History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 10/10 · Translated from Japanese; English edition 1969

• Accuracy: Rooted in the real persecution of Japanese Christians in the 1630s and in the historical apostasy of the Jesuit Cristóvão Ferreira.
• Readability: Clear, restrained and quietly devastating.
• Plot: Two young Portuguese Jesuits smuggle themselves into Japan to find their former teacher, rumoured to have renounced the faith under torture.

In the 1630s Japan has banned Christianity. Missionaries are expelled or killed, and Japanese believers are tortured until they apostatise by stepping on an image of Christ, the fumie. News reaches Portugal that Father Cristóvão Ferreira, a respected Jesuit, has renounced his faith. Two of his former students, Sebastião Rodrigues and Francisco Garrpe, refuse to believe it and travel secretly to Japan.

They find hidden Christian villages, poor people clinging to a faith they barely understand, and a Japanese guide, Kichijirō, who betrays them again and again and returns each time begging forgiveness. Rodrigues is captured and made to watch his followers suffer.

Shūsaku Endō was a Japanese Catholic who spent his life wondering whether Christianity could take root in Japan. Silence is his answer, and it is not an easy one. The novel asks what faith means when God is silent in the face of suffering, and whether apostasy can itself be an act of love.

The narrative moves from Rodrigues’s letters to third-person narration and documents, a structure that increases the sense of isolation and doubt. The interrogations by the magistrate Inoue are intellectually subtle, not cartoonish.

Kichijirō is one of the great characters in modern fiction: weak, contemptible, and in the end perhaps the most human figure in the book.

The 10 reflects a profound, beautifully controlled novel that is at once historical fiction, theology and psychological drama. It won the Tanizaki Prize, and Martin Scorsese filmed it in 2016.