Endō Shūsaku and *Silence

In April 1964 a Tokyo novelist on a visit to Nagasaki stopped at the Jūrokuban-kan, a museum near Ōura Cathedral, and looked at an old fumie, one of the images of Christ or Our Lady that suspected Christians had been forced to tread on. Around the image were the dark marks of toes, left by the feet of the people who had stepped on it.¹²The novelist was Endō Shūsaku, and the museum that bears his name says that in those marks he heard "the voice of those who had betrayed their faith."²He could not forget it. Two years later the image became Silence, his best-known novel, and the question it raised is the thread of his life as a Catholic writer: what does Christ say to the one who falls?

Endō was born in Sugamo, Tokyo, on 27 March 1923, the second son of Tsunehisa, a bank employee, and Iku, a violinist trained at the Tokyo Music School.¹³His father's work took the family to Dalian in Manchuria, and when his parents divorced in 1933 his mother brought him and his elder brother back to Japan, to Kobe, where her sister was a Catholic.¹³The boys began going to the church at Shukugawa and learning the catechism. In May 1935 his mother was baptised, and on 23 June 1935 Shūsaku and his brother were baptised by the parish priest of Shukugawa, Fr Nagata Tatsunosuke; he took the name Paul.¹⁵In 1939 his mother began, under the direction of the German Jesuit Fr Pedro Herzog, a life of strict prayer.¹

He failed several entrance examinations, spent a short time in the preparatory course of Sophia University, and in 1943 entered the literature faculty of Keiō University.¹³His father disowned him for not entering medicine, and he lived in a Catholic student hostel whose warden was the Catholic philosopher Yoshimitsu Yoshihiko; through Yoshimitsu he met the novelist Hori Tatsuo, and both men left a deep mark on him.³At Keiō he turned to French literature and to the Catholic novelists François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos; his graduation thesis was on Neo-Thomist theories of poetry.³In 1950 he went to France as one of the first Japanese students sent abroad after the war, to study modern Catholic literature at Lyon, and came home ill with tuberculosis in 1953.³⁴⁵

His first stories won him the Akutagawa Prize in 1955 for Shiroi hito (White Man), and Umi to dokuyaku (The Sea and Poison, 1957), based on the wartime vivisection case at the Kyushu University medical school, made his name;²the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten sums him up as a man who "built his own literature as a Catholic writer."³⁴⁵Then came illness. In 1960 his tuberculosis returned, and over 1961 he underwent three operations; the third, the most dangerous, lasted six hours, and his heart stopped once on the table.¹On the day before it, he looked at a paper fumie.¹The Nipponica encyclopedia judges that he passed through a deep conversion during these years in hospital, and that his later work shows a deeper religious theme.³He also read widely, his chronology says, in books about the Kirishitan age.¹

In April 1965 he travelled to Nagasaki, Shimabara and Hirado with his friend Fr Inoue Yōji and the writer Miura Shumon, and that summer he finished the novel.¹He had called it Hinata no nioi, "the scent of a sunny place," but his publisher, Shinchōsha, proposed Chinmoku, Silence, and it appeared in March 1966.¹⁶It was a bestseller and won the Tanizaki Prize.¹²

The story follows a young Portuguese Jesuit, Sebastian Rodrigues, who slips into Japan to find his teacher Ferreira, rumoured to have apostatised. He finds a persecuted Church, the poor Christians of a village called Tomogi, and a weak, repeatedly unfaithful guide, Kichijirō, who betrays him and keeps coming back to confess.²⁷At the end his old teacher, now an apostate, tells him that Japanese blood is being shed for his dream, and he sets his foot on the fumie. As he does so, the face of Christ on the bronze speaks: 「踏むがいい。私はお前たちに踏まれるため、この世に生れ、お前たちの痛さを分かつため十字架を背負ったのだ」, "Trample. I was born into this world to be trampled on by you; I bore my cross to share your pain."²Then, the novel says, "the morning came, and far away a cock crowed."⁶

Many readers took the book to mean that God was silent and that the priest lost his faith. Some Catholics were troubled for a different reason: the novel seemed to them to make light of apostasy and of the martyrs who had refused it. The Endō Shūsaku Society's chronology records that the book "was criticised in some quarters of the Church and treated as a banned book," and that at a public debate held at a church in Yotsuya Endō argued alone against many.¹In Nagasaki a story long circulated that a church leader had called it a forbidden book; the Nagasaki-born Catholic scholar Kurata Natsuki, asking older Catholics who knew the 1960s, found no one who had heard such a ruling, and was told that Silence was in fact widely read in the seminaries, where one student even wrote his thesis on it. He grants that some Nagasaki Catholics, descendants of families who believe their ancestors trod the fumie, still find Kichijirō hard to bear.⁷

Endō's own reading was a Catholic one. Late in life, his disciple Katō Muneya recalls, he said he had two regrets about the book. Readers had missed that Rodrigues did not abandon his faith: the closing "diary of an official of the Christian residence," written in archaic style and taken for an appendix, shows him made again and again to write that he renounced it, which Endō meant as a sign that he kept returning to the faith.⁶And he regretted the title, because he had written the book to say that God is not silent.⁶The cockcrow points the same way: it recalls St Peter, who denied Christ three times and was restored to become the first of the apostles.⁶The novel's own last word for Rodrigues is that "even if He had been silent, my life until today has spoken of Him."⁶Endō liked the phrase "the voice of silence," Katō says, meaning that Christ's voice is there within the silence.⁸The critic Etō Jun observed that the trampled Christ of Silence has the face not of a stern father but of a gentle mother, and Endō, who was grateful for the insight, made "the mother-like God" the theme of all his later work.³⁸

It should be said plainly that Silence is a novel, not a history. The martyrs and missionaries it draws on, among them Giuseppe Chiara and the inquisitor Inoue Masashige, appear elsewhere on this site in their documented lives.⁹

Whatever the first unease, the Church came to welcome Endō as one of her own. In 1970 the Holy See made him a knight of the Order of St Sylvester for his work as a producer of the Christian Pavilion at the Osaka Expo, the first joint project of Catholics and Protestants in Japan.¹⁵He was godfather at the baptisms of his friends Miura Shumon in 1963, the playwright Yashiro Seiichi in 1969, the novelist Kaga Otohiko in 1987, and Yasuoka Shōtarō in 1988.¹Universities in the United States and Taiwan, among them Santa Clara, Georgetown, John Carroll and Fu Jen, gave him honorary doctorates.¹⁵

In November 1987 a monument to Silence was unveiled at Shitsu in Sotome, in the old Kurosaki village that was one of the models for the novel's Tomogi, above the sea, and Endō came with his wife. He called it the place "God had kept for me," and the stone carries the words he wrote for it: 「人間がこんなに哀しいのに 主よ 海があまりに碧いのです」, "Lord, when men are so sad, the sea is so very blue."¹¹⁰He finished his last great novel, Fukai kawa (Deep River), in 1993, received the Order of Culture in 1995, and died on 29 September 1996, aged seventy-three.¹³His funeral Mass was celebrated on 2 October at St Ignatius Church in Tokyo by Fr Inoue Yōji, with some four thousand people present, and at his wish Silence and Deep River were placed in his coffin.¹¹¹

In May 2000 the Endo Shusaku Literary Museum opened at Sotome, looking out over the same sea, and the next day a memorial Mass "for Endō Shūsaku and all the Kirishitan" was offered in Urakami Cathedral; a second was arranged at Ōura Cathedral for May 2006, the tenth anniversary of his death.⁸In November 2016, before the release of Martin Scorsese's film of Silence, three hundred Jesuits watched it in Rome, and Pope Francis, receiving the director, told him that he too had read Endō's novel.¹²

The fumie in the Jūrokuban-kan had shown Endō the marks of feet. His novel let the trampled Christ speak to the one who falls, with mercy, and the Church that read it has kept both the martyrs who would not tread and the hope Endō gave to those who did.