[In the following review, Binding discusses the stories in Endo's The Final Martyrs and asserts that Endo gives a view of the power of suffering and insight into late 20th-century urban life.]

"Dogs and little birds still appear frequently in my fiction," says the novelist narrator of the story "Shadows", "but they are no mere decorations … Even today, the moist grieving eyes of dogs somehow remind me of the eyes of Christ. This Christ I speak of is, of course, not the Christ filled with assurance of his own way of life. It is the weary Christ, trampled upon by men and looking up at them from beneath their feet."

These lines are of Endo's very essence; the attraction, in a Japanese middle-class milieu, to the Catholic Christianity bequeathed by his mother is precisely in its moral and spiritual elevation of the confused, the downtrodden, the insulted and the injured. And in its forgiving inclusion of the errant.

The Church was founded by one who betrayed his master; Japanese Catholicism was kept alive in secret by those who, converted by Portuguese or French missionaries, had capitulated out of cowardice to the cruelties of the authorities and apostates. In the title story, the large elephant like protagonist who so easily becomes terrified in the face of trouble is almost given dispensation for his weakness. Christ, it's suggested, will be made happy merely by the times (before he runs away again) when he keeps company with his fellow believers. It is not difficult for a non Japanese to appreciate how, against the cultures first of Tojo and the war lords and then of Japan's postwar "miracle", such aspects of Christianity would have their appeal.

In an interesting preface, Endo explains that he writes short stories to familiarise himself with the material he will turn into novels. Certainly each of the stories in this wonderful volume has something of a novel's richness and discursiveness. Readers will see openings to one novel or another throughout the book. Endo is a writer who works very much from his experimental grammar of metaphors. The Catholic priest in a non-Catholic society; "colonial" childhood in Manchuria; the unease of the graduate in the immediate postwar years; the appalling paraphernalia of illness; the contemporary writer trying to establish the moisture of spiritual life in an arid materialist society—all these predicaments are to be found here.

Endo is unflinchingly autobiographical. The moving "A Sixty Year Old Man", for instance, was written when the author had turned 60 himself, extending his so ample charity even to his own ageing self as he records his pathetic hankerings after young girls witnessed in bars or parks.

Three stories in particular seem strong and generously worked in precisely the same way as his novels. "Lies", from Endo's Manchurian boyhood, deals with the long term significance of interactions with those seemingly on the margins of our lives. "The Last Supper" and "The Box" present the unmanageable anguish consequent on certain compulsory immersions in the violent events of contemporary history.

The main characters here have had their whole beings defiled by the moral anarchy unleashed by war (in Burma and in mainland Japan in the second world war's last stages). It is Endo's triumph that his sense of the totalitarian power of suffering does not diminish his insights into quotidian, late 20th century urban life—and vice versa.