Shusaku Endo has wisely set his gripping novel about one man's struggle for belief in early 18th-century Japan when medieval samurai still held sway and the brutal process of expelling Christianity (and other Western influences) was in full flower….

At the heart of Silence, whose title refers to God's muteness in the face of evil's savage triumph, throbs the sensitive, if vain, awareness of Sebastian Rodrigues, a young Portuguese Jesuit who has slipped into Japan with a fellow missionary to tend whatever native Christians they can find and to discover why Christovao Ferreira, a former teacher and hero, has apparently renounced his faith rather than endure a glorious martyrdom. Sebastian's own capture by the authorities, which had seemed inevitable from the start, gives the novel much of its impressive narrative power, as does the dramatic series of climactic confrontations with both Ferreira and Inoue, the Japanese magistrate who embodies a very contemporary marriage between intellect and detached inhumanity.

Although flawed by a somewhat simplistic grasp of philosophical complexities and a taste for elemental characterizations, Endo's terse tale has a subtle way of penetrating sophisticated thresholds into the cellar of self where more primitive emotions rule. We root for Sebastian to find salvation even as we reject the terms of his inner dilemma.