Silence by Shusako Endo

If you have not read Silence, I urge you to do so. It is a profound, disturbing, and beautifully written book about a Portuguese priest in Japan in 1614 when the few Christian converts there were persecuted. He struggles throughout with the silence of God.


I was reminded of this book when I saw a link to an article "Japan's 'Hidden Christians' Face Extinction," which is about the few remaining descendants of those Christian converts from the 16th and 17th Centuries.


Amy Welborn writes about the author:

"Shusaku Endo (1923-1996) used these themes in his many novels and short stories. Endo, baptized at the age of eleven because his mother had turned to the faith in the wake of personal difficulties, described his Catholicism as “a kind of ready-made suit…I had to decide either to make this ready-made suit fit my body or get rid of it and find another suit that fitted…”

"As a Christian child in Japan, Endo was taunted by his peers for his religion. As a student come to France after World War II to study Catholic novelists, his faith was irrelevant to those who may have shared it, but who deplored him nonetheless because he was Japanese. It seemed, at that point, that it would have to be the suit that changed – it brought him nothing but suffering.

"But on the way back to Japan from Europe, Endo visited Palestine. In walking where Jesus himself had, he came to understand that the Christianity he had known was incomplete, for it had never revealed to him the Jesus who had lived, suffered and died for the outcast. It was this Jesus, he realized, who could reach beyond culture and connect with the Japanese soul."

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This is such a monumental book that I need to re-read it. It is not easy to read, but I highly recommend it. Here is a quote to give you a glimpse of the imagery Endo uses about harsh circumstances:

"As I pushed open the wet door, the song of the birds broke in from the trees like the rising of a fountain. Never before had I felt so deeply the sheer joy of being alive. We sat down near the hut and took off our kimonos. In the seams of the cloth the firmly entrenched lice looked just like white dust, and as I crushed them one by one with a stone I felt an inexpressible thrill of delight. Is this what the officials feel when they capture and kill Christians?"