A Portuguese priest travels to Japan as a missionary during the Shogunate. But, after an initial period in which missionaries were welcome, now Christianity is forbidden and Christians tortured and killed. Will the priest be captured and if he is what will happen to him? Apostasy or martyrdom? And, crucially, why is God silent?
The book has obvious parallels with Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, also a story about a priest in a land where priests are forbidden, where to be a priest is a capital crime; and with Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, a story about the interrogation of an old Communist, both of which I read fifty years ago, at school.
The prose is interesting. In some ways it is a minimalist style, recounting only the facts. There is no great melodramatic over-analysis of emotion (I read it immediately after Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and the contrast could not have been greater). It is like the difference between a Chinese painting and a Baroque battle scene. Endo achieves his effects using a minimum of perfectly selected images: "Holding the string attached to the kite, they ran up the slope, but there was no wind and the kite fell idly to the ground." (Ch 10) On the other hand, he repeats and repeats and repeats some images and ideas as if he is hammering them into you. I found this combination of deceptive simplicity and ostinato powerful.
The form is also interesting. After a prologue, the first four chapters are told in the form of letters from the priest; from chapter five the story becomes a straightforward first person narrative. There are two epilogues: one in the form of notes made by a Dutch merchant, the other extracts from a Japanese prison log.
Some great moments:
- "Man is a strange being. He always has a feeling somewhere in his heart that whatever the danger he will pull through." (Ch 3)
- "Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt." (Ch 3)
- "Judas was no more than the unfortunate puppet for the glory of that drama which was the life and death of Christ." (Ch 4)
- "Sin ... is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind." (Ch 5)
- "In evil there remained that strength and beauty of evil; but this Kichijiro was not even worthy to be called evil. He was thin and dirty like the tattered rags he wore." (Ch 6)
- "True love was to accept humanity when wasted like rags and tatters." (Ch 6)
- "What he could not understand was the stillness of the courtyard, the voice of the cicadas, the whirling wings of the flies. A man had died. Yet the outside world went on as if nothing had happened." (Ch 6)
- "You look upon missionary work as the forcing of love upon someone? Yes, that's what it is - from our standpoint." (Ch 7)
- "Eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani! It is three o'clock on that Friday; and from the cross this voice rings out to a sky covered with darkness. The priest had always thought that these words were that man's prayer, not that they issued from terror at the silence of God." (Ch 7)
- "Whenever you plant a sapling in this swamp the roots begin to rot; the leaves grow yellow and wither." (Ch 7)
- "Dawn broke. And far in the distance the cock crew." (Ch 8)
A brilliant book.
April 2021; 267 pages
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| This review was written by the author of Motherdarling |
Other Japanese books reviewed in this blog include:
- By Kobo Abe:
- By Haruki Murakami:
- Norwegian Wood
- What I talk About When I Talk About Running (essays)
- After the Quake (short stories)
- South of the Border, West of the Sun
- By Yuko Tsushima:
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