[In the following essay, Gessel attempts to expand Endō's literary significance beyond his reputation as a Japanese Catholic writer.]

It is no simple matter to define the position which Endô Shûsaku holds in contemporary Japanese letters, since he does not occupy a single, easily definable position as most of the prewar, confessional writers did. He belongs to a uniquely distinguished list of less than a dozen writers who over the last six decades have held the office of President of the Japan P.E.N. Club (that list also includes such names as Shimazaki Tôson, Masamune Hakuchô, Shiga Naoya, Kawabata Yasunari, and Inoue Yasushi). But we tend sometimes as puzzled readers of foreign literature to seize upon labels and classifications for writers that are overly-simplified and all too facile.

Most familiar, of course, is his moniker as the “Japanese Graham Greene.” There are several problems attending such a label. Certainly some Greene works, especially The Heart of the Matter and The Power and the Glory, have influenced Endô's own writings. But such a blithe categorization ignores the even more important influences of Mauriac, of Bernanos, of Julien Green, and of course, of such Japanese antecedents as Akutagawa, who presaged some of the cultural and philosophical insights of Endô's Chimmoku (Silence) and Samurai (The Samurai) in some of his Christian stories, notably “Kamigami no bishô” (The smile of the gods); Natsume Sôseki, the first twentieth century author in Japan to probe the moral issues of betrayal and personal responsibility that lie at the heart of Endô's work; Shiina Rinzô, the first important postwar Christian author; and a host of others. Worst of all, such a label is meaningless for the hundreds of thousands of Japanese who loyally read Endô's works.

Similarly, is it all that useful to call Endô “the leading writer in Japan today?” To my mind he certainly is, but such titles are fundamentally the invention and province of advertising departments at greedy Western publishing houses. Precisely the same problem attends the use of the phrase “Japan's chief contender for the Nobel Prize.” The list of potential Japanese honorees is fraught with problems; and why would anyone attempt to read the distinctly capricious and politicized minds of the Stockholm committee anyway?

Space will not permit an examination of the entire range of diverse positions which Endô occupies in contemporary Japanese literature. In terms of surface honors, he has received every major prize which can be offered to a writer in Japan, from the early Akutagawa to his recent dubbing as a “person of cultural merit” (bunka kôrôsha), which often precedes elevation to the elite company of recipients of the Bunka Kunshô; has served with distinction on the selection committees for several prominent literary awards, once again including the Akutagawa Prize; has served as editor of Mita Bungaku; and, as noted at the outset, held the position of President of the Japan P.E.N. Club, the most influential assemblage of writers in the country. But a very large portion of the Japanese populace considers Endô a “popular” writer, by virtue of the fact that he has published an enormous number of humorous novels, entertainments, and light-hearted essays, has appeared on Japanese television in many less-than-serious formats, manages Kiza, the largest amateur theatrical troupe in the country, and many years back was the chief commercial spokesman for Nescafe coffee. He is widely regarded as a prankster and a practical joker, and as a droll essayist he combines the irreverence of a Dave Barry with a typically Japanese preoccupation with bodily functions. These facets of Endô's career are not widely recognized in the West, and likely will continue to be downplayed by his Western publishers. For me there is nothing problematic about them, since they fit in with a larger project that has consumed much of Endô's time and energies—the convincing of the non-Christian Japanese public that one can be a Christian and a fun-loving human being at the same time.

It is worthy of mention that Endô also holds a central position in contemporary Japanese letters as a writer of the war generation which attained maturity at the zenith of the Second World War. Although the focus of these remarks will be on the varied Japanese reactions to Endô as a Christian writer, it will also be necessary to highlight the fact that his writings simultaneously focus upon the anxieties, and sense of loss, and the desperate search for reconciliation that is typical of the generation of Japanese who suffered the shocks and scars of the war and its aftermath.

I do not for a moment want to take issue with the label of “Christian writer” which we have nailed onto Endô, but I reemphasize at the outset that it represents only one of the many facets of his work, and the one which we as Westerners are swiftest to seize upon. There can be no question that of the perhaps score of major writers in Japan today who would identify themselves as Christians, Endô is the most important, the most creative, the most prolific, and the most widely read and respected author. No Christian writer working in Japan during this century has been more direct or more forthright in exploring the conflicts inherent in practicing the imported faith as a member of the Japanese race and nation. I will be exploring these conflicts in more detail below, but perhaps I can simply suggest here the possibility that Endô has attained his position as the leading Christian writer in Japan precisely because the religion was bequeathed to him at a relatively young age through his mother, and not something he chose of his own volition. Keenly sensing the moral responsibility that such an encounter with Christianity has thrust upon him, Endô has taken it upon himself to act as the godfather (and I intend that to be taken in a Christian, not a Coppolaen, meaning) of Japanese Christian writers. He has fostered publication of their works, provided intellectual guidance, established a Christian Literary Association, served as creative advisor for the Christian pavilion at Japan's 1970 world exposition, and even acted as a spiritual go-between for some at the time of their baptism. His preeminence in the Japanese Christian writers' community is unassailable.

However, it might be instructive to point out here that the overall Christian population in Japan is neither large nor monolithically unified. Something less than one percent of the hundred and thirty million Japanese claim adherence to Christianity, and because the Japanese Christian is, by definition, an anomaly, the centrifugal tug toward even greater marginality often threatens to pull apart an organized church structure altogether. The Christian writer in Japan is an outsider's outsider, an aberration among anomalies.

The result for a writer like Endô is that his work is not universally embraced and venerated by Japanese Christians, not even by Japanese Catholics. The case of Silence, one of Endô's finest literary achievements, is instructive. The work was, in fact, acclaimed almost unanimously, and it became a major best-seller in Japan at a time when the best-seller list actually had some connection with literary quality. But a close look at the composition of the readership for Silence reveals a very interesting piece of information. We might conclude that the Christian faithful in Japan had rallied around their literary spokesman, and that his novels had also struck some kind of responsive chord within the collective spiritual unconscious of the Japanese people. In point of fact, however, the strongest critics of Silence emerged from within the ranks of devout believers, and the novel managed to meet with some official forms of disapproval from the established Church. The readers responsible for elevating it to best-seller status came not from amongst Christian believers and sympathizers, but rather from largely left-wing college students, who saw in the torture and apparent apostasy of Father Rodrigues a paradigm for Japanese Marxists of the 1930s who had been imprisoned, tortured, and forced to recant their seditious political beliefs publicly in a practice often described as “forced intellectual conversion” (tenkô). I would enjoin serious caution in any attempt to assume that Endô's novels are read by the average Japanese reader of serious fiction in the same way that we Westerners read them.

I do not for a moment wish to imply that Japanese readers have not been moved, either consciously or otherwise, by the spiritual import of Endô's writings. Endô very clearly recognized from the outset of his career that the distinctive cross he must bear as a writer is the fact that much of the Christian imagery, metaphor, and substance of his writing will fall upon unprepared ears amongst his kinsmen. Perhaps part of the reason his most recent essays and stories focus upon the quest for a pan-cultural and pan-religious unconscious mind linking all of humanity—a quest that has led him to combine Christian, Jungian, and Buddhist thought—can be traced to his desire to break through the barriers that separate Japanese culture from Christian culture.

The truly unique position which Endô occupies in modern Japanese fiction becomes evident when he is lined up with his cohort. While his contemporaries in the Japanese literary world have either been absorbed in their own narrow autobiographical spheres or struggling with the loss of individual prerogative in the wake of defeat in 1945, Endô has stretched wide the confines of the Japanese narrative and added to it the one element most essential in the creation of a true literary “drama”—a consideration of the relationship between man and God. Endô's early works, such as Kiiroi hito (Yellow Man), Umi to dokuyaku (The Sea and Poison), or Kazan (Volcano), suggest that the spiritual climate in Japan is lacking in a partiality for the absolute and is bereft of a sense of the moral consequences of human behavior. But no Japanese reader can help being struck—if not fully persuaded—by passages such as the following, taken from the story “Yonjussai no otoko” (“A Forty-Year-Old Man”):

I still don't know what life means, what it is to be a human being. I'm idle and I'm lazy, and I go on deceiving myself. But, if nothing else, I have finally learned that when one person comes in contact with another, it is no simple encounter—there is always some sort of scar left behind. … One ripple expands into two, and two grow into three. And it was he who had cast the first stone. …

One can long scan the landscape of Japanese fictional narratives without finding too many other bodies of work that focus so persistently upon the basic moral responsibilities shouldered by each of us as a result of our actions. I don't think it is too much of an exaggeration to suggest that the vast majority of Japanese authors in the last century have concerned themselves almost exclusively with the impact that an individual's actions have on himself or, at best, on those who immediately surround him. The higher moral perspective—given metaphorical shape through the plaintive eyes of dogs and myna birds and drab, plump wives who look with compassion on all the frenzied transgressions of man—is the dominant perspective in Endô's fiction, and I doubt that very few readers in Japan can be shown life through such a perspective and reject its relevancy outright.

The agony of personal weakness, the torment of inescapable sin, the horrifying allure of evil—whether or not the Japanese reader of Endô's works would give them such labels, these experiences of loss and separation are familiar to Japanese who have endured the war, the unprecedented humiliation of defeat, and the stigma of foreign occupation. And so the quest for a source of relief, of compassion, of forgiveness is a yearning of the spirit that many Japanese today share in common. By providing these readers with a Christ figure whose primary function is to mourn with those that mourn; to suffer alongside those who suffer; and to provide companionship to those who are despised and rejected by the world, Endô has set himself apart from the ranks of postwar Japanese writers who have chosen to focus almost exclusively on the pain without offering any proposals to alleviate it.

The evolution of this image of a forgiving, compassionate, Mother-like Savior in Endô's writings is fascinating to examine. After proposing in his earliest stories and novels—from his initial novella Shiroi hito (White Man) in 1955 through Ryûgaku (Foreign Studies) of 1965—that a massive cultural and spiritual wall separates Japan from the Christian West, Endô set about doing his “homework” as he himself describes the process of development in his writing. The most conspicuous signpost of change dotting the Endô fictional landscape is of course Silence, because in this work Endô first posits the existence of a pinhole of hopeful light, a way out of the mudswamp of Japanese pantheism and spiritual stagnation. Many readers, both Japanese and Western Christians, have been overly disturbed by the questions raised by the antagonists in the novel—both the Japanese magistrate and the apostate priest—who question whether Christianity can ever take root in Japan without having its essence rotted away by the native soil. But the arguments of the magistrate Inoue are, after all, words emerging from the mouth of a literary character, not direct expressions of an authorial point of view. Endô himself has emphatically made that point. Readers should rather hear the significance of the voice that speaks comfort to Rodrigues as he is about to trample on the sacred image. Is that voice to be taken as a hallucination within Rodrigues' is the voice of a forgiving Christ, accepting the gift of Rodrigues' pain and urging him to choose the better part of mercy on behalf of others who suffer. With all due respect to William Johnston's translation of the novel, the words that fill Rodrigues' mind at the height of his passion are, in the original Japanese, not so much an imperative, a command to “Trample!”, as they are benevolent words of permission: taken very literally, they tell Rodrigues that it is “all right to trample” (fumu ga ii) on the holy image.

There were, certainly, a number of Japanese readers who were disturbed by the systematic demolition of Rodrigues'—and the West's—version of Christianity. It seemed to some that the elevation of the forgiving, maternal form of Japanese Christianity at the end of the novel was achieved at the expense of Rodrigues' confident, judgmental brand of religion, that in fact the message of the novel was that the demands of justice had to be trampled upon in order for the intercessory act of mercy to take effect. And, indeed, one can certainly read the novel in this manner. But 14 years after the publication of Silence, Endô published what is to my mind a far more open, expansive, even, if you will, “catholic” novel in The Samurai. In this novel it seems to me that the Western priest's dynamic version of faith and the Japanese warrior's subtle, even passive embrace of Jesus are both affirmed as viable strains of the large, universal symphony that is Christianity. It is not the conflict between differing qualities of faith that energizes The Samurai; it is rather the struggle between self-serving human institutions—whether political or religious—and the cravings of the individual heart for a binding link with deity that produces the stirring drama of the novel.

But the reaction to The Samurai in Japan was disappointing. While a handful of critics read the novel with sensitivity to its many layers of meaning, including the spiritual journey it traces, mainstream critics for the most part dismissed the work as a piece of ambiguous historical fiction without relevance to the Japan of today. Perhaps Japan in 1980, having achieved a position of extraordinary economic power in the international community, was not feeling sympathetic toward a denunciation of temporal institutions, the very kind of institutions that had made their remarkable success possible. If The Samurai can, on one of its many levels, be read as a critique of a people who place all their faith in political and economic organizations and forsake the spiritual realm because it does not so readily offer tangible profits, then it becomes obvious why such a message would clang uncomfortably in the ears of many contemporary Japanese.

If The Samurai made uncomfortable, or even incomprehensible, reading for some in Japan, you can imagine what the response to Sukyandaru (Scandal) must have been like. As Japan's war generation has settled back comfortably into seats of power within the various institutions of society—just as the figures of authority do in The Samurai, and as a younger generation which has experienced none of the losses of the war and occupation years single-mindedly pursues its quest for worldly success, the critical response to Endô's writings in Japan has become less and less insightful and supportive. When Scandal was published, virtually the only review that came close to grasping the essence of the work came not from a literary critic, but from Kawai Hayao, a professor of clinical psychology at Kyoto University. This suggests that the more Endô probes into the mysteries and dualities of the human heart, the less comfortable is the Japanese reading public. Japan today, I am afraid, would much rather cling complacently to an image of itself like that which the Christian novelist Suguro has of himself at the opening of Scandal. On his way to receive an important literary prize, Suguro leans back against the cushions of his chauffeured car:

Now that he had passed the age of sixty-five, he could not quite repress the feeling that tonight's honor was a bit overdue. Still, the accolades showered upon the novel massaged his sense of pride. There was more to it than pride, though. The harmony he had finally been able to achieve with this recent work, both in his life and in his writings, was deeply satisfying.

But throughout Endô's literary career, one of his primary tasks has been to shake his characters from their complacency, to force them to stare directly at their deluded senses of stability and pride, and to awaken them to an awareness of their own fragility and dependency, their inherent duplicity, and their desperate, but largely unrealized, need for the companionship of one who will save them from their endless wavering between sainthood and satanhood. Scandal is perhaps the boldest of such attempts, precisely because Endô creates a main character who is essentially his own double, and proceeds to shake himself to the foundations of his self-satisfied ego. It is an awe-inspiring struggle, as Suguro tiptoes along the edges of the pit that falls directly into unredeemable evil and catches a quick glimpse of the faint but unmistakable light of saving grace. But the novel ends without resolution, with Suguro lying awake at night listening to the nagging ring of a telephone that seems to be calling him from the void beyond. A dramatic difference between Silence and Scandal, then, is the fact that in the more recent novel, the voice from the other side of the veil does not speak. It offers no words of either condemnation or forgiveness. As he draws ever closer to death, Suguro is going to have to do even deeper probing of his innermost being before he will be prepared to pick up the receiver and hear the final words of reconciliation with his maker. That, perhaps, is the “homework” that remains for Endô in the wake of Scandal.

There is no sure way to predict how the Japanese reading public will respond as Endô delves deeper and deeper into the human soul, searching for that tiny dot of light that he is convinced dwells within the heart of darkness. It is clear, however, that Endô's work reverberates in the hearts and minds of his countrymen, whether Christian or not. In a sense, the tales of Christian torture and apostasies from an earlier day merely function as a metaphor for the intellectual and moral struggles of all Japanese in the postwar age. By describing those who are too frail or too frightened—or too often betrayed—to cling to any single saving dogma, Endô has depicted the plight of many contemporary Japanese (and Europeans and Americans) who grapple with the anxiety of living in a time when virtually every traditional source of strength and security has been snatched from our grasp. The Christian martyrs of Endô's fictions become types for us all, as we yearn for the reassuring verities of the past and cringe in their absence. Whether we can be comfortable having such images thrust before us is open to question, and the apparent unwillingness of Japanese readers to respond to Endô's most recent efforts suggests that such indications of lurking weakness may not be welcome.

But the sword of Endô's writing will continue to pierce the hearts of those who remain unconvinced that material success is the be-all and end-all of contemporary existence. And whether he receives the honor he deserves in his own country or not, I for one am persuaded that as we continue to read Endô's fiction, none of us will be able to feel either completely comfortable, or completely alone. That is the real power of Endô's writing.