Shusaku Endo:

BACKGROUND

The Japanese society into which the writer Shusaku Endo was born in 1923 was one which was modernizing rapidly on the one hand but which was also deeply traditional, nationalistic and militaristic, on the other. Japan had ‘progressed’ rapidly in the seventy years before Endo’s birth. The film Samurai most imperfectly illustrates the conflict between modernizers and traditionalists in Japan during the late Nineteenth Century. Japan adopted the Prussian/Germanic model militarily which wedded their own martial traditions with a European sense of expansion and national unity. Japan defeated Russia in the Far East in 1904 and because of China’s fractious state she became the dominant Far Eastern power. Along with Western powers she established a sphere of influence in China in the northern Chinese region of Manchuria. Endo lived there as a small boy from 1927 to 1933.

Several of Endo’s works contain scenes set in Manchuria. These mainly concern his childhood and the sense of loneliness he encountered as an only child in a marriage that was breaking up. His friends were animals and poor local people. I think there is a link here to both Endo’s personal loneliness and to the influence of Shintoism with the importance it attaches and to nature generally. Endo’s parents separated and he and mother returned to Japan. Here he was brought up in a largely female environment. His mother became a Catholic and either she or his aunt forced Endo to be baptized when he was eleven years old. I think this may have been the source Endo’s ambiguous representation of some women in his novels.

A conformist mentality was especially strong when Endo was growing up because Japan became more and militarist and nationalist. To be a Christian at this time was to be an outsider. Nowadays there are more Christians than there used to be because of foreign migrant workers but they are still a tiny minority. Most Japanese are not religious though they many pay lip service to Shinto and Buddhist customs and traditions e g funerals and marriages. This situation was to be a continual conundrum for Endo. Not only was he a Catholic in a society where Catholicism had no natural roots and was a tiny minority but it was religion that had been forced on him. For him Catholicism ”… was a kind of ready-made suit … I had to decide either to make this a ready-made suit fit my body or get rid of it and find another suit that fitted …There were many times when I felt I wanted to get rid of my Catholicism, but I was finally unable to do so. It is not just that I did not throw it off, but that I was unable to throw it off. The reason for this must be that it had become part of me after all.”[cited in Endo S, Silence, London, 1978, p13]

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

It is the campaign in Burma that plays the biggest role in Endo’s wartime descriptions. The British and the Indian Armies were rapidly defeated initially and the Japanese Army reached the border with India. It was only in 1944 that the tide was turned by the British Empire forces with American help in a grueling campaign. The British involved called themselves The Forgotten Army but the Japanese also felt forgotten. The Japanese suffered 61% fatalities in the Burmese campaign many from disease and malnutrition. Endo does not deal with campaigns or leadership issues but with the plight of private soldiers struggling to survive and even resorting to cannibalism. The dropping of the Atom Bomb on Nagasaki was particularly poignant in Endo’s story because Nagasaki was the centre of Catholicism. The epicentre of the bomb was near the Catholic Cathedral and it is said that about 9,000 Catholics were killed.

After the American defeat of Japan hundreds of thousands of soldiers returned home to a ruined country and everything was done by the American victors to destroy the influence of Japan’s traditions. The struggle to face this changing world and soldiers haunted by the war is a common theme in Endo’s writings. Endo belonged to a small group of writers who responded to the effects of the War on the Japan. In the war military adventurism and triumphs at the beginning gave way to catastrophic defeats, the experience of the atom bombs, American and Allied occupation and the dismantling of much of the old Japanese way of life by the victors represented a personal and collective upheaval.

ENDO’S LITERARY BACKGROUND

In 1943 Endo went to university in Tokyo where he was introduced to French Catholic literature, and in 1945 he decided to major in the subject. Due to a weak chest he managed to avoid military service. In 1947 he graduated and three years later was selected as one of the first group of Japanese to go abroad to study since the end of World War II. He returned to Japan in 1953 and his first work of fiction was published in 1954. [Morton L The image of Christ in the fiction of Endo Shusaku, Melbourne 1994, p2]

The second strand in Endo’s writing is the sense in which he is a Catholic author. Endo without doubt belongs to a tradition of novelists who draw their inspiration from Catholicism. Endo might be regarded as the last major contributor to a considerable tradition of significant novelists who were Roman Catholic.

The French Catholic writer, Francois Mauriac, especially, stands out as a major influence on Endo because of his reflection on evil in a work such as Therese Desqueyroux. This is about an unhappily young married woman who tries to poison her husband. The latter himself is faced with the conundrum, “Is she a criminal or a victim?” This influence is notably evident in Endo’s novel, Deep River, in the person of Mitsuko Naruse, who, on her honeymoon leaves her husband in Paris, and visits the countryside in which Mauriac set this novel. Both Therese and Naruse contain in them both the power of good and the power of evil.

ENDO’S STRUGGLE AS A ROMAN CATHOLIC

For Endo there is the whole question of cultural difference between Japan and the West, with Japan being seen as a cultural and social swamp that suffocates outside influences. This always militated against foreign religions establishing themselves. For a time from the mid 1500s Christianity enjoyed rapid expansion in Japan and many people in senior positions were baptized. This followed journeys of missionaries such as the Jesuit, Francis Xavier, to the Far East. However, at that time Japan was very unstable and Christianity had become involved in a society in which they could flourish. When Japan was united under one government in 1600 dissidents were no longer tolerated. Christianity came to be seen by Japanese leaders as an instrument of Hispanic imperialism. An edict of expulsion against Christians was promulgated. Ordinary Catholics were cruelly tortured and put to death, higher ups were pressurized to recant or face execution. Missionary priests were expelled or killed. To prove their disavowal of Christianity believers were forced to walk on an image of Christ called a fumie. By 1638 with the conclusion of the siege of Shimabura all overt Catholicism had been wiped out. Dutch Protestants were allowed to operate in a protected ghetto in Nagasaki for trade purposes. From this time on Japan remained a closed society until July 1853 when the Americans forced Japan to open up for commercial reasons.

An important theme in Endo’s novels on this period, were the Kakure. These were Catholics mainly in remote parts of Southern Japan and nearby islands, who conformed publicly but practiced a private from of Catholicism without a sort of any priesthood or Church structure. In this Our Lady played a big part and Kakure beliefs became blurred with Shintoism and Buddhism. After Japan was opened to the West, missionaries returned and the Kakure came into the open, but they still had a difficult time. In The Final Martyrs (1959), Endo describes the fate of a group of Kakure, who having come into the open in the late Nineteenth Century are (as happened in reality) were once more cruelly persecuted. The theme of apostasy is present once more in the character of Kisuke, an apparent clumsy bumbling failure, who is told as he is taken for torture, that it is after all acceptable to apostasise..

ENDO’S PERSONAL QUEST

Endo’s search into the Catholic past of Japan was also a personal quest, to discover the nature of a faith that had been imposed on him as a child. It was for this reason that Endo wrote the novel Silence, which was published in Japan in 1966. This novel takes as its theme a Jesuit expedition to Japan in the 1630s to establish the veracity of a rumour that one of their leading priests, Christovao Ferreira, had apostatized after torture. The main protagonist in the story is a priest member of the party, Sebastian Rodrigues. He begins the journey full of hope and confidence, but at the end of the story he himself has apostatized, and is obliged to work for the authorities against the few remaining Catholics. Endo returned to this theme in Samurai in 1981. This is quite different stylistically to Silence, but it is a similar story. The two major protagonists are Father Pedro Velasco, a scheming ecclesiastical politician, and Hasekura, a Samurai. The latter becomes a pawn in an elaborate plan to win Japan for Catholicism, a plan, which ends in disaster for both men. In reality both are pawns to Japanese power politics at home. However as in Silence there is a sense of redemption for the protagonists.

In what might be regarded as his historical novels, Endo’s concern was with the desperately poor outcast Catholics of southern Japan e.g. Silence and Final Martyrs and not with middle class urban Catholics who made up the majority of the Catholic population. Outcasts in society generally e.g. lepers in The Girl I left behind, gangsters in Wonderful Fool, and ordinary private soldiers in When I Whistle, and Deep River. However, the actual Catholic environment of which Endo was a part was itself élitist. For example, it has been estimated that 95% of Japan’s Christians are middle class, and the late nineteenth century converts were young samurai. Catholics were often seen as catering for the upper middle class.

ENDO AND JESUS

Endo’s representation of Jesus emphasizes the helplessness and weakness of Jesus. His characters struggle to accept as Saviour an emaciated wreck on a cross. Endo sees Jesus as personified in the poorest and marginalized of society. One is left with the sense that Endo’s concerns are for those marginalized in any sense, be they foreigners or poor peasants from the deep south of Japan. Endo’s Jesus is one who suffers with us and who allows our weakness but one who is a transcendent being who does not judge human beings. Endo’s God is more of a warm-hearted mother than a stern father. Here Judas is torn between love and hatred for Jesus. In the visible world Jesus is helpless and useless.

ENDO AS A SOCIAL AND POLITICAL COMMENTATOR

Endo has been accused of not being concerned with social issues. On the surface, his works seem concerned with personal, and not communal, morality. Insofar as this is true, it may be seen as a consequence of being part of a religious minority that was considered suspect in the ultra-nationalist years of the War. The War, for him raised conflicts between religion and country. In Army Chaplain (not translated into English), the principal protagonist is advised by the chaplain, that killing in the course of war is righteous. However, the former cannot accept this and finds that he is caught up in a war, which he cannot fully support, and in a religion in which he cannot fully believe. It has been argued that The Sea and Poison (1958) is also political. This is about a doctor, Suguro, who is haunted by his experience as a young medical assistant when he took part in medical experiments on American prisoners-of-war. This novel raises the question of the loss of individuality, which arises from becoming part of the army community. Suguro has no political or social enthusiasm. He is reduced to a cog in one the “gear wheels”, with no understanding of what is taking place. “Win the War, lose the War – it was all the same to Suguro.”

Although Endo was not directly political he was a very public man and was well known as a television personality and a commentator on topical issues. This is illustrated in Scandal, which begins with the main protagonist, (also called Suguro,) attending a public presentation for writers. This more social approach was reflected in Endo’s interest in the medical world and, in particular in the ethics of the medical profession. Endo was himself dogged by bad health. He supported medical charities, in particular the hospice movement, and many of his works contain hospital scenes. This interest in the medical field is already indicated in The Sea and Poison, but it is also, for example, apparent, in When I Whistle. When the heroine, Aiko Nagayama dies after receiving a new drug, the specialist, Kurihara, is less concerned about the patient’s death, which he regards as inevitable, than about her death being linked to the new drug.

THE DOWN TRODDEN

Endo, perhaps due to his youth and perhaps also to his membership of a national minority, never had any illusions about the War. His War was the War of the down trodden private, facing defeat, and struggling to stay alive as in Deep River and or as in The Sea and Poison, it is about civilian deference to an arrogant military caste. In When I Whistle, it is about its destructiveness, whether of the obvious physical nature, or in the sense of the destruction of loving human relationships. The adolescent Flatfish’s calf-love for Aiko is ended by his fatal desire to emulate the young naval officer, whom Aiko has married, and to join the armed services. The only consequence of this is his death as a trampled down private in Manchuria. It has been said that although Endo did not see active service, when confronted with the ruins of a defeated nation, he looked to Christianity as a means to rebuild destroyed mankind. Arguably this is illustrated in The Girl I Left Behind, in which an exploited young woman, Mitsu, provides a heroic example of self-sacrifice amidst the drabness of post-war Tokyo.

In Endo’s stories it is always the weak, apparently insignificant, and the fool for Christ who points to the workings of God. In Samurai we see this type in Yozo the servant of Hasekura. The latter is necessarily in the background during the ill-fated mission to Mexico and Western Europe. Yet he becomes a Christian through genuine conviction, whereas the latter’s later change of religion is half-hearted and for expediency’s sake. At the end of the story when Hasekura is facing disgrace and death, it is Yozo who is at his side. “The swirling flakes seemed like the white swans of the marshland. Birds which had seen many countries many cities. They were he himself. And now he was setting off for another unknown land …’From now on …He will be beside you.’ Suddenly he heard Yozo’s strained voice behind him. ‘From now on …He will attend you.’ The samurai stopped, looked back, and nodded his head emphatically.” The correspondence here between the servant Yozo, and the suffering servant Christ is unmistakable. It is through this tiny intervention that Hazekura faces the future with fortitude. The association between Yozo’s words and Christ’s words from Matthew’s Gospel 28:20, “…lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age,” seems inescapable.

In Wonderful Fool published in 1959 the hero is Gaston Bonaparte a simple well-meaning Frenchman and a descendent on the distaff side from the Emperor Napoleon I. He comes to Japan for reasons, which are unclear, and stays with a brother and sister, Takamori and Tomoe. His clumsy innocence and compassion brings him into contact with people in the Japanese under class, not to say the underworld. He dogs the footsteps of the gangster, ironically called Endo, who is seeking revenge for the death of his brother. Gaston saves Endo from death and appears to die himself, but his body is never found. Here associations with Christ’s resurrection are inescapable. Tomoe, the more hardheaded of the siblings, comes to understand that Gaston is not just a fool. “He is a wonderful fool who will never allow the little light which he sheds along man’s way to go out.” After Gaston’s disappearance the brother and sister see an egret, a symbolic bird, climbing into the sky. Takamori whispers “Gas, san, goodbye,” and he concludes with the conviction that he is still alive and will return. Gaston thus becomes the light of the world who only appears to have died.

HIS CONFLICT WITH THE CHURCH

Endo wrestled with a Church that was occidental in its culture and history. A Church which had suited the West for centuries, did not necessarily suit a Church, which was expanding rapidly in the areas of the world that were non-Anglo-Saxon and non-European. A missionary movement that had been in tune with a considerable part of European society in the Seventeenth Century did not necessarily have any understanding of Japanese society at the same period.

Endo struggled to come to terms with a religion that had been imposed on him as a child. This is illustrated by the short story, Shadows. Here, a young boy, who has left Manchuria with his mother after parental break-up, has baptism forced on him after their return to Japan. He gets to know a French priest who is a confidante of his mother. However, the boy’s association with the priest has unfortunate consequences, and the former sees the latter as being responsible for a number of misfortunes in his life. When the boy grows up he learns of rumours that the priest is having an affair. He dismisses these stories, but they are substantiated when his bride-to-be sees the priest with the latter’s woman friend, on the day of their wedding. The priest leaves the priesthood, and a few years later the narrator sees him with his wife and child at a restaurant on the roof of a department store. The narrator’s initial reaction is one of having been betrayed, and he is struck by the ex-priest’s shabbiness, lack of authority, and loss of mystery. However, on reflection he sees him as a man with the sad eyes of a dog, and even, that the very purpose of the priest in coming to Japan was to be diminished.

This is similar to the position of the failed Rodrigues in Silence who, having come to Japan with sense of superiority is himself diminished by agreeing, after torture, to trample on the fumie. As he places his foot on Christ’s face, he hears the voice of Christ, “Trample! Trample! I know more than anyone knows the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.”

This marks a change from Endo’s representation of the priesthood in an early work, Volcano, in which the two protagonists, Sato and Durand, are portrayed in a negative way. Sato is an active, enthusiastic priest who is immersed in his work, but who also relishes the adulation of his parishioners, and is ambitious, and unwilling to face the uncomfortable challenges presented by Durand. The latter is an ex-priest who taunts Sato with the accusation that Japan can never be Christian, and he tries to convince a young Catholic of the incompatibility of a Christian ethical stance in life, with Japanese culture.

In Deep River, one of the main characters is Otsu, a failed priest, who is, nonetheless, dedicated to his own perception of vocation. Having been rejected by a French religious order as having ideas that are too unorthodox, he ends up by the sacred River Ganges to which he takes Hindus who are too sick to get there by themselves. In the end he gives his life in this cause. Endo who started out wrestling with a Catholic Church, whose dogma he maintained, was alien to Japanese culture, came to find a Christ that was present in the weakest of humanity, and in our very failures. Endo’s Christ was a Christ who demonstrated characteristics that were both maternal and compassionate. Through the self-sacrifice involved, people are helped to see the selfishness of their own lives. In the case of Deep River, it is seen in the character of Mitsuko, who all her life, having been troubled by Otsu’s way of living, finally sees Christ as having been reborn in him.

Endo’s approach was criticized by mainstream Catholics, and yet any disagreements he had with the Church, he took philosophically. He observed that where once clergy told people not to read his novels, now they were the objects of study in the Church. This kind of change represented an alteration in the Japanese Church. The missionaries, who returned to Japan in the late Nineteenth Century, had little if any understanding of the spiritual state of Japan. Their kind of Western Catholicism appealed only to a tiny group of Japanese. It was perceived by many as being too abstract, conceptual, ideological, formalistic, and generally intellectually highbrow. It might be argued that Endo’s approach was merely symptomatic of changes in the Church at large after the Second World War. These changes were desirable for non-Western regions of the Church. Endo’s desire in his novels to, ”… reshape this Western dress that my mother gave me [i.e. membership of the Church] and make it fit the Japanese body …” was, perhaps, a natural part of a changing Church. Endo’s attitude to the Church was not only a critique of the Japanese Catholic Church as an institution; but was also a result of his personal life. He would have been amused by the eventual showing of the film of Silence in the Vatican.

THE STRUGGLE WITH EVIL AND INDIVIDUATION

There is no doubt with regard to Endo that he used the idea of the doppelganger. Endo had studied C G Jung and the doppelganger appears as a device to illustrate a man’s shadow or dark side. Shadow and Light in Endo’s works is a recurring theme. He had a growing interest in the existence of human duality that is the division of the individual into conscious and unconscious elements.

Here he recognized the existence of a shadow self that is an integral part of the human personality. Traces of Endo’s exploration of this idea exist in earlier novels. In Foreign Studies he writes that as a student in Lyons he used to peer into the underground chamber where the Nazis tortured their victims. He compared this to looking into the inner recesses of the human soul – dark and unfathomable. [Endo S Foreign Studies, London, 1989, p9]

His exploration of the shadow self is most strikingly present in Scandal. A successful writer, Suguro, becomes aware that he is being followed. A dubious woman who claims to have met him reminds him of his presence in a seedy area of Tokyo. Suguro flatly denies this suggestion, and believes that he is the victim of an impostor who is seeking to smear him. Through Mrs Naruse, a volunteer hospital helper, he is brought face to face with the dilemma of someone who, on the one hand is a selfless comforter of the sick and yet, on the other, takes pleasure in base desires. This moral dichotomy comes to the fore in his own life through a young woman, Mitsu, whom he employs in his own home as a means to help her. However, Mrs Naruse confronts him with proof of his own base desires towards Mitsu. It is only then that he recognises that he himself is a man of two personalities. “What he had seen through the peep-hole had been no illusion, no nightmare. The impostor who had befouled Mitsu’s body with saliva. That had been no stranger, no pretender. It had been Suguro himself.” This recognition is only the first stage in the acknowledgement of his own evil. He also comes to accept that this shadow still lives within him, and cannot be destroyed. Therefore, he, himself, might have been in the crowd that stoned Christ at his passion. He has to acknowledge that there is no impostor involved, and that he must live with himself.

A similar situation presents itself in the short story, A Sixty Year Old Man. The protagonist, a writer, and author of A Life of Christ (as Endo was in real life*), takes to watching a group of high school girls in the park, and in a cafe. His interest settles on one of them with whom he strikes up an acquaintanceship. She explains to him that it is not uncommon for men of his age to show an interest in girls such as herself, and that the girls follow a certain behaviour pattern. As a result of this awareness he becomes conscious of his own shadow self which he had tried to deny.