[In the following review, Brown considers the theme of heroism in Endo's Stained Glass Elegies.]

A Catholic himself, Endō, like Japanese writers from Ryūnosuke Akutagawa onward, admires the Christian martyrs of the seventeenth century and finds in their commitment unto death a continuing source for literature: his stained-glass elegies. “Unzen” deals with seven men who allow themselves to be hurled into the boiling water of a hot springs above Nagasaki rather than recant. Still, the writer has sympathy for, and modestly identifies with, the one man who denied Christ to save his family. “The apostate endures a pain none of you can comprehend,” he writes.

A surprise ending greets the reader in “Fuji no Tsuda,” as a former student at a church university contrasts the heroism of fifty Christians who went to their deaths at a place by that name in 1623 with the timidity of the foreign monk who was only a clerk at their school in the prewar years of the twentieth century, known to contemptuous students as “Mouse.” This mediocre man died a courageous death, substituting himself for a Jew sentenced to starve at Dachau, as we learn in the final sentence. “Retreating Figures” deals with another kind of courage, that of an uncle who embraced a hazardous radical political philosophy and disappeared into the Soviet Union in the 1930s, perhaps to die there. The author seems to confess in “Despicable Bastard” that he is incapable of the sublime courage shown by these others and is terrified by the prospect of accidentally touching a leper in a friendly baseball game at a sanatorium.

For me personally, “The War Generation” was the most impressive piece. A middle-aged man was reminded, by a chance encounter with the lady who played the violin, of a concert of European classical music—“The enemy's music,” as the military police put it—played at Hibiya Public Hall the day after the most destructive air raid of the war, the fire-bombing of Tokyo on 9–10 March 1945. It was a sublime moment amid police-state oppression and devastating loss, but when he tried to share it with his wife and daughter, he met only indifference. His was a very private sentiment.

Van C. Gessel has translated the stories, written between 1959 and 1977, splendidly, just as he did Endō's novel The Samurai, about another seventeenth-century Christian.