Why have you abandoned us so completely? He prayed in a weak voice. God asks me to imitate the strong even though he made me weak. Unable to perform the symbolic act, the non-consenting peasants are crucified on crosses in the sea. Rodrigues likens the foreboding silence of the ocean to the foreboding silence of God during their martyrdom and is deeply troubled by the experience.
#Shusaku endo trial#
Photograph: Wikimedia CommonsThe Fathers are sheltered by the Japanese Christians until the authorities become suspicious and round up a selection of villagers to undergo the trial of the fumi-e, a bronzed image of the crucifix upon which they must trample with their foot in order to prove their non-allegiance to Christ. Or rather, if I begin to reflect that it is not a dream I feel like shouting out that it is a miracle … Certainly my being in this utterly remote and unknown Oriental town is like a dream. A throbbing sensation fills my being, and behind my eyelids arises the memory of that long and terrible sea journey so that my breast is filled with pain. And I keep turning over in my mind the thought that I am at the end of the earth, in a place which you do not know and which your whole lives through you will never visit.
Following in the footsteps of the order’s co-founder, St Francis Xavier, Rodrigues and his companion, Father Francisco Garrpe set off on an arduous sea voyage to Japan via Goa and Macao.īeneath the light of the candle I am sitting with my hands on my knees, staring in front of me. More specifically, it is the quest to find out what has happened to Rodrigues’ beloved mentor, Father Christovao Ferreira, who has reputedly apostatized (renounced his faith) under torture and subsequently disappeared without a trace. Set in seventeenth-century feudal Japan, Silence is an historical novel-part epistolary, part third-person narrator-recounting the journey of a Portuguese Jesuit priest, Father Sebastian Rodrigues, and his struggles as a missionary during a time when the practising of Christianity had become outlawed by the Japanese authorities, forcing it underground, known as “ Kakure Kirishitan“. Shūsaku Endō (27th March 1923–29th September 1996) grew up in the unique position of being a Japanese Catholic, a motif he would explore time and again through his outstanding body of work however, it is Silence, recently adapted into a motion picture by Martin Scorsese, that takes the issue of spiritual abandonment to its zenith and what ultimately is meant by the perceived indifference of the Creator, the “silence” of God. Indeed, it is little wonder that its author was awarded Japan’s highest honour, the Order of Culture, shortly before his death. It is literature at its most perfect, accomplished, profound. It is not possible to praise this tale of religious apostasy highly enough for all the themes it explores, not least the meaning of personal faith in the midst of human suffering in a world gone completely mad. WHEN I AM reading Shūsaku Endō’s Silence (沈黙), I have to keep reminding myself that it is a translation, beautifully effected by William Johnston, whose prose unfolds effortlessly and elegantly like an unfurling scroll of Japanese calligraphy. Let all the earth keep silence before him.
Martin Scorsese, Silence Be still and know that I am God
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