In three tragic stories of varying size and dimension [in Foreign Studies] Shusaku Endo conveys with striking intensity the experience of the Japanese in Europe. It is clear from his introductory remarks that Endo is drawing on the memory of his own life in France, a life that must have been filled with profound psychological and physical pain.

In the first selection [“A Summer in Rouen”] a young Japanese has used his protestations of Catholicism to gain a summer abroad in Rouen just after World War II. He finds himself living with a devout bourgeois family which tries to use him to replace a deceased son once destined to go to Japan to convert the people. They are painfully ignorant of Japan, and their visitor is helpless to disabuse them of their false notions because of the weakness of his French and the reticence of his personality.

The second story relates with detachment the limited information known of one Araki Thomas, a seventeenth-century Japanese who studied Catholicism in Rome only to apostacize the faith upon returning to Japan. Araki appears to have been in Rome while Japanese leaders shifted to a virulent rejection of Christianity and was unable to withstand the tortures to which he was subjected upon his return. In recanting his faith he betrays those loyal to it, fellow Japanese and fellow Christians on whom the most terrible punishments were inflicted.

The third and by far the most sizable piece [“And You, Too”] is a deeply revealing tale of a young French literature specialist from Japan who arrives in Paris to study the Marquis de Sade. The protagonist moves from an observer of the decadence and corruption characterizing Japanese abroad to one who shares that fate. We are presented with an overwhelming portrayal of desperate loneliness and profound cultural disjunction. Sade's legendary decadence forms the backdrop against which the young Japanese students act out their lives.

The three pieces taken together constitute a strong statement of the abyss that separates the Japanese mind and sensibility from the West. Endo is as critical of the Japanese players as he is of the Westerners. He sees the foolishness and stupidity of Japanese life with the same clarity with which he views the vanity and superficiality of the West. By juxtaposing the two worlds against each other in these three quite different settings, he leads us to the most serious questions about the human condition.