Silence is the best known of this Japanese writer’s prolific production of novels exploring the apparent disparity between existential experience and theological doctrine. The novel by Shūsaku Endō (1923–96) reflects some of the author’s own struggles with Catholicism, which he was compelled to adopt in boyhood by his mother, but which he eventually came to embrace after much resistance and grappling with its problematical aspects, not the least being its foreignness to traditional Shinto and Buddhist worldviews and spiritual practices and its relation to Western cultural imperialism.

This novel concerns a young, idealistic Portuguese missionary, Father Rodrigues, who travels to Japan in the early 17th century with two purposes: to minister to converts of Christianity, who have come under intense persecution, including an edict expelling their priests from the country, and to investigate rumors that his highly respected former teacher, Father Ferreira, has become an apostate. It is rumored that Father Ferreira has taken a Japanese name and wife, and perhaps even collaborated with the authorities to convince other priests caught out of hiding to abandon their ministries and renounce their religion. In the course of recounting Father Rodrigues’s responses to increasingly perplexing experiences, Silence addresses profound ethical and theological complexities that are encapsulated in a relatively small set of recurring images and tropes, chief among them water and the phenomenon of silence that gives the book its title.

Rodrigues ministers clandestinely to a Christian underground of perennially mistreated and impoverished peasants. He is comforted to believe that they have found relief from their cares in the loving mercy of the Christian God, made flesh in his priestly representatives on earth: “The reason our religion has penetrated this territory like water flowing into dry earth is that it has given to this group of people a human warmth they never previously knew . . . men who treated them like human beings [with] kindness and charity.” But the naive priest is forced to begin a profound spiritual reeducation regarding his spiritual office and his faith, beginning with his betrayal to the authorities by one of his flock, the furtive, craven, and thoroughly abject Kichijiro. Rodrigues has been deeply committed to, indeed in love with, the idea of the imitation of Christ. But he finds in this obligation something more than expected with the acquisition of his very own Judas, who shifts the blame elsewhere: “God asks me to imitate the strong, even though he made me weak. Isn’t this unreasonable!”

Accompanying the priest on the run in the wilderness, the “servile,” “fawning, obsequious” Kichijiro gives him dried fish that causes a “burning thirst” that weakens his resolve to escape. Rodrigues compares this to the vinegar-soaked sponge offered Christ in his agony. “Mouse-like,” with “fearful eyes like a spider” that make him the antithesis of the idealized, tranquil face of Christ that has always sustained and comforted Rodrigues, the remorseful Kichijiro is always to be seen whining for compassion and mercy on the periphery of the crowds that gather wherever the priest is displayed by the authorities.

Knowing that Kichijiro has “sold” him for 300 pieces of silver compels Rodrigues to try to come to terms with what has perplexed him since his seminary days. This haunting thought is the enigma that Christ had allowed Judas “to slip from the path of righteousness,” had even urged him to his task (“What thou dost, do quickly”), and that, once the disciple had played his necessary part, God had allowed him to commit suicide and thereby damn himself eternally. Was not Judas “no more than the unfortunate puppet for the glory of” Christ? Did Christ ever pray for Judas, or was he disgusted with him? “Could it be possible that Christ loved and searched after this dirtiest of men?” Such “doubts had arisen in his mind like dirty bubbles that rise to the surface of the water in a swamp . . . that soiled the purity of his faith.” Kichijiro’s role in God’s (and the author’s) scheme necessitates the priest’s gradual recognition that the imitation of Christ entails the difficult task of relinquishing anger, resentment, and bitter sense of grievance, and overcoming his contempt and the “joy” he feels at the thought of abandoning the traitor so as to be able to give him the sacraments of confession and absolution.

But the predominant aspect of the priest’s imitation of Christ concerns the discovery of personal meaning in the quasi-comparable conditions of his own suffering, notably his repudiation by the community, his incarceration, and the prospect of being tortured and executed. “Yes, his fate and that of Christ were quite alike, and at this thought a tingling sensation of joy welled up within his breast. This was the joy of the Christian who relishes the truth that he is united to the Son of God.” The frequency of such assertions may seem belabored, but this insistence is largely attributable to the character’s prideful aspiration and self-pity, rather than to an authorial didacticism that fears the reader will not spot the parallels without prompting. Rodrigues often refers to Christ as “that man,” “that other man,” and “another man,” which humanizes Christ and his suffering while identifying him as an ego-ideal, an internalized model of behavior that provides the terms by which he can conceptualize his own experience. He becomes aware, for example, that while he is living the Stations of the Cross, elsewhere seminarians and priests are verbally rehearsing the corollary prayers of the rite without truly understanding them, as once he had himself.

Rodrigues also comes to realize that martyrdom is not glorious or heroic, as he had been taught in the seminary, but miserable and shabby. He wonders if his “inexpressible thrill of delight” in pulverizing his lice into white dust is comparable to what is being felt by those killing the Christian converts. However, Rodrigues’s approximation of the Passion of Christ, his emulation of ordeal, does not come in the form of physical torture, as he expects, but as psychological and spiritual torment from being forced to watch others tortured and killed because he will not consent to the “formality” of trampling on the fumie, a holy icon made for this purpose. Ironically, if he is to “save” his people, in an imitation of Christ, he must publicly repudiate Christ and, by apostatizing, display the inadequacy and unsuitability of Christianity for them.

The priest is initially resistant to the arguments of the presiding magistrate and chief persecutor, Inoue, a cunningly patient Grand Inquisitor who had himself once been baptized to advance himself in a more tolerant period in the country. Inoue fails to win over Rodrigues to his conviction that Christianity must be outlawed because it is not suited to “this swamp of Japan,” as evidenced by the fact that the converts have deformed the Christian God to comply with Japanese spiritual understandings.

Inoue’s attitude is similar to Endo¯’s own criticism, expressed in other writings, regarding the spiritual indolence of the Japanese temperament, which he characterized as a “mudswamp.” As a state of mind or spiritual condition, Japan is as much for Inoue “the end of the earth . . . its uttermost limit,” as it is for the European missionaries. He deploys two similar proverbs to characterize the mutual unsuitability of Japanese culture and Christianity: “the persistent affection of an ugly woman is an intolerable burden for a man” and that “a barren woman should not become a wife.” One further distinction he makes is crucial to other themes in the novel. This includes the difference between Christ’s and the Buddha’s conceptions of mercy: “For in Japan salvation is from the mercy upon whom people depend out of their hopeless weakness,” whereas “Christian salvation is not just a question of relying on God—in addition the believer must retain with all his might a strength of heart.”

These arguments are also advanced by Father Ferreira, who, after a long ordeal of sustained humiliation, has not only renounced Christianity but begun to denounce it in a book that Inoue has compelled him to write. The apostate reiterates his superior’s judgment that Japan “is a more terrible swamp than you can imagine,” where the roots of the tree of Christianity necessarily rot. The Japanese “never had the concept of God; and they never will.”

But the argument that finally wears down Rodrigues’s spiritual resolve and faith pursues the question of what mercy properly entails. Despite his protests Ferreira convinces him that “Christ would certainly have apostatized to help men. . . . Even if it meant giving up everything he had. . . . Now you are going to perform the most painful act of love that has ever been performed.” The priest comes to recognize, as Ferreira had before him, that it has been his pride and his dread of being repudiated by the church and losing his place in the social order, and not his love of his flock or fidelity to his oath and priestly obligation, that has kept him from truly imitating Christ. He realizes that even in his obdurate resistance at the risk of martyrdom there is “vanity.”

The priest looks down sadly upon the “worn down and hollow” icon, as Endo¯’s omniscient narrator comments. “He would like to press to his own face that face trampled on by so many feet.” He hesitates because stepping on the image would be stepping on all his ideals, on everything that is beautiful and pure. But he hears Christ’s voice command him, “Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world.” Broken in this act, the priest begins to see that Ferreira and he are alike, both having been terribly thwarted in their need to justify their existence by being of some use to others. He also sees that given his weakness—“I could not endure the moaning”—Kichijiro and he are not so different. The significant difference is “that my Lord is different from the God that is preached in the churches.” His image of Christ has changed forever: no longer a face “filled with majesty and glory,” nor “a face made beautiful by endurance of pain,” nor “a face filled with the strength of a will that has repelled temptation.” It is, rather, that of a man “sunken and utterly exhausted.”

The central dilemma of the book is silence, as the title signifies. Various kinds of silence are evoked and Endo¯ uses the phenomenon as a refrain throughout Silence. There are human types of silence: the stubborn silence of resistance, the silence of those who keep faith by not betraying their priests or their religion. The silence of contempt. The silence of fear. The silence of the intimidated, the traumatized. The silence of passive resignation. But more crucially, in the etymological sense, the silence of God is the central preoccupation.

The silence of a God that allows the faithful to be tortured generates the bemused silence of those who cannot resolve this seeming contradiction, who are at a loss to explain the enigma. Father Rodrigues is wracked by this theological dilemma: Why has God permitted this spiritual coercion, why has he not intervened to stop it, and why has he not even strengthened the will or given courage to the persecuted? Did Christ also feel “terror at the silence of God”? Feeling abandoned, and remembering the sunny stillness in which a Christian martyr had been executed, the priest wonders, “On the day of my death, too, will the world go relentlessly on its way, indifferent. . . . will the cicada sing and the flies whirl their wings inducing sleep?”

Natural noise, (spiritual) sleep, and a seemingly universal obliviousness converge for what is possibly the novel’s most powerful, and distressingly ironic, incident. In a dark prison cell on the eve of what might be his torture and execution, the priest is outraged to hear the relentless snoring of a drunken guard, whom he compares to the disciples in the garden of Gethsemane, “who slept in utter indifference to the torment of that man.” The contrasting juxtaposition of terror and freedom from care strikes him “as utterly ludicrous” and he wonders, “Why is human life so full of grotesque irony?” Shortly later he discovers how unimaginably apt this characterization is, when he learns from Ferreira, “That’s not snoring. That is the moaning of Christians hanging in the pit.” Endo¯ rings chimes on the trope of silence, and occasionally that silence is broken in ambiguous, if not always hopeful, ways. The “muffled roar that issue[s]” from a seashell makes Rodrigues “shudder,” until he is compelled to crush it. The equally “muffled drum” of waves that relentlessly break and recede at the edge of the sea that had “swallowed” the martyrs also bespeaks distance and meaninglessness. “Behind the depressing silence of this sea, the silence of God.”

The words Laudate Eum (Praise Him) that Ferreira had carved on the cell wall to sustain himself and others during imprisonment would seem to serve as authorial counterpoint to that silence, inasmuch as this phrase, an injunction preceding each line of Psalm 150, urges the production of sounds—sounds that might distract from the void. Given the discursive ubiquity of silence, it is significant that Christ is heard as a voice assuring Rodrigues that he is there “suffer[ing] beside you.” After so much painful silence, after so much implication of divine nonexistence, which would reduce the priest’s life to absurdity, readers must decide for themselves whether Rodrigues is sufficiently convinced to be reassuring when he affirms at the end of the novel that “everything has been necessary to bring me” to a more authentic way of loving God. But he still feels shame and self-contempt for his degradation— there has been no miraculous salvation from that. In the end only the man speaks, and perhaps in that resides the miracle: “Even if he had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of him.”

Silence’s interrogation of and attempt to mitigate God’s silence with regard to human suffering is typical of many novels written by Catholics in the decades following the Holocaust. Endo¯’s evocation of existential angst is particularly reminiscent of the British writer Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1940), and his body of work shares many of the same thematic preoccupations as the work of the French novelists Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac, which Endō is known to have studied. Silence’s author also studied the works of the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Endo Shūsaku. Silence. Translated by William Johnston. New York: Taplinger, 1980.
Gessel, Van C., ed. Japanese Writers Since World War II. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 182. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997.
Johnston, William, and Endo Shūsaku. “Endo and Johnston Talk of Buddhism and Christianity.” America 171, no. 16 (November 19, 1994): 18–20.
Mathy, Francis. “Shūsaku Endo: Japanese Catholic Novelist.” America 167, no. 3 (August 8, 1992): 66–71.
Matsuoka, Fumitaka. “The Christology of Shūsaku Endo.” Theology Today 39, no. 3 (1982): 294–299.
Swain, David L. “The Anguish of an Alien: Confessions of a Japanese Christian.” Christian Century 112, no. 34 (November 22–29, 1995): 1120–1125.

Categories: Japanese Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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