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This book ruined my life. Sorta true. It's the catchiest review intro I'm going to come up with. I'm afraid to review this book and remember why it set me off to feeling hopeless and stupid. Band aid scenario. Pull it off!

I don't have the religion or spiritual kinds of faith. I'm dyslexic when it comes to religion, maybe. My mind jumbles the meanings and I just don't speak that language of KNOWING what you can't see and this is good and this is always bad. I don't look at someone who does have it and see that core glowing from within them. I hear the adults from Peanuts warbled talk about it like someone being in love with someone. *I* am not in love. Maybe it is something spiritual I have but it isn't like anything I've heard about. My Star Wars buddhism and humanism, whatever that is. Any kind of thread between me and everyone else, of past, present and future (on good days when I don't heartily wish there was no me). I at least want to see the glow in another.
The times I believe what is worth remembering (and is actually remembered!) is enough. Things I'm afraid to try to name 'cause it'd probably make me an asshole (like if I could ever understand or know anyone else). I live for moments I feel like walls of skulls aren't so thick after all. I'll try to keep the faith (that I don't have 'cause I don't know what it is) that there's going to be something in there to spark the life and days for the next day. Something like that. Unless I get confused reading a book like Silence and it ruins my life!

Church? After life (that there won't always be life has sometimes been my only hope)? It would occur to me last, if at all. (My first memory of catholicism is seeing the bath tub in the catholic church my cousins went to. I decided they used it to drown children while the adults watched. Not to mention the Alabama baptist church my mom allowed this "kind lady" - ha!- to force us to go to.) Shusako Endo's Silence might be about God and religion and stuff like that, as the book jackets and quotes suggest. Graham Greene named it as a best novel of the century. Other guys called Endo the Japanese Graham Greene. I only know The Third Man Graham Greene, really... No help at all. Since that stuff doesn't exist in my heart I read something else. I felt a little stupid reading this was about Christian themes. More remorseful still when it is about philosophy. Soooo don't get it. Humanity? Asshole! Maybe I didn't read the intended book. Oh well. Can I go on beating myself up about it forever? (Yeah, I could.) If I had read it as a Christian themes book I wouldn't have given a shit about the book at all and could have moved on with my reading life as if nothing had happened.

What killed me was the losing the faith in the unnameable let's not be an asshole stuff. I guess I was an asshole. I can hardly explain it to myself why Endo's Silence "triggered" one of my more awful depressions since fall of 2009 (I didn't talk to anyone that was not purely perfunctory reasons for months. I'm, um, afraid of people sometimes. Um, all the way into spring 2010). My mental health is a fragile little balanced thing that I have to keep watch over constantly. The little engine that couldn't. The stupidest shit can make me feel bleak as hell. I never know when it is going to happen. Relatively happy one second, depressed the next. I read lots of books and listen to music to keep up the feeling like someone other than me. I need other voices than me in here.

I don't know how it happened. Yes, I do! It was that damned Kichijiro, and Father Rodrigues. It was that damned Mariel. Father Rodrigues is pumped up with love of Jesus Christ (he loves his beautiful face. Young me thought my dad looked like Jesus 'cause he had a beard. Now I think he looked like a prototype of a hipster. Too late. Jesus couldn't stop brutal jerks from sporting beards. George Harrison had to shave his off after Charles Manson ruined the look. Anyway, the look isn't gentle to me. It's the beard! Perfect for hiding undesirable dinner foods and violent secrets). The Catholic church is ready to give up on converting Japanese. The grapevine has it that Father Ferreira apostatized. I really don't get this apostatsy business. This could be me not getting the whole religious thing. WHY would it convert anyone to your religion when you got killed for it? "I wanna do that!" Does it matter if every person you are ever going to meet (for example, brutal guards with or without facial hair) knew that you fantasized about paintings of Jesus in your most affectionate moments? If that's where your feelings of self worth came from... Father Rodrigues definitely got off on the inner paintings of himself looking holy and serene. Boy, did he ever. Does one moment negate your entire being, what you are about? Denial of yourself to someone else? I personally believe that you are going to spend your life with yourself and knowing yourself is more important than a few Japanese guards getting you to say what you didn't want to say. Father Rodrigues lies to himself about his reasons for saying what he didn't want to say. That was kinda creepy crawly to read about. Stop the Jesus navel gazing, man! Did he believe that God was not there for him as the most protective big brother on the block? Or did he just wake up and smell the burning feet?

Kichijiro was their Japanese guide, rescued from exile in Portugal. Kichijiro is a Christian in his heart. I think he was embracing the Catholic guilt too well. He apostatized. His entire family did not, and died their martyr deaths (maybe they were partying up there in heaven with Jesus made water wine while their brother drowned in sake and guilt made vomit. Who knows for sure?). Father Rodrigues hates Kichijiro, for all that he will not admit it. He likes to think well of himself and it depressed me to read his full of shitness about the lost man. What is the point in having a belief system if you can't LIVE with it? It depressed me to read about the pity from his Christ for the pain of having to step on the fumie. One man hated himself and the other felt he was loved. What enabled him to think that way? I couldn't do it. What the picture of Christ thought, in the heart of Father Rodrigues? What Kichijiro followed him through so much to hear, that it was not the end to have had that moment and stepped on the fumie? It is forgiven? What is forgiven? To live? Life sucks!!!!! Most of the time, for most. It is okay to feel something about it? What the hell is there to forgive? One day was not the whole life! What enlightenment did Father Rodrigues have that Kichijiro could not have? Kichijiro who would at least admit that he wanted to live.

I don't know how it happened. I didn't catch myself in time. I couldn't stop thinking about Father Rodrigues. They were on their crosses to bear and the darkness crossed my face, crossed my heart. Hoped to die. My cross to bear. I made a face and it got stuck that way (it isn't stuck. It was the worst because it felt like it would be. Stuck). My cynicism started up. My lack of faith is truly that I cannot trust people in the me to them and them to me way. Would I hole up inside as Father Rodrigues? So supicious, that Father Rodrigues. I related too much to Kichijiro's cut off from life, his half alive desire to BE alive again. The inkling of what he wanted, yet doing all of the wrong things to keep that desire fed. It's a struggle, to live every day. I don't care if they die and if there's a happy all you can drink wine buffet party, or the kegger from hell with every asshole frat guy all in one place. I felt hopelessly stupid that I couldn't grasp what the point of this was. Is silence better if it is unspoken to not go unheard? God is dead, or unknowable, perhaps uncaring? It is possible to escape being an asshole and hiding from what you don't understand? Is there a glowing within others and I'll never be able to see it?

I'm feeling more myself again, today. What I live for to stay with head above total darkness is the not faith but just trying not to be an asshole "I know them all" while keeping some kind of faith in not being all alone in this noggin. Other voices. No silence. It was my fault. I listened to my potential Father Rodrigues too much and I should have looked into the world around him, as much as I wished they'd look at each other (starving peasants risking all to feed the priests! Ugh!). It wasn't about him. If they needed Christianity it was because it was hard to live through the day to day without a connection to someone (I'm hoping their image of Christ wasn't as reflecting back as that stupid priest!). They went through a lot, those Catholic Japanese. They didn't doubt and grow silent within themselves.



Silence is one of the few words that I know in kanji (I'm progressing perhaps slowly in kano. I'm not rushing anything. It's a kind of hobby to relax me, that's all [Note to self, don't start feeling bad about this]). I'd show off my writing if I had a (working) camera (I break everything! [I'd bang my head in frustration if I wouldn't break it too]). I've practiced it a lot. I've been writing reminders to myself like that for a long time. It was one of my worst ones to write "Shut up" on my own arm to remind myself throughout the day to not talk to anyone because everything I said felt so hopelessly stupid and pointless. I was afraid of feeling worse so I hid, in silence. (I've stopped doing that during the last three years, at least.) Silence is better (golden?). New language, new meaning. Silence instead of words of despair. (I'm not positive at all it's gone. I'm moment to moment.) Silence like listening is good silence. Sometimes I do nothing but read until I feel better.

(I am hating myself writing this review. Is there no chance? Next thing I'll probably write some shit like "Forgiveness is better than faith" and I'll feel hopelessly tongue tied trying to write what I feel and connect it to thoughts that are half words, parts pictures, songs from childhood.

is in my head. "I used to think that the day would never come that my life would depend on..." the setting sun! (Like Japan.)
Father Rodrigues hiding in a hole and waiting for his church followers to feed them and be blessed. The hand of god... Someone else's hand... That's not good enough. Some clarity would be good.)

The cover art is of a christ figure hung on the character. Jesus.