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106th book of 2021.

4.5. Brilliant. I bought this in London last weekend visiting my old university housemate and began reading it at once on the Tube journeys back out of central London towards his home. Despite the throng of passengers, sometimes heat, and sometimes those awful screeching sounds, I was completely absorbed when reading on the Tube and often worried about missing our stop. Like other Japanese writers, Endō's prose is sparse and sharp. As a setting, 1640 Japan is utterly compelling and Endō writes it beautifully and convincingly.

I felt a drop of water on my cheek, and looking up saw a huge black cloud like a finger floating across the surface of a sky that had now become leaden and murky. The drops became more numerous until at last a blanket of rain enveloped the whole plain like the strings of a harp. Catching sight of a copse of trees quite near to me I ran into them with all speed. Out flew a number of birds like an arrow from the bow and sped off in search of shelter. The rain struck the leaves where I stood, making a noise like pebbles pattering on a roof. My peasant clothes were completely drenched; the treetops, swaying in the silver rain, looked just like seaweed.

Most of the novel is through the eyes (set up as letters but reads like a first-person narrative all the same) of Father Sebastian Rodrigues, a Portuguese Jesuit priest. At the time, the Christians in Japan were being oppressed and brutalised, and Rodrigues and another priest set out to spread the religion of Christianity in a country that resisted it. They are also looking for news of their mentor, who they heard had renounced his faith under torture.


Arrival of a Portuguese Ship

Despite being a thoughtful and philosophical novel, it also has moments of great tension as the priests are essentially hunted through 1600s Japan. As it progresses the theme of the novel comes to light, as does the title: Why is God silent? And it progresses as, Why do bad things happen to good people? Or more so, to people who love God? The priests begin to question their faith when they realise the suffering the Christians are put through by the Japanese, for their missionary work, for God; they ask, Why does God not help them? God's silence is, even today, one of the reasons I hear most for people losing their faith. I do not consider myself firmly religious but was raised in a fairly lax but Christian household. As I grew up and I lost family members to cancer, things happened to me at school, as life happened, I began to wonder what was the use of praying, believing, when there seemed to be no visible benefit. This is the problem at the heart of Endō's novel. It is Dostoyevskian in its sombre inner turmoil and, for good measure, compared with Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, which, coincidentally, is my favourite Greene novel too.

Behind the depressing silence of the sea, the silence of God . . . the feeling that while men raise their voices in anguish God remains with folded arms, silent.

In an interview Jack Kerouac was once asked about his love of Buddhism and he replied, quite plainly, that no one ever died because of Buddhism, and he only wishes he could say the same about Christianity (like Endō, Kerouac was raised in a Catholic household). The Buddhists in Silence go against Kerouac's bold answer. The deaths in Silence are fairly brutal, hanging in 'the pit' and being crucified out to sea. The samurais behead men and women and children alike. I found it fascinating that Endō chose to write the story from a Portuguese man's perspective and so he views Japan as an outsider, as a westerner; it brings a whole new layer to the story, the idea of Japan's place in the world at that time compared to the west itself. Endō himself was one of the first Japanese university students to study in France. Silence is without a doubt his magnum opus, though I'm intrigued to read his other works now.

The answer to the question of God's silence, if it is indeed answered, is not for me to say. Endō's novel deserves to be read. A page-turner one minute and a reflection on religion and mankind the next, it is a wonderful work of art.