of your career as a novelist. Of course, since that time, you have been writing criticism as occasion arises, but if we are to describe you, you are a novelist. Why did you choose a novelist's career?

Well, I am a novelist. That is entirely because of the strife between my being Japanese and being Christian. A critic depends on language, deals in language logically, while for a novelist, what cannot be dealt with by language must come foremost. Therefore, however well a novelist may write, his sincerity must finally reveal itself. When a work is finished, division of intention and performance can easily be detected through the style and imagery of the work. For me, Christianity should not be performance but sincere intention. The most difficult but surest way to get to such Christianity is by being a novelist. A critic can variously write about how far Christianity has become his flesh and blood, but a novelist must verify Christianity by image after image. So, I steered myself to the way of a novelist.

I found that the style of your critical essays is very clear and distinct, and I find, comparatively speaking, that the style of your novels is also clear and distinct, logical in the best sense of the word. Not only the style, but also the structure of your novels is superb. Do these features of your novels have anything to do with your critical activity?

Yes, they have much to do with it.

Just as I expected.

Yes, very much. My strong point as a novelist is structure or composition. I must have prepared the structure of a novel before I set to write it, because I am making something. But that's not all. Structure, in a sense, will come out while the work is going on. With some other writers it may be that an image will call forth another image, but for me the structure creates structure.

Some years ago I wrote a book on Graham Greene, believing that the inherent significance of his works cannot be caught except by reading into the structure of each work. As far as I have read, your novel On the Coast of the Dead Sea has double plots which are parallel with each other, just as we see in William Faulkner's Wild Palms.

Yes, William Faulkner.

Yes; but, in Faulkner's novel, the two plots have nothing to do with each other, while in your novel the two plots, which are separated from each other by distance of time, are, as it were, internally connected with each other. By this technique you seem to have aimed at producing a great effect in the reader's mind. The reader can construct for himself another, a third, plot.

That's right.

And in Chinmoku (Silence), I have found that the narrative structure is perfect except in one point of inconvenience.

Up to now no one has seen my novels from that angle.

I have sometimes done that kind of work, and I hope I will write a book on your works mainly from that angle. Your recent novel Scandal is extremely complicated in its structure; and, unless we are careful, we are liable to misunderstand the intention of the author. As you know, Jean Paul Sartre said that the technique of a writer is equivalent to his metaphysics. A look at your efforts in the technique of composition will never fail to give us an insight into your metaphysics. I understand your object is to catch fish with the net of technique.

Ah yes, I catch with a net!

By the way, I understand that you have been influenced by some foreign writers. Is the Marquis de Sade one of these?

Yes, I have read and studied much of de Sade. The problem of evil has come up.

Don't you think there is something optimistic about de Sade's evil? He may be understood in the context of optimism.

Yes, I have come to think that de Sade's evil is the negative of Christian good; it highlights the positiveness of Christianity by contrast.

Then, how about Mauriac?

I have read and thought really much of Mauriac. I have thought that sin is a prelude to regeneration. One tells a lie because one dreams of happiness that one cannot get. Thus, I think there runs through Christian literature the idea that out of sin comes good, an idea similar to the Buddhistic idea of the co-existence of good and evil. But I felt on hearing the news of Auschwitz that there might be some things with no possibility of salvation. To kill two thousand people in the gas chambers during the day and to listen to the music of Mozart on that very evening! In my twenties, that gave me the greatest shock. It made me feel the deep and horrible nature of man, and, at the same time, I wondered how a writer like Mauriac would deal with such a matter. I have found that no Christian literature has dealt with this topic. I continued to write novels mainly about “sin” in the usual form of Christian literature. But at some stage, I began to feel that I should turn my attention to the problem of “evil.”

George Steiner in his Language and Silence says something to the effect that the greatest enigma is that out of the mildest of European literates sprang Nazism.

And Arthur Koestler says that such a situation arises only when men attempt to reach that which is beyond man's proper limits. In the case of a religion, massacres will happen when people believe that they are executing some duty. In the case of an individual “sin” results while in the case of a group “evil” results. That is roughly what Koestler says. But I think “evil” results not only in the case of a group. Then, I presume Freud's death wish, not the instinct of eros, but the instinct of—

Thanatos.

Yes, thanatos. I presume that thanatos has connection with that evil. In my novel, Scandal, I associated Masochism with the problem of evil; whereas before that, I wrote about the world of sin from Chinmoku to The Samurai. So, I can say that my works have traversed the full circle on the plane of sin, as well as on the problem of the relationship of Japan and Christianity, and now I am ready to write exclusively about evil.

Then, you have already made a plan for your next work?

Yes. I will write my next work focusing on Madame Naruse, one of the main characters in Scandal, and publish it in a few years. Madame Naruse is for me just like Mauriac's Thérèse Desqueyroux.

You began to write about Graham Greene while you were young. The problem of Pity—

Some time ago in London I happened to meet George Bull who has written about Greene. We talked about Greene. I believe that the concept of God in Greene's novels has greatly changed from what it was in The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair to what it is in The Travels with my Aunt. I detect some element of Gnosticism there. In The Travels with My Aunt, God doing good and God doing evil are seen as parallel with each other. Of course, Greene himself tries to hide this situation, but it flickers through words in the work. Bull said that Greene has begun to have interest in the daemonic. I myself am rather interested in the diabolic. Anyway, I asked Bull if anyone has written on this aspect of Greene, and he answered “no”. Of course, he would like to do it himself. In some of the novels written before The Travels with My Aunt, Greene's technique was superb, but my present interest in him centres on how he will develop the daemonic in his future works. I am not sure whether he is conscious of this problem or not. I may, of course, have misunderstood him.

Are you interested in G. K. Chesterton?

Yes, I am, but I have not read much of him, though I have always felt that I should read him. Of course, I have read Orthodoxy, and some of his detective stories.

Schmude pointed out the similarity between your Obaka-san (Wonderful Fool) and G. K. Chesterton's writings.

I have not read much of Chesterton, and so I cannot say that I have been influenced by him. But we, being Catholics, our forms of thinking naturally become the same. It is as easy to find in my works G. K. Chesterton as it is to find there Greene and Mauriac.

But, even if we can find points of similarity, the novels of Endo are clearly Endo's.

It cannot be helped.

Greene, since he became a Catholic, had to think of the conflict between his freedom as a writer and the laws of the Church as an establishment; and he says that what an individual writer thinks rarely coincides with the laws of the establishment to which he belongs. He is also thinking of the Soviet Union. He preached, at least to himself, the “virtue” of disloyalty, which should keep a writer free. Mr. Endo, have you suffered such a conflict with the Church?

Well, the Catholic Church in Japan used to be “old,” but not now. When I wrote Chinmoku, I was much rebuked, and some priests even preached at Mass to the congregation telling them not to read my novels. But now my works are the objects of study in the Church. I suffered such conflicts a little, only a little, but the Japanese Church, unlike that of Greene or Mauriac (Mauriac had the performance of his drama prohibited in Bordeaux), has no strong social power. So, even though my books are not sold in Catholic book-stores, the Church need not be troubled, for my books are sold in other stores. And when I heard slanders, I did not receive any actual damage. As time went on, more and more priests and common readers began to read my novels. Different situations—

This I can understand, but—

But my personal problem is another matter. What I detest most is that some people began to go to the Church only after they had read my novels.

Your novels have inclined them to go to the Church?

Yes. That's disgusting. I felt myself to be a hypocrite. When I received such a letter, I felt uncomfortable because I was confident that I was not writing novels with such a purpose in mind. Moreover, I felt that I should be responsible for other persons whom I might be influencing. Non-Christian writers can accept such readers as their fans, but we Catholics are concerned with their souls.

That's exactly what troubled Mauriac?

Probably.

And that is why he was attacked by Maritain?

Mauriac was afraid of contaminating his readers by the world of carnal desire that he was depicting. But my case is—

Your case is the opposite?

Yes, opposite.

That is to say, literature is not primarily intended to convert people, is it?

That's right. You can go to the Church apart from my novels, but do not put on my novels the responsibility for your soul.

Then, we have come to the problem of literature and Christianity. What do you think about this problem?

I think that the best solution is that of Greene: the way of saying “I am not a Christian writer—my novels happen to have Catholic priests as characters.” I can understand this quite well.

However, to take a nasty view-point, don't you think Greene made his escape in pretending to be like that?

Nasty, yes. I think the matter must be heart-rending to Greene.

Heart-rending?

I think his response is to the utmost limit. “Happen” … yes, I think he made his escape. As a matter of fact, when he was writing, he must have been hoping that his religious sense would ooze out, and influence the reader. If we say that this was not the case, we are telling a lie. For example, in The End of the Affair, Greene wrote of the miracle of Sarah; he made her a saint. It is impossible to say that this novel happens to depict a saint, because the author wished her to have the beauty of a saint.

Indeed, impossible.

Therefore, as you say, he made his escape. Only, we cannot help sometimes inflicting burning pains or trauma on those whom we come in touch with in this life—even more so when we write novels and poems. That even proves the genuineness of art. Every genuine artist will have some effect on his readers, but the degree or intensity of the effect is different according to the writers. How different the case of, for example, Yasunari Kawabata will be from the case of Endo will be a problem, but I have not heard of any person who has been converted to the faith of metempsychosis through reading the novel of Yukio Mishima which deals with the theme of metempsychosis. Then, my novels may happen to be very deeply involved in the belief or non-belief of my readers.

Then, I can say that Jesus causes trauma for those who meet Him, as you depicted in your On the Coast of the Dead Sea. You also experienced trauma in writing this novel.

Yes, indeed.

And those of us who read your novels also experience trauma; trauma is the common thread connecting all of us.

So, I feel I am a writer who is, in a sense, read in the most proper way, because my readers have experienced trauma through reading my novels. They have actively accepted my works, not like cinema-goers, but like the audience at a drama. What I hold as most precious is this active response on the part of my readers. I want to raise strife in them, to give them problems. I feel troubled to see the sentimentality that induces them easily to go to the Church.

I understand. Our time is almost up. How do you feel about your literary activity? Could you give it up?

What do you mean by “giving it up?”

What part does your literary activity play in your whole life?

Now I see—[in a low voice] I do not know all of myself; some parts of me only God knows. But I say that I use consciously half of myself as a writer, emotionally seventy percent.

I asked you this question partly because I know that recently Greene has written against social evil. What this social response has to do with his novel-writing is a big problem.

I do think that each has much to do with the other, as can be seen in his novels. Oh, by the way, recently in London I happened to see Greene. One night, coming back to the Hotel Litz, I entered the lift with another person. He kindly asked me what floor I was going to. He pushed the button. In my room I found myself wondering who that old person could be; I remembered him vaguely. Then suddenly I came to recognise him; he was Greene himself. So I called up information. And in a few minutes I was hearing Greene speaking on the phone, asking me to come down to the bar.

That must have been a very nice experience. Greene and I had agreed to meet either in London or in Paris during my stay in Cambridge, but it did not come about, unfortunately. Many thanks for this interview. Finally, I sincerely hope that you will finish another interesting novel soon.