Christianity and Literature

Vol. 48, No.2 (Winter 1999)

Hearing God in Silence:

The Fiction of Endo Shusaku

Van C. Gessel

In the last four or five years of his life, it appears that Endo
Shusaku grew increasingly frustrated with the chronic misreading
of his most famous novel, Chimmoku (Silence). Despite the book's
best-seller status and the mountains of praise heaped upon it both
in Japan and in the West, Endo went out of his way to try to correct
what he saw as serious misapprehensions about the novel's funda-
mental meaning.
Endo's concerns about the reception of Silence date back to the
time of the novel's initial publication in 1966. In an interview with
me that appeared in 1994, Endo acknowledged that it was not the
comparatively tiny Christian population of readers in Japan who
turned the book into a best seller, but rather "frustrated left-wing
students" who saw in the story of Rodrigues' struggles a metaphor
for the Japanese Marxists of the 1930s who were tortured by the
Japanese authorities for their political views and forced to commit
tenko-an ideological "about-face" that is sometimes described
euphemistically as an "intellectual conversion" (98).1 A few Catho-
lic priests in Japan, irritated by what they considered Endo's degra-
dation of the martyrs and exaltation of the apostates, enjoined their
parishes against reading the novel; consequently, even among Iapa-
nese Christians it was predominantly those belonging to Protestant
sects who read and admired Silence.
Like the bird set free to soar, however, a novel sprouts its own
wings and leaves the cage ofits author's control once it has appeared
in print, and though Endo was, no doubt, simultaneously baffled
and bemused by the make-up of the audience for Silence, he must
have been pleased that the novel stimulated so much attention and
discussion. It was not, in fact, the composition ofhis readership that
continued to bewilder Endo for the next quarter of a century.
Rather, it was the way in which readers and critics from many dif-
ferent cultures assumed that the title ofthe book was a telegraphic

149

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150 VAN C. GESSEL

representation of the novel's theme. Quite simply put, the standard

reading of the book is that it is about "the silence of God." Con-
fronted by that interpretation, Endo at times must have wished he
had given the book the title he originally intended for it, opaque
though it may have been: Mahiru no nioi (The Scent ofMidday).2 For,
despite the many means by which God speaks to man throughout the
corpus of Endo's works, the common conclusion is that the novel is
a suffering human's agonized cry of recognition that God has re-
mained silent through his trials.
It is not difficult to imagine why such an interpretation of Silence
would quickly attain the status of established fact in a country
whose literary and religious traditions are not packed with tales of
dialogic communication between man and god. Nature as the re-
pository of a higher essence has repeatedly, almost incessantly, been
apostrophized in japanese verse; japanese poets regularly turn their
gaze toward natural phenomena that might mirror the subtle swings
oftheir private emotions. But one has to look long and hard through
the literature to locate tales in any form that anthropomorphize
deity or suggest verbal interchange between man and a celestial
authority figure. Perhaps it would have been more astonishing if, in
fact, japanese readers had blithely assumed that God speaks to
Rodrigues in the novel.
Western interpreters of the novel have scarcely done better. Endo
has remarked:

The most frequent question I am asked by foreign journalists is,

"Why do you call Japan a 'mudswamp'?" It's always "mudswamp,
mudswamp." That's actually a term used by one of the characters
in the novel, not by me. The next most frequently asked question
is, "What do you mean by having God remain silent?" The title, af-
ter all, is Silence. They don't understand, even when I tell them that
I wasn't writing that God was "silent;' but that there was a "voice in
the silence." ("Sekai" 99)

In a 1992 video, one produced with his cooperation and approval,

Endo has also said:

Because I titled the novel Silence, both readers and critics in japan
have gotten the mistaken impression that I was writing about God's
silence. And though I've written that, no, God does speak, there are
still many people who misread the novel as treating the silence of
God. As a result, they overlook the portion of the novel where God
does speak, the part that is most significant to me. . .. What I ulti-
mately wanted to write was that within the silence there comes a
voice ... that a voice emerges through the silence. (Haha naru
mono)

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 HEARING GOD IN SILENCE 151

The voice in the silence is as apt a metaphor as I know for one of the
most profound thematic strains running through all of Endo's writ-
ing. I would argue, in fact, that much of Endo's literary focus from
the early 1960s through the end of his career may be found in depic-
tions of the various means through which God attempts to commu-
nicate His will to humankind. The first traces of this motif may be
found in the short stories he produced between 1963 and 1965, to
be collected in that latter year under the title Aika (Elegies).
These stories were written in the aftermath of the serious pulmo-
nary illness that robbed Endo of nearly three years of health and
productivity and that culminated in the removal of one lung after
three critical surgeries. The critic Saeki Shoichi, noting the change
that came into Endo's fiction after his recovery from the long ordeal
of illness, wrote that Endo "had clearly matured as a writer after his
two and a half years in the hospital:' Saeki pointed out that Endo's
stories had started to be populated by creatures such as mongrel
dogs and myna birds whose "mournful eyes" were metaphorical rep-
resentations ofthe eyes of Christ that looked on with sorrow as hu-
man beings treated one another with less than human compassion.
One could argue that Endo's earlier works-novels such as The
Sea and Poison and Volcano, for instance-suggest the possibility
that God attempts to get through to individuals in need ofguidance.
In The Sea and Poison, for example, although the young doctor
Suguro participates in the vivisection of a captured American pilot,
he seems to feel pangs of conscience for what he has done, though
he lacks the ability to describe the source of his uneasiness:

Suguro was silent. Finally as though to himself, he spoke in a still

feebler voice. "Toda, you're strong. As for me ... I shut my eyes
today in there. I don't know what to think, even now. I just don't
know .
"Still some day, we're going to have to answer for it." (166)

Suguro is a fairly typical Endo character (so typical, in fact, that

several characters in different stories and novels bear the same
name) in that he hears the faint groanings of a voice deep inside
himselfbut cannot decipher either the critical message or its source.
In that sense Suguro is not unlike Rodrigues at the point in Si-
lence where, incarcerated by the authorities, he demands that the
guards who snore insensitively be awakened and reprimanded:

... that on this, the most important night ofhis whole life, he should
be disturbed by such a vile and discordant noise-this realization
suddenly filled him with rage. He felt that his life was simply being
trifled with; and when the groaning ceased for a moment, he began
to beat on the wall. But the guards, like those disciples who in

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152 VAN C. GESSEL

Gethsemane slept in utter indifference to the torment ofthat man,

did not get up. Again he began to beat wildly on the wall. (250)

The problem at this point with Rodrigues, as with so many Endo

characters, is that the voice of his own ego is screeching so loudly
in his ears that he cannot discern the whisperings ofthe still, small
voice trying to inform him of the hazards of his own self-absorption.
Endo's writings prior to his hospitalization would characteristically
have ended with characters thus trapped within the cells of their
own selfishness. The enraged Rodrigues has not yet been sufficiently
humbled by his trials to be inwardly quiet, thereby allowing the voice
of God to speak to him through the silence. As his faith has been
tested by his experiences in Japan, he has tried to steady his inner
ark by shouting within his own head the rightness of his mission, of
his self-portrait. Unfortunately, all that self-directed hollering has
deafened him to the cries of others, which are, ultimately, the ech-
oes of God's own voice.
Rodrigues at this stage of his spiritual tutorial is not unlike Egi,
the protagonist in Endo's short story "Iya na yatsu" ("Despicable
Bastard;' 1959). 3 Egi is a college student who is persuaded to join a
community service project at a leper hospital near the base of Mount
Fuji. When the students come up with the idea of playing a game of
baseball with the lepers, Egi, who has a mortal dread of contamina-
tion, ends up trapped between bases, with two lepers trying to chase
down and tag him. As Endo describes the scene, Egi's fear and in-
stinct toward self-preservation overpower the voice of his con-
science:

The first baseman threw the ball to the second baseman. When
he got a close-up view ofthe second baseman's receding hairline and
gnarled lips, Egi's body was no longer willing to respond to the
promptings of his conscience. He stopped, hoping to be able to
dodge his opponent, and looked nervously at the approaching pa-
tient.
In the patient's eyes Egi saw a plaintive flicker, like the look in
the eyes of an abused animal.
"Go ahead. I won't touch you," the patient said softly.
Egi felt like crying when he was finally by himself. He stared
vacantly at the infirmary, which now looked somehow like a live-
stock shed, and at the silver fields beneath the overcast sky. And he
thought, "Thanks to my fear of physical pain, I'll probably go on
betraying my own soul, betraying love, betraying others. I'm a good-
for-nothing, a wretch ... a base, cowardly, vile, despicable bastard."
(Stained Glass Elegies 41-42)4

Even in this early story the critical motif of the "body ... no longer
willing to respond to the promptings of ... conscience" foreshadows

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 HEARING GOD IN SILENCE 153

the kinds of torments that most later Endo characters have to en-
dure. Egi responds in a predictably human fashion, thinking of his
own safety and convenience and stifling the messages sent from his
conscience. Yet he does berate himself after the fact, but only in the
negative sense, persuading himself that because he is no good the
pattern he has set for betraying his own soul, love, and others will
continue for the remainder of his life. There are no indications at
this stage in Endo's writing that any providential changes will
emerge from such an incident; the experiences through which his
early characters pass are not instructive or epiphanic for them but
merely fill them with remorse and guilt. The voice of God, attempt-
ing to communicate through the channel of conscience, has not yet
begun to speak in discernible sentences that will teach or transform,
comfort or cajole.
It is, consequently, a long and torturous road that leads from the
muted voice ofconscience in Endo's early stories to the soft but pow-
erful voice of Christ in which the Word becomes audible in Silence.
But, like the Stations of the Cross, there are signposts along that
pathway suggesting in subtle and moving ways that Endo is gradu-
ally moving his characters away from their own egotistical noise and
toward an inner silence through which the voice of God can be
heard. The stories in the Aika collection, leading as they do to the
ultimate message relayed by deity to an agonized Rodrigues in Si-
lence, present much clearer examples of the ways in which these
communications are transmitted.
The stories that Endo wrote in the four years preceding the pub-
lication of Silence are, as the author himself has suggested, a kind
of dessin, an artistic draft sketch of the motifs and characters he
would draw in greater detail in his subsequent novels. Each ofthese
stories seems to be written to suggest the various ways in which God
attempts to communicate with His creations. The sense is that the
message is conveyed clearly but that the listening device-com-
monly an individual whose eyes and ears are congested through
sin-is receiving only static.
In "Yonjussai no otoko" ("A Forty-Year-Old Man;' 1964), for in-
stance, a man with a sinful secret in his past-an affair with his wife's
cousin-is preparing for a second lung surgery that may prove fa-
tal. He had been to visit his priest and attempted to confess his act
of immorality, but he could not bring himself to describe his deed.
His inability to be honest with God means that the words of absolu-
tion spoken to him fall empty on his ears:

"Recite the Hail Mary three times. Do you understand? He died

for the sins of us all. ..." When he had delivered this simple admo-
nition and prescribed the simple penance in an almost mechanical

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154 VAN C. GESSEL

tone, the priest again lifted his hand and chanted a Latin prayer.
"Now ... go in peace."
Suguro got up and walked to the door of the tiny chamber. How
can they claim that a person's sins areforgiven through such a per-
functory ceremony? He could still hear the priest saying, "He died
for the sins of us all. ..." (Stained Glass Elegies 16)5

God, it would seem, is unable to get through to those entrapped by

self-deceit and hypocrisy. But the God in Endo's stories does seem
determined. The more intractable the individual involved, the more
insistent God must become to pass along a message. When a priest
will not suffice, even a myna bird will do.
In ''A Forty-Year-Old Man" the bird, purchased for the hospital-
ized Suguro by his wife as a companion in his agony, remains mute,
unlike the bird in a contemporaneous story, "Otoko to kyukancho"
("Man and Myna:' 1963), that keeps calling its owner a manuke, a
"dolt." Endo makes explicit the connection between the ineffectual
priest and the uncommunicative bird: "The metal birdcage re-
minded Suguro of the confessional. A gridwork partition just like
this had separated him from the foreign priest. In the end he had
not confessed what he had done. He had been unable to speak the
words" (Stained Glass Elegies 16). Like Suguro, the bird too refuses
to speak when prompted by its owner. Just as God will not vocalize
disappointment with Suguro's act of adultery, He seems to wish for
Suguro to figure out the problem on his own. All God will do is to
use the myna as a proxy:

As the age offorty crept up on him, Suguro began to derive plea-

sure from studying the eyes of dogs and birds. Viewed from one
angle, those eyes seemed cold and inhuman; yet from another per-
spective they appeared to brim with sorrow. He had once raised a
pair offinches, but one of them had died. He had held the tiny bird
in the palm ofhis hand before it expired. Once or twice it struggled
to open its eyes, as though in final desperate defiance of the white
membrane of death that was gradually stealing across its pupils.
He came to be aware of eyes filled with a similar sorrow observ-
ing his own life. Suguro felt particularly that those eyes had been
fixed on him since the events ofa day many years past. The eyes were
riveted on him, as iftheywere trying to tell him something. (Stained
Glass Elegies 13-14)

The myna becomes a proxy for God in more ways than simply as a
reminder of Suguro's past sin. In a metaphor that is likely too obvi-
ous for Western readers but useful for a non-Christian Japanese
reading audience, Endo has the myna die from exposure while
Suguro is on the operating table. While he is in recovery, Suguro's
wife remarks to him, "I feel as though it took your place:' The empty

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 HEARING GOD IN SILENCE 155

cage of the bird, with its perches stained with droppings and its
water trough dry and brown, still smells of the bird, but "the smell
ofSuguro's own life was also a part of it" (Stained Glass Elegies 27).
Each ofthese images seems designed to convey something unique
in modern japanese fiction, something that may be Endo's most sig-
nificant contribution to his nation's literary heritage. One can look
long and hard and still fail to locate another japanese author who
so assiduously intimates that human actions of every stripe are ob-
served from an outside perspective-that there is, in fact, an eye
(and perhaps, even, a voice) of omniscience that stands apart from
the narrow self-centered, autobiographical voice ofboth traditional
and modern japanese narrative. In both the structures ofhis works,
which frequently alternate between points of view, and this exalted
perspective, often embodied in a subhuman figure such as a bird or
dog, Endo hints at the existence of a personage who observes every
human act with a unique blend of sorrow and compassion. The sor-
row precedes the compassion, and is often muted in these earlier
stories, but the compassion is most certainly there.
The final and, in some ways, most compelling image that Endo
uses in ''A Forty-Year-Old Man" to convey the sense that God is try-
ing to break through the mortal silence and provide an overlay of
moral interpretation to human acts is the image of "scars." The
metaphor itself is an appropriate one for Endo, since so many of his
stories are set in hospitals and involve violations of the body, inju-
ries and illnesses themselves being a kind of symbol for sin. But the
scars to which Endo refers in this and later stories are the wounds
that individuals leave through their actions on the bodies and souls
of others.
just before he goes in for a surgery that he is not persuaded he will
survive, Suguro thinks to himself:

I don't want to die. I don't want to die! No matter how painful

this third operation is, I don't want to die yet. I still don't know what
life means, what it is to be a human being. I'm idle and I'm lazy, and
I go on deceiving myself. But, if nothing else, I have finally learned
that when one person comes in contact with another, it is no simple
encounter-there is always some sort of scar left behind. . .. I
couldn't help what happened between Yasuko and me .... But as a
result, one ripple has expanded into two, and two ripples have
grown into three. Everyone is covering up for everyone else....
One ripple expands into two, then three. It was he who had first
cast the stone, he who had created the first ripple. And if he died
during this next operation, the ripples would likely spread out fur-
ther and further. The actions of a human being are never self-con-
tained. (Stained Glass Elegies 22-23)

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156 VAN C. GESSEL

This sense that the cosmos is disturbed, the natural order violated,
through the sins of one individual against another is a powerful and
original one for Japanese literature. I would venture again to pro-
pose that Endo uses these scars (and ripples) as teaching tools-or,
more accurately, that in Endo's literary view God employs these
wounds as teaching tools, as modes ofcommunication. Suguro cer-
tainly seems to have learned something from them, for he is able to
discern that "the actions ofa human being are never self-contained"
but flow out like ripples on a lake into which he has hurled a stone.
The layers ofimagery are complex here, but I think all are designed
to convey the impression that Somebody actually cares about what
people do to one another and is trying to pass that word along.
The scars, of course, playa critical role in Endo's best "entertain-
ment" novel from this same period, Watashi ga suteta onna (The Girl
I Left Behind, 1963). There Endo takes us back among the lepers and
introduces us to an innocent young woman named Mitsu who is
manipulated and sexually used by an unprincipled, ambitious young
man. The outward manifestation of her inner pain is the brownish
marks on her wrists that are initially misdiagnosed as leprosy. Mitsu
takes those marks as a message from God that she needs to devote
her life to others; her purity and selflessness make it possible for her
actually to hear the voice of God urging her to do so. Though the
young man is not sensitive enough to derive an audible message
from those marks, he does learn something from them:

... why did I feel so lonely? If Mitsu had taught me anything at all,
it was that every single person with whom we cross paths during our
journey through life leaves an indelible mark on us. So does loneli-
ness stem from such marks? Furthermore, if ... God ... truly ex-
ists, does He speak to us through these marks? But still I have to ask,
what was the source of my loneliness? (192)

The message that Endo hoped to convey even in this "entertain-

ment" novel is clearly religious, as evidenced by the fact that he re-
garded the young woman as a Christ figure and, as indicated in the
afterword to the novel, the title as an allusion to "The Jesus I Left
Behind" (195).
The stories in the Aika collection, seen from this angle, come to
seem like a catalog of attempts by God to ring up His children; of-
ten, however, the line is busy or left unanswered, and He has to leave
a message in some form. It is the varied forms ofthose messages that
give depth and meaning to each story. In "Watashi no mono" ("My
Belongings," 1964), for example, some familiar images are superim-
posed:

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 HEARING GOD IN SILENCE 157

Suguro hugged his knees. I'll never leave this wife and child of
mine, he thought. His own parents had grown to hate each other
and were divorced; but in all likelihood he would spend his entire
life beside this woman with the fat body and the exhausted face. He
had this feeling primarily because her look ofweariness sometimes
overlapped in his mind with the face of"that Man." I suppose I will
never abandon Him, either. Just as I will not desert my wife, I will
not desert that Man, whose eyes have a look as sorrowful as those
of the dog that peered into the forest [at a man who had hanged
himself there] ....
. . . Just as I will never leave my wife, I will never abandon you. I
have tormented you the same way I have tormented my wife. I'm not
at all sure that I will not go on abusing you as I do her. But I will
never cast you off utterly. (Stained Glass Elegies 44, 55)

Endo also wrote several stories touching on the life of Father

Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest who labored in Nagasaki in the
early 1930s and then offered his own life in place of a Jewish pris-
oner at Auschwitz and was starved to death by the Nazis." The ear-
liest of these, "Fuda-no-Tsuji," contrasts the impressions some Iapa-
nese had of Kolbe-that he was scrawny and comical and rodent-
like (they called him "Mouse")-with the act of Christ-like love that
he displayed in the death camp. The Japanese narrator ofthe story,
visiting the spot whereJapanese Christians had been martyred in the
early seventeenth century, ponders the remarkable story he has
heard of Mouse's compassion:

[Y]ears before he had seen newsreel photos of a concentration

camp. It had seemed much like the Kodenma-cho prison where the
Christians had been incarcerated. The realization that Mouse had
been in such a place filled the man with wonderment. And if, in fact,
Mouse had died for a friend-for love-then that was not a tale
from the long-gone days of the Edo period, but an incident that
commanded a place in the man's own heart. Who or what had ef-
fected such a change in Mouse? Who or what had carried Mouse to
such a distant point? The man shook his head and looked across
at the sleeping girl and the young man hunched over his gambling
sheets. Somewhere in this crowd-yes, somewhere in this crowd,
he thought, sitting with his Harold Lloyd face, his mud-splattered
knees quivering, was Mouse. (Stained Glass Elegies 68-69)

Here, Endo suggests, God uses the lives of others, and particularly
the transformations wrought on their souls and their acts by an in-
fusion of charity, as a prompt for questions such as the ones this
narrator asks himself: "Who or what had effected such a change in
Mouse?" There is clearly an expectation that this question needs to
be answered before the narrator can locate yet another "Mouse" in

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158 VAN C. GESSEL

the crowd surrounding him-or perhaps even in his own mirror.

There are numerous other examples from the Aika collection that
underscore the point I am making here." In "Sono zenjitsu" ("The
Day Before") it is, of all things, a collection ofpornographic pictures
that a pedlar brings to the protagonist's hospital room the night
before his surgery that prompts him to ponder human frailty and the
ways in which God manifests His will even through those weak-
nesses. The same story also introduces thejUmie, which for Endo
was a potent reminder, with the grimy stains from the soles ofapos-
tate feet obliterating the face of Christ in the copper plate, of human
fallibility, along with his earnest hope that God would forgive those
who succumbed from fear of torture. And in "Unzen" we get our first
glimpse of Kichijiro, the weakling who will figure so prominently in
Silence. Kichijiro, like the novel itself, is complex and much misun-
derstood. It is easy to dismiss him as the typical Judas figure, repeat-
edly betraying Rodrigues because of his fear of torture. But Endo
finds great significance in the fact that Kichijiro, despite his spine-
less acts of apostasy, will never abandon Rodrigues, just as the au-
thor in "My Belongings" will never abandon his wife or "that Man:'
Kichijiro tramples time and again on the fumie, but he always re-
turns to be with Rodrigues in order to share his suffering. In a dra-
matic and moving attempt to correct misapprehensions about the
role that Kichijiro plays in his fiction, Endo in one instance even
asserted in a public address: "Kichijiro is me,""
Similar images are to be found in the moving "Haha naru mono"
("Mothers"), which focuses on the "hidden" (kakure) Christians of
Kyushu and their prayers for forgiveness to

[a] drawing ofthe Holy Mother cradling the Christ child-no, it was
a picture of a farm woman holding a nursing baby.... These people
had joined their gnarled hands together and offered up supplica-
tions for forgiveness to this portrait of a mother. Within me there
welled up the feeling that their intent had been identical to mine.
Many long years ago, missionaries had crossed the seas to bring the
teachings of God the Father to this land. But when the missionar-
ies had been expelled and the churches demolished, the Japanese
kakure, over the space of many years, stripped away all those parts
of the religion that they could not embrace, and the teachings of
God the Father were gradually replaced by a yearning after a
Mother-a yearning which lies at the very heart ofJapanese reli-
gion. I thought of my own mother. She stood again at my side, an
ashen-coloured shadow. She was not playing the violin or clutch-
ing her rosary now. Her hands were joined together in front of her,
and she stood gazing at me with a touch of sorrow in her eyes.
(Stained Glass Elegies 134-35)

I know of no more concise and moving explanation of the personal

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 HEARING GOD IN SILENCE 159

and literary processes that led Endo himself to create and put his
faith in an image of a forgiving Christ that combines elements from
native Japanese religion as well as his feelings for his own mother.
Once Endo completed the maternalization of God in his literary
cosmos, he opened up the possibility for the final act of communi-
cation, for God in his creative conception no longer sits on the pa-
ternal seat of judgment but stands alongside his suffering, weak
characters as a compassionate mother who wishes to convey her love
and support for them even as they disappoint her through their fail-
ings. The transformation goes both ways: God has to be softened
so that His shouts do not puncture the fragile eardrums of His chil-
dren, but man has to be stripped of egotistical self-justification be-
fore the muffled voice of the maternal Christ can become audible.
It is not really until Silence that a character-in this case, Rod-
rigues-is sufficiently humbled, his pride sufficiently broken down
by his trials, to stop squawking away about his own needs and sim-
ply listen. When he is finally reduced to silence himself, it is then
that God speaks in very clear, communicative terms, and Rodrigues
realizes that, as Endo has remarked, "The face on thefumie spoke
and said, 'Because of what I am, it's all right for you to trample,"?'
It is noteworthy that the original Japanese in the fumie scene in
Silence conveys a somewhat different impression than the published
translation in English;" The English version reads: "How his foot
aches! And then the Christ in the bronze speaks to the priest:
'Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of 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" (259).
The use of the imperative here suggests, and in a powerful manner,
that Christ has to shout even now to get Rodrigues' attention; that,
perhaps, even at the peak of his agony, his focus is upon his own
torment and the consequences that his outward act of apostasy will
have on his standing in the Church as a priest. I do not want to sug-
gest here that Rodrigues has utterly forgotten himself or is oblivi-
ous to the position in which he places himself with the Catholic hi-
erarchy by trampling on the image of Christ.
I cannot help wondering, however, whether the voice of Christ in
this passage is really a command from the heavens. If I am correct
in arguing, as I have elsewhere, II that in Silence the passion of
Rodrigues consists in a progressive smoothing down of the sharp
corners of his selfish ego and his overly confident Eurocentrism,
then I think that the man who stands with his foot poised to grind
into the face of "the most beautiful thing in his life, ... what he has
believed most pure, ... what is filled with the ideals and the dreams
of man" (259), has himself been "silenced"; that it is no longer the
voice of his own desires and aspirations and ambitions that he hears

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160 VAN C. GESSEL

with such impassioned exclusivity; that his torture by the Japanese

authorities, culminating in his realization that others are suffering
because of his stubborn willfulness, has finally been of sufficient
intensity to convince him that he has been wrong in caring first and
foremost about himself. What I am arguing, then, is that it is not
God who is "silent" in this novel. Rather, it is Rodrigues who is re-
duced to "silence" and taught, thanks to his tribulations, that the
way to emulate Christ is not to shout His words to others but to qui-
etly perform His acts of compassion for others, forgetting self and
its incessant, high-decibel demands. Ferreira's seeming taunt to
Rodrigues thus takes on a much more serious, spiritual dimension:
"'If Christ were here... .' For a moment Ferreira remained silent;
then he suddenly broke out in a strong voice: 'Certainly Christ would
have apostatized for them. . .. Christ would certainly have aposta-
tized to help men.... For love Christ would have apostatized. Even
ifit meant giving up everything he had'" (256-57).
What, then, of the voice of Christ that seems to encourage Rod-
rigues into the same act? Is it a shouted command, an enthusias-
tic, liberating encouragement of apostasy? My response to those
questions is admittedly colored by the argument, which I and oth-
ers have made, that in Silence and subsequent works Endo has cre-
ated what is essentially a "rnaternalized," forgiving Christ who looks
upon the sins of mankind with compassion-filled eyes. Influenced
to a large extent by Endo's feelings toward the mother who brought
him, all unwitting, into the Church, that uniquely personal and com-
passionate maternal Christ does not strike me as the type who would
resort to the imperative. Nor do I believe that Rodrigues needs that
kind offorceful direction from a God he now understands in a very
different way.
In Endo's original text the words spoken by the Christ in the fumie
read as follows: "Sono toki ,fumu ga ii to doban no ano hito wa shisai
ni mukatte itta. Fumu ga ii, Omae no ashi no itasa 0 kono watashi
ga ichiban yoku shitte iru, Fumu ga ii, Watashi wa omaetachi ni
fumareru tame, kono yo ni umare, omaetachi no itasa 0 wakatsu
tame jujika 0 seotta no da" (Chimmoku 200; my emphasis). Rather
than undertake a literal translation of this entire passage, I want to
concentrate on the thrice-repeated phrase ''fumu ga ii:' which WiI-
liamJohnston translates as simply "Trample!"
Fumu is the root verb, meaning "to step on" or "to trample." The
intriguing part of this phrase, described unequivocally as the phrase
spoken by the voice of "that man in the copper plate:' is the ''ga ii"
segment. This can scarcely be described as an imperative; it is
rather a granting ofpermission. Typical translations ofphrases con-
taining "ga ii" include "it is good to rv"; "it is proper/right to rv"; "it
is okay to rv"; "it is better to rv"; "you may rv"; "it's all right to rv"; "I

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 HEARING GOD IN SILENCE 161

don't mind ifyou ","; "It doesn't matter ifyou "," and so forth. I:! These
usages all clearly suggest the granting of permission-not in a be-
grudging, dismissive manner but in a tone that seems almost to
encourage the act. In fact, one additional usage ofthe term (related
to the meaning of "it is better to ",") connotes that Rodrigues, by
trampling on the image, will actually be "choosing the better part"-
performing an act that is not sullied by self-interest but rather aimed
at relieving the torments of others, even at the sacrifice of his own
stature and calling. Endo seems to be suggesting here that
Rodrigues' choice is a type ofChrist's admonition to "lose" one's life
in order to "find" it.
The voice from the fumie, therefore, is not an impatient voice
echoing from the summit of Sinai; instead, it is a voice filled with
compassion and offering forgiveness-a voice that can almost be
interpreted as encouraging Rodrigues to set his foot upon the cop-
per plate so that the agony of others may be ended, and thereby his
own as well. The voice is, then, a maternal one, not the stern voice
of a judgmental Father but the merciful, accepting whisper of a de-
ity willing to forgive. 13
It is true that Rodrigues loses his standing in the Church, but
Endo makes it clear in the final section of the novel that Rodrigues
continues to stand up for Christ after his public apostasy." "Stand
up," yes, but he continues to fall and then rise to his feet again, a
process that to Endo is the essence of human frailty: always betray-
ing what we believe in but always striving to do better next time. In
Endo's own words,

In the final section is the "Diary of an Officer at the Christian Resi-

dence," in which the character Sawano Chuan [Ferreira] forces
Rodrigues to write a document.... This document is an oath, which
means that Rodrigues had once again professed to be a Christian,
and therefore was again subjected to torture, after which he wrote
an oath disavowing Christianity. That's what I was trying to hint at.
Over and over again he fell [korobu =to apostatize] and then stood
up again, fell and stood up. That's what faith is, I think: to keep
repeating various mistakes. And since Kichijiro is working in the
same prison as a lackey, his fate is just the same.... Depending on
whether the reader grasps the significance ofthat written oath, he
or she will understand that the meaning ofthe novel is not "silence;'
but "the voice in the silence." ("Sekai" 99-100)

The careful reader of En do Shusaku's fiction will, I am persuaded,

find therein sufficient evidence that the author's lifelong project was
not to demonstrate the inability or unwillingness of God to commu-
nicate with His creations; rather, his focus was on the repeated and
varied attempts God makes to transmit His will by breaking down

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162 VAN C. GESSEL

the walls that human beings create through their own selfish and
willful attitudes and behaviors. The message that finally emerges in
and through the silence is a simple one: stop hurting one another;
bind one another's wounds. It all reaches culmination in Endo's fi-
nal and, in some ways, most compelling literary image in Deep River:
the forlorn but determined outcast priest Otsu, dressed in the robes
of a Hindi monk and carrying the bodies of the dying to their final
resting place in the Ganges. God no longer needs to speak to Otsu.
He has already gotten the message.

Brigham Young University

NOTES

II confess that I think Endo brought some ofthis on himself. The word
that he chose to use in the novel for "apostatize"-korobu-is related to
tenko, representing the "about-" portion of the "about-face" phrase, no
doubt calling to mind the sufferings of the persecuted Marxists of the
1930s.
2There is some confusion about Endo's initial working title. In the video
Haha naru mono: Ningen no dohansha (Mothers: Companions to Mankind)
produced with Endo's cooperation in 1992, the narrator says that the origi-
nal title was Hinata no nioi (The Scent ofa Sunlit Place) and that through
such a title the author "wanted to describe the loneliness of an individual
who has lost everything important in his life, that aroma ofloneliness that
suddenly wafts by, like the scent that emanates from a spot illuminated by
the sun:' However, Endo's widow, in a recently published memoir titled Otto
no shukudai (Homeworkfrom My Husband), writes that his original title
was Mahiru no nioi. The distinction is perhaps inconsequential, but one
can only speculate on how the novel might have been interpreted by read-
ers had it been given one ofthese two titles instead of Silence.
3 Although this story was written in 1959 and published in a collection
preceding Aika, I included it in Stained Glass Elegies, my anthology of
Endo's short stories.
4ft is perhaps worth noting that Egi's experience is modeled after Endo's
own. As he notes in his afterword to the English translation of The Girll
Left Behind, "... there was a leprosarium run by the Catholic mission at the
foot of Mount Fuji which, as students, my friends and I often visited as
volunteers. In addition to organizing games of baseball, we devised our
own feeble shows by way of entertainment for the patients" (I95).
51 should note that the name of the protagonist in Endo's original story
is "Nose;' which could only have created a comic impression in roman-
ization. With Endo's permission I changed the name in translation to the
oft-used "Suguro."
'Kolbe is also the key figure in the 1979 story "Warushawa no Nipponjin"
("Japanese in Warsaw") and in his novels Shikai no hotori (By the Shores

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 HEARING GOD IN SILENCE 163

ofthe Dead Sea, 1973) and Onna no isshot Sachiko no baai (The Life ofa
Woman: The Story ofSachiko, 1982).
71 could even argue, but will conceal the argument within an endnote,
that the humorous story I included in Stained Glass Elegies, while not from
the Aika collection, confirms my argument. Bontaro in "Incredible Voy-
age" is taught the true "inner" beauty ofthe girl he loves when he is shrunk
to microscopic size and rides in a surgical vessel within her body, eventu-
ally making the "incredible voyage" all the way through her intestines.
8Endo made this comment at a symposium held atJohn Carroll Univer-
sity in Cleveland on 18 May 1991, the day prior to his receipt of an honor-
ary doctorate from the Jesuit university, during a question-and-answer
period. Keiko Nakano's translation of his remarks was published as part
ofthe proceedings ("Silences and Voices: The Writings of Endo Shusaku")
in the Journal ofthe Association ofTeachers ofJapanese 27 (Apr. 1993): 85-
88.
'This remark is attributed to Endo in the Haha naru mono video.
"There are tense problems in the translation of the penultimate para-
graph of chapter eight. Johnston translates the entire paragraph in the
present tense, presumably to give a sense of immediacy to the dramatic
moment. Endo's original language, however, attempts no such effect,
though the argument could certainly be advanced that the "past" tense in
Japanese creates a "present" moment itself and therefore justifies the use
of present tense in translation. Yet it is surely a form of interpretation to
choose that particular paragraph and no other to render in such a way.
USee, for instance, my discussion of Silence in The Sting ofLife 249-57.
121have taken common definitions for the phrase from Kenkyusha's New
Japanese-English Dictionary.
131 must confess to the role I played in placing this interpretive stamp
on the stage adaptation of Silence, written by Steven Dietz, that premiered
in Tokyo and Milwaukee in 1995 as a joint production between the Milwau-
kee Repertory Theater and the Institute of Dramatic Arts in Japan. After I
explained my analysis ofthejUmie scene to Mr. Dietz and the director, they
made the decision to have the voice of Christ that speaks from the fumie
be a gentle female voice, one filled with compassion and forgiveness. Co-
incidentally, on the day that I finished the first draft ofthis essay, I received
a letter from Endo Junko, the author's widow, in which she expressed dis-
may at having just learned about the use of the imperative in the fumie
scene and her wish to have a correction made in the English translation.
It is, she wrote, a "maternal" voice speaking to Rodrigues.
140r, perhaps, not so clear. Japanese readers often skip over or scratch
their heads at the ''Appendix'' of the novel, since it is written in imitation
of seventeenth-century documentary style that is virtually inaccessible to
contemporary Japanese readers. Although not quite as daunting as pre-
senting a reader of English with an extended concluding passage in Latin,
the comparison is not as far-fetched as it might sound.

WORKS CITED

Endo,Junko. Otto no shukudai (HomeworkfromMy Husband). Tokyo: PUp,

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164 VAN C. GESSEL

1998.
Endo, Shusaku. Chimmoku (Silence). Vol. 6 in Endo Shusaku bungaku
zenshu, 11 vols. Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1975.
- - - . The Girl I Left Behind. Trans. Mark Williams. London: Peter Owen,
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- - - . The Sea and Poison. Trans. Michael Gallagher. Tokyo: Charles E.
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- - - . "Sekai ni okeru Nihon bungaku, Nihon ni okeru Kirisuto-kyo
bungaku" ("japanese Literature in the World, and Christian Literature
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Endo. Tokyo: Shunjusha, 1994. 88-120.
- - - . Silence. Trans. William johnston. New York: Taplinger, 1980.
- - - . Stained Glass Elegies. Trans. Van C. Gessel. New York: New Direc-
tions, 1990.
Gessel, Van C. "Silences and Voices: The Writings of Endo Shusaku," Jour-
nal ofthe Association ofTeachers ofJapanese 27 (Apr. 1993): 57-89.
- - - . The Sting ofLife: Four ContemporaryJapanese Novelists. New York:
Columbia UP, 1989.
Haha naru mono: Ningen no dohansha (Mothers: Companions to Mankind).
Video produced with Shusaku Endo's cooperation by President Inc.,
Tokyo, 1992.
Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary. Ed. Koh Masuda. 4th ed.
Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1974.
Saeki Shoichi. '''Kanashii me' no sozoryoku" ("The Powers ofimagination
That Created 'Mournful Eyes"'). Kokubungaku 18 (Feb. 1973): 58-59.

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