It’s no surprise that Graham Greene was so keen on Shusako Endo’s novel Silence. ‘In my opinion one of the finest novels of our time,’ he is quoted on the dust jacket of the UK first edition. The novel must have reminded him more than a little bit of his own novel The Power and the Glory (1940).
Both are about a missionary priest being hunted down by a government that’s trying to suppress Roman Catholicism. Greene’s novel is set in 1930s Mexico, while Endo uses 17th century Japan as a historical background, but the situation is very much the same. The books are about guilt and religious doubt (like most of Greene’s books), and the silence of God when He is most needed.
There’s an element of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness too: the priest is in Japan to track down his old teacher who is said to have apostasized. The priest refuses to believe it until he eventually meets this elusive but constantly present Kurtz-like character.
Endo’s philosophy is very much of his own making: he claims Western religion can’t take root in the ‘swamp of Japan’, at least not without changing into something different. What’s left of a religion if the core of it changes? Do Japanese Christians believe in the same God as European Christians?
You might wonder the same about Buddhism in the West. Can a religion adapt without losing its heart? Can people in the West ever properly understand Eastern religion? These are the sort of questions that Endo circles around in this thoughtful and moving novel.
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Silence was the basis for Scorsese’s well-received 2016 film of the same name starring Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver.
Our copy is the first British Commonwealth edition, published by Peter Owen in 1976. The translation was first published in 1969 by Sophia University Press, Tokyo, two years after the Japanese edition came out.
We also have a first edition in stock of The Ministry of Fear, the first novel Graham Greene wrote after The Power and the Glory, published in 1943.
At Quinto we specialise in literature in translation. We usually have several other books by Japanese authors in stock, like Kanzoburo Oe, Saiichi Maruya and Haruki Murakami.