After reading Kiku’s Prayer, I moved on to Silence, arguably Endo Shusaku’s most famous work. It’s thought-provoking, more depressing than Kiku’s Prayer, and also more controversial.
If you’ve not read Silence, you can get a feel of this book from the trailer for the marvellous adaptation by Martin Scorsese:
As you can tell, this book is HEAVY. Endo discusses the theme of God’s silence during our suffering as well as the suitability of Christianity to Japan and he is very pessimistic about both. This is also why it’s so controversial: the book caused a stir in the Japanese Christian (especially Catholic) community when it came out because many Japanese Christians felt that Endo had diminished the faith of the martyrs.
Possibly his most controversial position is that many Japanese Christians died for a heretical view of Christianity. This is quite debatable but Endo uses this assumption to post a question: would you give up your faith to save someone who has already given up his?
Reading this, I’m afraid I don’t have many deep and thoughtful things to say. My copy of Silence is the one that I used when I was writing my EE on the ‘Judas Archetypes in Endo’s Silence and Greene’s The Man Within’ (title may not be accurate, it’s been years) so:
- All deep thoughts were already expressed so many years ago (also, I’m tired)
- I was mostly marvelling at what I was annotating back then and wondering if I was annotating for the sake of annotating.
Although I don’t have much to share, I still felt myself moved by the book so many years later. It’s definitely not a book for everyone because of the subject matter, but I can say with confidence that this is a book that has made a huge impact on me.