Beyond Tokyo and Jerusalem
Review of Silence. By Shūsaku Endō. Translated by William Johnston (1969). Taplinger Publishing Company, 1980, 294 pp.
By Christian Gibbons*
In the 17th century, two Portuguese priests named Sebastião Rodrigues and Francisco Garrpe are faced with a devastating moral dilemma. For the past few weeks, they have been living among a village of Japanese peasants, not far from Nagasaki. The peasants are secretly Christians, and Christianity has been outlawed in Japan. Now an informer in the village has gotten the ear of the state, and the state has demanded hostages. The daimyo (a local feudal lord) will continue to take, cross-examine, and imprison villagers unless someone confesses to either practicing Christianity or hiding the priests. Two of the village’s most revered leaders, Mokichi and Ichizo, volunteer themselves as the first hostages, but don’t know what they should do when put before the authorities. What if they are told to apostatize, they ask, by trampling upon a fumi-e, a stone image of Jesus Christ? Rodrigues, his heart swelling with pity, shouts: “Trample! Trample!” He is immediately reproached by his companion Garrpe, but the essential conflict remains. How can these two priests stand firm in their faith when doing so endangers the very Christian souls that they purport to serve?
Both men must travel a long, arduous road before either can find an answer. Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel Silence portrays their journey. In the process, it also depicts some of Christianity’s long and difficult history in Japan. The first Christian priest arrived in Japan in 1549 from Spain, and over the course of the next century, the country developed into a thriving center of missionary activity. Beginning in 1614, however, Japan also became the site of an unfolding campaign of anti-Christian persecution, led by the Tokugawa shogunate. European proselytizers were banned, and their Japanese converts were hunted and repressed. Nevertheless, Japanese Christianity continued to live on underground long after its so-called “Christian century.” Today the Christian minority in Japan enjoys quite a bit of visibility, both because the history of Christianity in Japan is promoted for tourists and because Christians have played prominent roles in Japanese society.
Endō was one such Christian, becoming one of Japan’s most celebrated Catholic novelists at a time when Catholic writers were still not very well-known in the country. Baptized into the faith by his mother at 11, his journey as a writer arguably began in the 1950s, when he chose to study the works of French Catholic novelists as a university student in Lyon, France. By the time of his death in the late 1990s, Endō had received virtually every major literary prize in Japan, had been a frontrunner for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and had managed to become both a beloved “popular” writer and a giant of Japanese letters. While Endō is not necessarily representative of the rest of Japan’s Christians (a number of whom, such as Kunio Ogawa, have distanced themselves from his œuvre), he is considered one of the most important voices of postwar Japanese literature, and has undoubtedly become one of the most well-known Japanese Christians in the West.
This has in large part been due to the enduring success of his book Silence. However, many Westerners have been slow to recognize just how much this book has to do with Endō’s own life, and this has had the unfortunate side effect of obscuring one of the book’s most powerful themes: the inherent tensions between Christianity and Japanese culture. Understanding Endō’s efforts to reconcile his own Japanese heritage with Christianity is crucial to understanding why Rodrigues ends up staying true to his faith in Silence — and at what cost.
When Rodrigues and Garrpe first leave Portugal for Japan, they do so in the hopes of finding their former mentor, Father Christovão Ferreira, whom they believe to have been waylaid and captured when the wave of persecution began. Yet as the narrative progresses, and the priests become separated, the journey of Father Rodrigues grows more and more to resemble a retelling of the Passion — a characterization abetted, notably, by Rodrigues himself. Rodrigues initially views himself as a Christ-like figure who is likely to be gloriously martyred for his efforts to protect the Christian peasants whom he encounters. Yet, as he learns, he is hardly the hero of this story, and suffering for one’s beliefs is a much bleaker, grimmer affair than he had imagined. Although the daimyo are much more interested in making the priests apostatize than in brutalizing the peasants, they are not above doing the latter as a means of accomplishing the former. “It is because of you that they must suffer,” one samurai tells Rodrigues.
The book closes with a bitter, humbling victory, with Rodrigues successfully finding Ferreira, who has given up his faith and now lives as a bonze named Sawano Chuan, writing anti-Christian treatises for the government. Ferreira is no longer the renowned missionary that Rodrigues remembers — he now seems genuinely convinced of the incompatibility of Christianity and Japanese culture, and he urges Rodrigues to apostatize so that no more peasants will have to suffer. Indeed, he says, it is the Christian thing to do. “Christ would certainly have apostatized to help men,” he claims on one occasion to Rodrigues. “For love Christ would have apostatized.” Initially, Rodrigues cannot accept this. He has already seen many Japanese die for their faith — how could they have been mistaken about the object of that faith? And how could he apostatize, knowing that doing so would not only invalidate his life, but theirs as well?
Yet eventually, Rodrigues also surrenders his religion. Already haunted by God’s seeming indifference to the plight of Japan’s Christians, he convinces himself, as Ferreira once did, that only his actions can bring the suffering to an end. From that point forward, he is forced, like Ferreira, to live and work as a Japanese, adhering to Buddhist customs, taking a Japanese name and wife, and helping local authorities ferret out Christian symbols that would otherwise be smuggled in by Dutch merchants. Even still, Rodrigues seems to apostatize for different reasons than Ferreira. When finally brought before a fumi-e, Rodrigues finds himself conversing mentally with the image of Christ in the stone, who urges Rodrigues to trample on him. Therein lies one of Silence’s defining twists: Rodrigues seems to give up his God at the behest of God. And for this reason, Rodrigues never truly gives up on his faith. Indeed, Endō implies that he continues to secretly administer sacraments until his dying day.
When it was first published, Silence alienated some Japanese Catholics, who felt that its portrayal of apostasy disrespected the sacrifices of the many hidden Christians (kakure kirishitan) who had continued to worship underground well after the 17th century. A sermon given in Nagasaki by Pope Paul VI shortly after the book’s publication did not help much: the Pope urged attendees not to read the book, claiming that it effectively endorsed blasphemy. More bad publicity came with a 1971 film adaptation by Masahiro Shinoda, which omitted Rodrigues’s mental dialogue with Christ and emphasized his apostasy over the ambiguities of his continuing faith. Conversely, the book’s themes proved more popular among left-wing readers, for whom Rodrigues’s struggle recalled the suppression of Marxist ideas in the run-up to the Second World War. Silence also became massively popular in the West, where Rodrigues’s lingering doubts about the silence of God resonated more with the zeitgeist. Overall, however, the book garnered much acclaim, and Endō’s dissatisfaction with Shinoda’s film would eventually lead to a second adaptation by Martin Scorcese in 2016 — which is quite possibly the most faithful (pun intended) book adaptation that I have ever seen.
What many of these responses to Silence have in common is a narrow focus on the book’s theological content, as if the theology can be separated from Endō’s repeated attempts to grapple with cultural difference and hybridity. It cannot. The unorthodox views about God and suffering which Endō depicts in his book are broadly in line with what the Japanese pastor Kazoh Kitamori once described as “the first genuinely indigenous Japanese theology.” The unique contribution of this theology to Christianity’s largely Hellenized metaphysics was the elevation of God’s pain as one of His defining qualities. In Silence, as Rodrigues realizes the limitations of his belief in a triumphant Christ Pantokrator, God’s choice to suffer with humanity on the cross becomes ever more heavily emphasized. “It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world,” Christ says to Rodrigues in one of their “conversations.” “It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.”
These messages serve as a kind of theodicy, effectively affirming, despite both Rodrigues’s fears and the title of the book, that God was never really silent in the face of the persecution of Japan’s Christians. They also help to bring Rodrigues’s own Passion-like journey full circle: by descending into the midst of the kakure kirishitan, whom he hopes to protect and serve, Rodrigues also eventually becomes one himself, thus mirroring the Son’s assumption of a human form in order to suffer with humankind. Yet the price exacted by this is not what one might expect, and in this respect, Endō’s story deviates significantly from the New Testament. Instead of the divine assuming the mantle of the mundane, Silence ends with the image of a Portuguese man becoming Japanese.
Or, rather, becoming like Endō. Rodrigues’s uncomfortable assimilation of foreign mores mirrors Endō’s own personal struggle with Catholicism, which provided one of the guiding motifs, not only for Silence, but for his work as a whole: the tension between Japanese peculiarities and an ostensibly universal Christian religion. Endō’s framing of this issue is interesting in part because early Christianity is also a kind of cultural hybrid. As a successor of sorts to both classical culture and Judaism, it too was woven out of contradictory threads. Certain Church Fathers, like Tertullian, actually dismissed the relevance of pagan thought to Christianity, while others, like Origen and Augustine, tried to reconcile them.
Tertullian’s question of what Athens has to do with Jerusalem (or, metonymically, what “reason” has to do with “revelation,” Plato’s “Academy” with Christ’s “Church”) is extended by Endō’s writings. After all, what does Tokyo have to do with either? It seems that Endō felt a moral responsibility to try to answer this question. In the course of his life, he provided intellectual, institutional, and even spiritual support to other Christian writers; yet he also struggled with the cultural dissonance engendered by his baptism, sometimes comparing his Catholicism to a “borrowed” suit that he often wished he could remove, but never could. “This I think is the ‘mud swamp’ Japanese in me,” he once claimed in an interview. “I felt that I had to find some way to reconcile the two.”
In Endō’s work, the “mud swamp” often emerges as a metaphor for collective Japanese identity and, by extension, Endō’s own identity. It also serves to communicate the “otherness” that Endō believed was inherent in both. In Silence, for example, the “mud swamp” motif appears several times in arguments that Rodrigues has with Japanese officials, serving as a symbol of Japan’s distinctly difficult cultural terrain, which actively resists the incursion of Christianity. As Father Ferreira, echoing the words of the magistrate Inoue, tries to tell Rodrigues, Japan
is a swamp [and] a more terrible swamp than you can imagine [at that]. Whenever you plant a sapling in this swamp, the roots begin to rot; the leaves grow yellow and wither. And we have planted the sapling of Christianity in this swamp.
In spite of the large number of converts in Japan, Ferreira claims, not one of them truly believed in the Christian God. Distorted by local modes of understanding, words like Deus, which referred to the Son of God, were often understood instead as equivalents of dainichi (meaning “Great Sun”). Endō also developed these ideas about Japanese folk religion outside of Silence, in essays such as Nihonteki kanjo no soko ni aru mono (What is the Root of Japanese Feeling) and Watakushi no Kirisutokyo (Christianity and I), where he described Japanese culture as a world that had never had an indigenous theistic tradition, a world insensitive to divinity, sin, and death. In contrast, in the West, Christianity had permeated history, society, and culture indelibly. “I [could] see that this religion remains in some form or other in the Westerner’s heart,” Endō wrote of his time as a student in France. Given his religious affiliations, Endō had once expected to experience a kind of spiritual homecoming in Europe. No such homecoming materialized, however, and Endō was disappointed to see the ignorance and stereotypes of Japanese society on display in France. Additionally, and frustratingly, the Japanese people still seemed to “have no such Christian history or tradition or sensibility or cultural heritage,” despite centuries of continued Christian practice. “There is something in the Japanese sensibility that cannot accept the Christian view,” he mused. “From my youth, I began with astonishment to discover this puzzling Japanese sensibility in my environment and even in myself.”
Following Japanese custom in spite of adhering to a Western religion that is supposedly immiscible with it — this also describes Rodrigues’s fate at the conclusion of Silence. Endō shares very little about how Rodrigues manages to go on living with this conflict of cultures; but then again, it is not entirely clear whether Endō ever succeeded in this, either. As he himself once put it in an interview:
It seems to me that Catholicism is not a solo, but a symphony […] [a] full symphony of humanity. […] And unless there is in that symphony a part that corresponds to Japan’s mud swamp, it cannot be a true religion. What exactly that part is — that is what I want to find out.
Consequently, his novel sometimes deals with questions that it cannot fully answer. What exactly is the relation between culture and religion? Which aspects of religions like Christianity are truly universal, as opposed to culturally peculiar? What does it really mean to be Japanese, in Silence or anywhere else? And what does it mean to find oneself at the crossroads of these two things, as Rodrigues does? Can a balance indeed be found?
Given Endō’s career, the compatibility of Christian-ness and Japanese-ness could hardly be doubted; yet the ease with which these two different ways of being can coexist remains open to question by the book’s end. In what is possibly a veiled reference to the ancient controversies over Christ’s nature (is He wholly divine? both human and divine? how can that be?), Endō portrays Rodrigues as a character who manages to unite both Japanese customs and Christian sensibilities in one person. Such an achievement was certainly not inevitable. Although Ferreira was also forced after his apostasy to live as a Japanese, he lost his faith in the process. Only with Rodrigues does a certain “consubstantiality” of cultures seem to have occurred.
Rodrigues’s experiences are made even more compelling by the ways in which Endō amplifies and frames the historical elements within his novel. Despite altering a number of events and people for the sake of dramatization, Endō did in fact draw significantly from Japanese Catholic oral histories while carrying out research for his book. Unsurprisingly, Endō chooses to give a significant portion of his book the look and feel of an historical document. The first few chapters consist of letters that Rodrigues writes while in Japan, and then sends to the Holy See in Rome. This type of epistolary narration is set up by the prologue, which proclaims that the letters can be read in the present day inside a Portuguese “Institute for the Study of Foreign Lands.” Additionally, when Silence finally concludes, it does so in a highly unconventional fashion, with several extracts from “official” logs elucidating Rodrigues’s fate in an appendix. It is through these fragmentary, uninformative documents that the reader learns a little of Rodrigues’s life and eventual death under the name of Okada San’emon.
From a purely theological point of view, Silence ends in a moment of triumph for Rodrigues. “Our Lord was not silent,” he thinks to himself in the book’s final chapter, and “even if He had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of Him.” From a historical and cultural point of view, however, there is something ambivalent and inscrutable about how the novel ends. Although Endō explicitly shows the reader that Rodrigues has remained true to his faith, the reader is forced to play the historian in order to discern what, if anything, might have happened next. As Rodrigues, like Ferreira, is based on a genuine historical personage, this lack of clarity seems intentional on the author’s part. Even if Rodrigues does in fact learn to live with cultural hybridity, Endō implies, the secret to how he does so may nevertheless be lost to time.
It should not be forgotten, either, that Endō wrote Silence in a country that was still very much in search of its own cultural identity. With the end of America’s postwar occupation of Japan in 1952, this small island nation was reborn (once again) as the poster child of modernity in Asia — a modernity which, for many in Japan, entailed further Westernization. And yet, as cultural historians like Christopher Harding have tried to make clear, there were always many stories that directly called into question this oversimplified narrative of what it meant to be Japanese. Endō’s life was one such story.
Silence thus seems all the more important in our own era of cultural globalization, where many nations still struggle to reconcile indigenous traditions with the consequences of the West’s past global hegemony. The characters of Silence highlight different human responses to that dilemma. Rodrigues, for instance, manages somehow to live at the crossroads of two cultures. But Rodrigues’s principal antagonist in Silence, the governor Inoue (himself a former Christian), would also be at home in the present day, where views about the “identity” of nations are frequently a source of political contention. Not only is Christianity of “no value for the Japan of today,” Inoue tells Rodrigues (echoing Lee Kuan Yew’s remarks in the 1990s about distinctive “Asian values”), but the efforts of foreign missionaries are comparable to “the persistent affection of an ugly woman.” Far better, then, for them to leave the Japanese, and Japan, alone.
By that time, however, the genie is already out of the bottle; and reflecting on this fact in Silence is perhaps the closest that Endō comes to forming a systematic statement about his identity and others like it. For better or worse, Japanese Christianity exists — and although it is not an easy union, it is nevertheless a union. Endō’s efforts to make sense of his faith speak to the deeply personal journey of those who must inherit such complex, conflicting cultural legacies; his book Silence is, if anything, proof that such individuals are not alone in their struggle.
*Christian Gibbons is a writer based in Boston, MA.
