The Novels of Shusaku Endo

These two novels deal with 17th century lacquer and its persecution of Christian missionaries. The accounts of historians support the major points do by Endo in these novels. For example, Notto Thelle writes of the "so-called Christian Century" in Japan during which the gates of Japan were opened at least(prenominal) a crack to missionaries, although this opening was for economic reasons than for any reasons of uncoiled tolerance or acceptance of Christianity or Christians. This era of which Endo writes in two of the novels under study here, says Thelle, "began with the arrival of Francis Xavier in 1549 and finish with the seclusion of the country and the proscription of Christianity."

Thelle writes that every aspect of the deportment of the Nipponese during this era was thoroughly regulated by the Tokugawa totalism:

Religious life was also regulated. Confucianism, . . . with its static view of hearty life and its emphasis on loyalty and filial piety, provided the ordained philosophy. . . . Buddhism, although protected as a quasi-national religion, was also strictly controlled in order to serve the governmental aims of the regime and was used to bottle up Christianity.

. . . Christian propagation and foreign trade . . . were regarded as threats to the political stability of the country. . . . Under the first three Tokugawa rulers, . . . the oppression of Christianity wa

In Silence and The Samurai, Endo reflects upon this era of Christian oppression in Japan. In Silence, the author focuses on the motility of whether or not Society of Jesus missionary Christovao Ferreira denied his belief at the hands of Nipponese torturers. The question is used to verbalise both(prenominal) the cruel extent to which the Japanese would go to have on the spirits of the Christians in that era, and the unique, mystical and humane understanding of Christianity which Endo holds. With deference to the latter facet of Endo's message, we find the missionary at the goal of the book on the verge of trampling the sacred fumie as a symbolic sign of his denial of Christ.

However, it is Jesus himself, through the "Christ in Bronze," who urges the missionary to trample the fumie:

The Christian themes and Endo's particular(a) fool on those themes as expressed in his novels of Japan directly reflect elements from the author's own life. The attitude of the modern Japanese in the third novel, The Sea and Poison, is thoroughly non-Christian, and, in fact, at best, amoral. Insofar as it can be seen as a novel preshadowing Endo's more overtly Christian message, the novel shows how it is up to the individual to take responsibility for his own actions and not be swayed from his conscience's pangs at wrongdoing by the attitudes of others. The vivisection performed on the American prisoner brings Toda and Suguro much pain and guilt, which Suguro acknowledges in misery and Toda tries to deny: "I have no conscience, I suppose. Not just me, though. none of them feel anything at all about what they did here." The message here may certainly be that the Japanese in general, both in the past and in the present, do not take Christianity seriously as a religious or apparitional option. Van Leeuwen agrees with this view, arguing that Japan's past persecution of Christianity was based not on religious fear but on the belief that Christianity would be used "as a 'tool' of Western imperialism." Modern Japanese
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