The perhaps too-often discussed "conflict of East and West" that began in Japan in the nineteenth century, and to which the atomic bomb made the most horrendous of contributions, finds a strong reflection in Endō's personal life. He was brought up a Catholic, an Easterner with a Western faith. Such a dual heritage troubles him…. (p. 252)

The confrontation he feels between these two ways of life and thought have naturally found their way into his fiction, notably in Chinmoku (Silence)…. In Silence, Endō sets up an aesthetic distance from his material not of twenty but of over three hundred years, in order to observe the first clashes of sensibility between East and West. The sources for his novel … are largely factual: he examines the lives of several Portuguese Catholic priests who continued to serve as missionaries to Japan after the promulgation of the edicts banning the Christian faith early in the seventeenth century. The protagonist of the novel is an amalgam of several of these men, to whom Endō gives the name Sebastian Rodrigues; he comes to Japan to work with the secret Christians, mostly poor farmers and fishermen. (p. 253)

Rodrigues … is portrayed in considerable roundness and depth…. Endō shows a most unusual ability in creating a non-Japanese character who is both credible in psychology and understandable in motivation. The novel is at least partially intended as an examination of the spiritual changes that come over the Western sensibility of Rodrigues in the "mudswamp of Japan." Early in his stay, he is hidden in a hut in a remote and mountainous area in order to avoid capture by the government authorities. This enforced leisure gives him time to write back to his colleagues in Europe, and in one of those letters he first poses the problem of the "silence of God" to which the title of the novel refers…. (p. 254)

Rodrigues has begun dimly to perceive the implications of the fact that his religion and his culture are bound up together and that, further, his own religious sensibilities can bring only destruction to those whom he is bound in good conscience to love. Later, after he leaves his place of hiding, Rodrigues undergoes his own "Temptation in the Wilderness." In this most poetic section of the novel, he travels to a remote and beautiful mountain area. There he suddenly encounters his own personal Satan in the person of Kichijiro, who, after asking his help, betrays him to the authorities.

Arrested by the police, Rodrigues is finally forced to understand the harm he and his faith have brought to Japan. (p. 255)

Rodrigues is … asked to give up his Western sensibilities, his own sense of identity, as much as he is his Christian faith. Stress on the importance of the self, on abstract concepts, on personal salvation, places the Western mentality at considerable odds with the Japanese sensibility, which emphasizes intuitive understanding and the processes of nature…. Endō finds a flexibility in his own tradition that serves to protect and permit survival; and in this particular novel, at least, he poses his concerns over the possible meeting of the two traditions in a negative configuration. The message is the same: those who abandon their Japanese sensibility (in this case, for Christianity) will become the victims. Endō … finds the imposition of the Western ego on the Japanese the most dangerous gift of all. (p. 256)