Shusaku Endo’s Silence Novelist Sought a Christianity That
Speaks to the Japanese Soul If a gardener were to uproot a
Christian sapling from its Western soil in order to transplant
it into Japan, would its branches still bear Christian fruit? If
a tailor were to disassemble a Western suit in order to fashion
a Japanese kimono, would it still be a suit? These are some of
the questions that the Japanese Christian novelist Shusaku Endo
asks in his spare and elegant novel Silence, long a staple in
the University Scholars program at Seattle Pacific University.
Set in 17th-century Japan at the height of its persecution of
Christians, this harrowing account of the Portuguese priest
Sebastian Rodrigues ultimately asks the big questions: How
should Christians engage a culture when that culture is foreign?
And what does the word “engage” mean, exactly? Conquest?
Marriage? Accommodation? A suit or a kimono? Until his death in
1996, the Catholic Endo, Japan’s own Graham Greene, explored
these issues in nearly two dozen n