![]() ![]() ![]() Opening with an apparently historical and biographical explanation of the apostasy of Fr. Did Jesus speak to him from the fumie? Did he place his foot on it to save Japanese Christians or to save himself? Did he apostatize at all, or did he simply find another way of being Christian? We are never allowed to settle into certainty, partly because questions and doubts are built into the very structure of the novel. As readers, we struggle along with Rodrigues to make sense of his motivations and actions. However, Silence is a complex novel that resists straightforward readings. The Portuguese priest may not come to love his equivalent of Big Brother but, after interrogation and the threat of torture, he does submit to the intransigent political power of his day and willingly serves it. Since theodicy springs from a very modern understanding of the relationship between God and man, it makes sense to see Silence not so much as an authentically historical novel but rather as an existential or even political one, with Orwell’s Winston Smith being Rodrigues’s most significant literary antecedent. But as both Martin Scorsese (in his introduction to the most recent edition of the novel) and Francis Mathy (in his introduction to The Golden Country, a sort of theatrical prequel to the novel) point out, Endō was motivated not primarily by a desire for historical veracity, but by his own contemporary concerns. Given the nature of his mission and the era in which the book is set-the mid–seventeenth century-this understanding seems historically implausible. Tormented by the silence of God, he has a surprisingly secular understanding of the world. Almost immediately after his arrival in Japan and before his own arrest, he urges Japanese Catholics to trample on the fumie and is scathing about the promise of Paradise. Rodrigues, in particular, is plagued by a very modern form of doubt. What is most striking about Silence, when one re-reads it today, is the extent to which it is a novel of its time. A novel about doubt, the problem of evil, and the silence of God captured the Western zeitgeist perfectly. Arguably what attracted many readers in the West was the same thing that had dismayed Japanese Catholics. When Silence was translated into English, Endō won supporters outside Japan, with Graham Greene and John Updike securing the book’s wider recognition and critical acclaim. Part of the reason for these impressive sales figures was the book’s resonance among left-wing Japanese readers, who saw in the struggles of the Jesuit missionaries something akin to the situation their Marxist predecessors had faced in the 1930s. And Silencewas an undoubted success, with 750,000 copies of the 1966 hardback edition and over double that number of paperbacks sold. The Bishop of Nagasaki ordered his flock not to read the book, while Catholic critics lined up to criticize it-especially the key scene in which the Portuguese priest Rodrigues places his foot on the fumie, an engraving of the face of Christ fixed onto a wooden board, in an act of apostasy.Ī Catholic himself, Endō knew that he could not rely on the tiny Catholic community in Japan if he was to achieve publishing or critical success. The initial reaction of Japanese Catholics, however, was largely hostile. Shūsaku Endō’s Silence is now widely regarded as a modern classic. ![]()
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