Likewise, the rest of the characters are shown briefly.

He doesn’t seem to have ever existed before the story began. While we are deep inside our central characters mind and spiritual thought, there is almost nothing else known about him. On the other hand, characterization is slightly thinner. Endo evokes the extreme differences in these parties, from their power to their dwelling places to what they eat. The setting of medieval Japan is well-evoked the peasants living in extreme feudal poverty, the samurais and warlords who rule over them. This is the question of Silence – what do you do in the midst of suffering when God seems to have turned His back? Based on this book, I suspect Shusaku Endo has faced Him too. While I have never been persecuted or tortured due to my faith, like most Christians, I have faced a silent God. I can’t speak to how it might come across to a non-Christian but for me it was moving and, even five hundred years later, painfully familiar. This is a story about the silence of God.

The story is intimate, horrifying, and heartbreaking. We see the story almost entirely from his perspective, from his initial arrival with another priest, hiding in the mountains, to their eventual separation and his arrest. The protagonist is a young Jesuit priest, who sneaks into Japan in search of his former mentor, rumoured to have betrayed the faith. (The book deals with Catholic Christianity, meaning that imagery is much more powerful and important to these believers than it may be to a modern Protestant. They do so by torturing them until they will reject Jesus Christ and stomp on an image of him. Quickly realizing that putting Christians to death only creates martyrs for others to follow, the ruling powers work to force Christians to apostatize. The country is closed to missionaries, leaving those European priests and missionaries already in country stranded and endangered. The novel begins in the 16th century after Japan leadership has declared Christianity punishable by death and torture. Having finally read it, I find myself both wishing I’d read it years ago and glad that I read it now, in my thirties, with a few years of experience behind me. Yet for years, I’ve seen Silence listed amongst the classics. In the realm of Christian literature, Japan does not loom large. Silence – Shusaku Endo (Picador Classic, 2015)

Silence by shūsaku endō