Silence

Translated by William Johnston. First British Commonwealth edition. Black cloth boards with gilt lettering to spine. Clean and unmarked; binding square and tight. In unclipped dust jacket with neat price sticker of £6.50 to upper flap on top of the original price of £4.25. Spine slightly sunned with some damage to tail apparently caused by removal of sticker. Otherwise a very attractive copy of the first UK edition of Shusaku Endo’s classic novel, which was the basis for Scorsese’s 2016 film. *** 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 this UK first edition. The novel must have reminded him more than a little bit of his own novel The Power and the Glory (1940). A missionary priest is being hunted down by a government that’s suppressing the Catholic Church (here 17th century Japan, in Greene’s novel 1930s Mexico). There’s an element of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness too: the priest is there to track down his old teacher, who turns out to have apostasized. Endo’s philosophy is very much his own though: he claims Western religion can’t take root in the ‘swamp of Japan’, at least not without changing. A moving and thoughtful novel by one of Japan’s most celebrated writers.