Shusaku Endo was a Catholic novelist in a country where Christians are a tiny minority, and he never pretended the fit was comfortable. He described his own baptism, arranged for him as a boy by his mother and his aunt, as being dressed in Western clothes that did not suit him, and said his whole career was an attempt to remake that suit into something Japanese he could wear. Elsewhere he compared his faith to an arranged marriage he tried several times to leave, and never could. That tension is his subject in every book he wrote.
This is a guide to the Shusaku Endo books in English, organized so you can find the right one first. The Japanese authors hub covers his background and the Graham Greene comparison, and Silence has an entry on the best Japanese novels list. Endo is a writer I know from his reputation rather than from reading him, so these notes summarize what critics and translators have said.
Where to Start
Silence is the natural first book, and it’s the one most people arrive looking for. If you want something shorter and more immediately gripping, The Sea and Poison is a compact, devastating novel about wartime guilt. Deep River, his last major novel, is the best place to see where his thinking ended up.
Readers who prefer historical fiction should go to The Samurai, which many admirers rank alongside Silence.
The Outsider’s Life
Endo was born in Tokyo in 1923 and spent part of his childhood in Manchuria, in the territory Japan then controlled, which gave him his first experience of being a Japanese person somewhere Japan did not belong. His parents divorced when he was ten, and he moved with his mother to Kobe, into the household of a Catholic aunt. Under her influence he was enrolled in catechism class and baptized with, by his own account, very little preparation.
He studied at Keio University, and in the early 1950s went to the University of Lyon to study French Catholic literature, one of the first Japanese students to go abroad after the war. It was not a happy time. He was the target of racial abuse in postwar Europe, including from fellow Christians, and he contracted tuberculosis, which forced him home and eventually cost him months of isolation and crude lung surgery.
Out of that came the theology behind his fiction. Endo turned away from an image of God as power and judgment toward the figure of the Suffering Servant, a Christ acquainted with rejection and weakness, which he believed was the only version of the faith the Japanese heart would recognize. He set those reflections out directly in A Life of Jesus.
The Career in Brief
Endo won the Akutagawa Prize in 1955 for the novella White Man, and the run of major novels followed over the next three decades. He was elected to the Japan Arts Academy in 1982, received Japan’s Order of Culture, and in 1989 was given the Campion Award by the editors of the Catholic Book Club in the United States. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize several times and never won it, which is one of the standard complaints of twentieth-century literary prize-giving.
Endo was also a working man of letters: a playwright, an essayist, and an active figure in PEN, which is why literary politics turns up in his later fiction. He died on 29 September 1996. Several of his major novels have recently been reissued in the UK by Pushkin Press.
The Sea and Poison
1957 · translated by Michael Gallagher
In a Fukuoka hospital during the last months of the war, a young intern named Suguro is drawn into a series of fatal medical experiments on captured American airmen. The novel moves between the perspectives of several people involved, the intern, a nurse, a colleague, and asks why ordinary people went along with it, and what, if anything, stopped their consciences from intervening.
It is based on real events at a Kyushu university hospital. Short and relentless, it’s often read as the first full statement of Endo’s recurring question about guilt and conscience: not whether atrocity is wrong, but why the people who commit it feel so little, and whether a culture without a shared idea of sin can produce remorse at all. Suguro, the name, recurs in his fiction for decades afterward.
Wonderful Fool
1959 · translated by Francis Mathy
A gentle, awkward Frenchman named Gaston, who claims descent from Napoleon, arrives in postwar Tokyo and wanders through the city with a goodness so complete that everyone around him takes him for a fool. He is swindled, used, and dragged into the orbit of a hitman, and he keeps responding with the same undefended kindness.
It’s comic on the surface and quietly religious underneath, a portrait of a holy innocent in a cynical city, and it’s one of the lighter Shusaku Endo novels in English. Francis Mathy, a Jesuit who taught at Sophia University in Tokyo, also translated Endo’s play The Golden Country, which dramatizes the same persecutions as Silence.
Silence
1966 · translated by William Johnston
Two Portuguese Jesuit priests travel secretly to Japan in the 1630s, at the height of the persecution of Christians, to find out what became of their former teacher, who is rumored to have renounced his faith. One of them, Rodrigues, is captured and forced to face a terrible choice while God appears to remain silent.
Two accounts circulate of what set the novel off, and they may both be true: that Endo found a bronze fumie, an image of Christ worn black by the feet of people who had trodden on it, in a small museum in Nagasaki, and that a friend gave him one before his lung surgery. Either way the object is the origin, and the Silence page covers the history behind the novel in full. It won the Tanizaki Prize, caused a serious argument among Japanese Catholics, and has been filmed three times: by Masahiro Shinoda in 1971, by the Portuguese director João Mário Grilo in 1996, and by Martin Scorsese in 2016.
The Samurai
1980 · translated by Van C. Gessel
Based on a real diplomatic mission of the early seventeenth century, the novel follows a low-ranking samurai sent across the Pacific to Mexico, Spain, and Rome, accompanied by an ambitious Spanish missionary who needs the embassy to succeed for his own reasons. The samurai accepts baptism to further his mission, a transaction rather than a conversion, and returns home to a Japan that has turned violently against Christianity in his absence.
It’s the most expansive of his historical novels and the best travel narrative he wrote, moving from marshy northeastern Japan to Mexico to Europe. Readers who admire Silence often consider it its equal, and it makes the same argument from the opposite direction: not what faith costs a believer, but what it costs a man who never believed in the first place.
Scandal
1986 · translated by Van C. Gessel
An aging Catholic novelist named Suguro, a figure much like Endo himself, is confronted at an awards ceremony with rumors that he has been seen in Tokyo’s red-light districts, and he begins to suspect that a double of himself is living a secret life. The novel is set in the literary world he knew, with its prize dinners and PEN meetings, and it is candid about the indignities of an aging body.
It has divided readers, but it shows a side of Endo that the historical novels don’t: the suspicion that a lifetime of writing about sin might have been a way of keeping his own out of view.
Deep River
1993 · translated by Van C. Gessel
A group of Japanese travelers on a tour of India each come to the Ganges carrying a private grief. Isobe is looking for the reincarnation of the wife he ignored while she lived. Kiguchi is haunted by the Highway of Death in wartime Burma. Numada is recovering from a critical illness. Mitsuko, cynical and empty, is drawn back to Otsu, a failed seminarian she once ruined for sport, who now carries the dying to the river.
It was his last major novel and his most direct statement about religious belief beyond any single tradition: Otsu’s God has many faces, which is precisely what the Church he trained in cannot accept. It was adapted as a Japanese film in 1995. According to widely repeated accounts, Silence and Deep River were placed in his coffin at his request.
Kiku’s Prayer and Sachiko
translated by Van C. Gessel
Two novels set in Nagasaki that reached English relatively recently, and between them a history of the city across two catastrophes. Kiku’s Prayer follows a young woman in the 1860s who loves a man from a community of hidden Christians, during the last official persecution, as the new Meiji government tried to decide what to do about a faith it had inherited as illegal. Sachiko moves forward to the years around the Second World War, following two young Catholics whose lives are shaped by the war and by the question of whether a Christian may kill, and ends in the shadow of the atomic bombing.
Gessel has translated eight of Endo’s books, more than anyone, and these two are his late achievement: both are long, patient historical novels, and neither was available in English while Endo was alive.
A Life of Jesus
1973 · translated by Richard A. Schuchert
Endo’s own portrait of Christ, written for a Japanese readership he assumed had no Christian background at all. The Jesus he presents is powerless, ineffective by worldly measure, and present mainly as someone who accompanies the suffering, which is the theology that runs under every novel on this page.
It’s short, it’s readable, and it’s the single most useful companion to Silence for anyone who wants to know what Endo believed rather than what his characters do.
The Short Fiction and the Rest of the Shelf
For short stories, Stained Glass Elegies and The Final Martyrs collect his best, both translated by Van C. Gessel, and Five by Endo gathers five stories as a small introduction to his range. One story in Stained Glass Elegies, set amid the seventeenth-century persecutions, is a seed that grew into Silence.
The early novels Foreign Studies and The Girl I Left Behind, translated by Mark Williams, show him working out his themes, Foreign Studies drawing directly on his miserable time in Europe. In an afterword to The Girl I Left Behind, Endo himself acknowledged its immature technique. Volcano and When I Whistle round out the translated novels, and The Golden Country is his play about the persecutions.
The Full English List at a Glance
Novels: The Sea and Poison · Wonderful Fool · Volcano · The Girl I Left Behind · Foreign Studies · Silence · When I Whistle · The Samurai · Scandal · Deep River · Kiku’s Prayer · Sachiko
Stories, nonfiction and drama: Stained Glass Elegies · The Final Martyrs · Five by Endo · A Life of Jesus · The Golden Country
Suggested order: Silence, The Sea and Poison, The Samurai, Deep River, then A Life of Jesus for the argument underneath all of them.
Where to Go Next
The English novelist Endo is most often compared with has his own Graham Greene guide. For a contemporary who took on war and conscience from a very different direction, the Kenzaburo Oe guide is the place to go, while the wider canon lives on the best Japanese novels page.
