Silence
Two Portuguese priests travel as missionaries to 17th-century Japan, eager to make new converts and spiritually nourish existing Catholics. A shadow looms over their journey, for one of their peers, Father Christovao Ferreira, has rejected his faith and been ousted as a priest. Father Sebastian Rodrigues begins his missionary work and finds that all Christians are in hiding and that those discovered are being forced to step on a fumie, a flat plate bearing the icon of Mary and Jesus Christ, and renounce Christianity. The alternative is torture or death. Rodrigues wonders if he would renounce his faith as well. Now we come to the essence of this brilliant story.
Rodrigues is told that Christianity does not “fit with” the Japanese culture or what is called “the swamp of Japan.” While listening to the physical suffering of Christians, Rodrigues agonizes over the silence of Jesus Christ during all of this horror. Rodrigues faces temptation, but the epiphany that he experiences is Endo’s answer to those who claim Christianity can never flourish in Japan. After years of meditation and research, Endo believed that both the West and the East needed to abandon old ideas about God and Jesus Christ and assimilate a more compassionate — perhaps even feminine as well as masculine – definition and experience of God.
Martin Scorsese, who is producing a movie of this novel this year, calls Silence “Endo’s greatest novel and one that has become increasingly precious to me as the years have gone by.” The novel contains a foreword by Scorsese and a prologue by translator William Johnston. This is indeed highly recommended, heartrending but profound historical fiction!
