The warmth of Christ shines through in his novels, says Daniel Frampton on the Japanese author’s centenary.
“The thing we are most lacking in our modern world is love … the thing no one believes in any more; love is what everyone mockingly laughs at,” laments Fr Augustine Otsu, Shūsaku Endō’s tragic priest in Deep River (1993), Endō’s final and most exemplary novel of love. As a writer of fiction, Endō’s subject was love; and as a Japanese Catholic, he bravely bore witness to the truth of God’s love in a postwar world where any such sentiment seemed foolish. God was as silent as the firebombed suburbs of Tokyo, as hushed as the shattered ruins of Nagasaki, killed by the atomic age, the empty sockets of its buildings staring back at man without response to the atrocities of the century.
The world that Endō was born into on March 27, 1923, was not much different from our own one hundred years later: a world of suffering. This dreadful reality was very soon to be made clear to the young author whose fiction would be profoundly affected by war, sickness and ultimately, the human condition.
One of Endō’s first novels, The Sea and Poison (1957), is an account of the final days of World War Two, when Japanese doctors subjected American airmen to vivisections – a crime against humanity if ever there was one, though God had remained silent. Endō was later diagnosed with tuberculosis, the same untreatable disease that was used as a cover for the crimes committed against the downed airmen.
The sufferings of man and the silence of God were what Endō’s novels tried to reconcile, most notably in Silence (1966), which was later adapted into the 2016 film by Martin Scorsese. The novel also underscored Endō’s peculiar Japanese ambivalence towards Catholicism, the faith into which he was baptised in 1934 at the encouragement of his mother. Ironically, too, it was Endō’s notion of the merciful mother that was to underscore his remonstration with the seemingly uncaring, punitive father of the Old Testament – the type of father-figure that Japan had seen enough of.
Accordingly, Endō went to great lengths to endear Christ to his fellow countrymen. Writing in the English preface to his 1973 biography, The Life of Jesus, he explained to his Western readers that “the Japanese tend to seek in their gods and buddhas a warm-hearted mother rather than a stern father”. It was because of this, Endō said, that he had given up “the God in the father-image that tends to characterise Christianity” in favour of “the kind-hearted maternal aspect of God revealed to us in the personality of Jesus”.
In his novels, too, Endō endowed his Christ-like protagonists with the same motherly mercy, not the fatherly harshness and even fury that the Japanese had experienced from on high, that century. Ultimately, Japan would be much more “responsive to one who ‘suffers with us’ and who ‘allows for our weakness’”, Endō believed. As one of his fictional saints, Otsu, explains in Deep River: “The one thing I was able to believe in was a mother’s warmth … the warmth that kept her from abandoning me.”
In the end, it was Otsu’s mother who taught him that God “was a vastly more powerful accumulation of this warmth – in other words, love itself”.
Many of Endō’s characters, especially his male protagonists like Otsu, fail to become Catholic priests, or appear to betray their calling, as happens in Silence when Father Rodrigues steps on a likeness of Christ, the fumi-e, to save his fellow Catholics from further suffering. And it is no coincidence that Gaston, Endō’s unmanly simpleton in Wonderful Fool (1959), desires only “to take upon his back” the “sorrow of people”, anticipating Endō’s later characterisation of Jesus as “the kind of mother who could share their wretched suffering and weep together with them”.
Gaston, we later find out, wanted to become a priest in France but was rejected three times – reflecting Endō’s anx-iety as a Catholic, I think, caught between East and West.
Endō was certainly not against the Church or priests. He was a Catholic to the end. Yet such Catholic characters as Augustine Otsu, as the name implies, are culturally conflicted. “An Asian like me just can’t make sharp distinctions and pass judgment on everything the way they do,” complains the pantheistic Otsu, who believes that there is something his Catholic teachers, again in France, “have lost sight of with their excessive clarity and their overabundance of logic”.
As a Catholic novelist, Endō instinctively pushed back against centuries of relentless theologising in which the mercy of God had been lost, but which Endō’s fiction sought to reclaim. In this sense, there was some common ground for Endō, even in France, influenced by the Catholic literary tradition there that, as the Catholic writer François Mauriac stated, “would finally get back to the human – that is, the dangerous element in man”, however saintly he might be.
Then there was Graham Greene, the English Catholic author, hailed by Endō as “one of the finest living novelists”. Endō was said to re-read Greene’s The End of the Affair before setting out to write a new novel. And one can understand why Greene’s novels about “the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God” appealed to Endō. While the Japanese novelist might not have been a contented Catholic, he was comfortable in the company of his fellow Catholic novelists.
Endō, because he was a novelist, had the flexibility to explore, if not actually contradict, Catholic teaching. He dared to hope and advocate for a literature of mercy that was open to all – like his “great mother Ganges” in Deep River, “accepting all, rejecting neither the ugliest of men nor the filthiest”. As Endō writes towards the end of this great novel:
“What I can believe in now is the sight of all these people, each carrying his or her own burdens, praying at this deep river … I believe that the river embraces these people and carries them away. A river of humanity. The sorrows of this deep river of humanity. And I am a part of it.”
Throughout his writing career, Endō bore witness to the love of God, made manifest in his characters and their personal dramas, each embracing their own cross. In the case of Otsu, his rejection by his fellow Catholics at a seminary in Lyon leads him to his ministry in India, his own Golgotha on the Ganges. Here he carries the discarded corpses of the outcast caste, the “children of God”, to the cremation grounds to be turned into ash and cast into the river.
“This person I’m handing over to you,” Otsu pleads to God, “please accept and enfold him in your arms.” And one wonders if Endō also meant this prayer to apply to everyone, including the Japanese and Jews turned to ash in Nagasaki and Auschwitz. In fact, I’m sure he did.
While Silence is Endō’s most highly regarded novel, Deep River, in my view, bears all the essentials of Endō, underscoring all the themes, characters and symbols that defined his preceding works, in which the spirit of Christ was reborn in every individual, irrespective of their religion. In the age of the atomic bomb, while God might seemingly have been atomised and blown across every border of the globe, he was still there, in each atom, and was being reborn every single day in the lives of all the peoples of the world. That was Endō’s vision.
Ultimately, Endō believed that Catholicism’s great strength was its catholicity, the all-embracing love that his fiction bore witness to in Deep River, especially through Otsu:
“As a Japanese, I believe that Christianity has been able to spread as widely as it has because so many diverse elements exist within it … Real dialogue takes place when you believe that God has many faces, and that he exists in all religions…
“He is everywhere.”
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