Shusaku Endo (1923–1996)

As an atheist I do find it hard to empathise with people undergoing crises of faith. I'm like, get over it! But this tale of a zealous Portuguese missionary being hunted in isolationist Japan, then pressured relentlessly to apostatize, generates a real sense of desolation. The titular heavenly silence gets louder and louder as you turn the pages. And it ends up being about more than the loss of religious faith; it's about futility in general, staring defeat in the face, the crushing of show more dreams and ambitions. show less

Wow! This book left me staggering at the thought of how cruel one man can be to another. The older I get, the more disillusioned I get with humanity. This cruelty is not limited to one ethnicity nor one nation, but is pervasive in the world. My question is what to do in its face? The author voices the same idea in his story. "I'm just one person. What can I do with the world?"

It was almost good to know that Jiro Suguro, one of the medical interns in this novel, was negatively affected by show more the cruelty he observed. I said almost, but it wasn't quite good enough for his complicity, albeit minor.

I was pondering what really happened during WWII while reading this story and, offhandedly, looked up the background for this novel only to find out that it was real. It was a historical incident of eight captured American airmen during WWII who underwent vivisection by Japanese doctors with the full knowledge that they were condemning these prisoners to bizarre and unjust deaths! I will never cease to be surprised at how cruel and evil people can be to one another. Yes, the Japanese and Americans were enemies in the war. However, what happened to the doctor's creed, at least in the Hippocratic Oath that I know from the medical community in the United States? It states: "First do no harm." It was hard reading this book as a retired nurse, but it must be an even harder read for doctors.

So is this human-to-human cruelty necessary? Yes, the Japanese and Americans were once enemies, but this very week I have a son who is traveling to Japan for vacation. He says that, to him, Japan is very safe. Imagine!

The book starts off with foreshadowing. We learn that a "welfare" patient was going to be undergoing surgery and would probably die from the experiments that the doctors were going to do on her. Are some human beings simply disposable? How do we choose which ones are in that state? Is it fair? Is it humane? What gives the right to be on top of this hierarchy? Money? Power? A prestigious job? The most education? Being born into a high status family?

The other incident that happened in this book, I also found chilling. There was a woman of high rank who died in surgery, and the doctors tried to cover it up by telling the nurses not to tell the family, and to take the patient back into the room while running in medications, making it look as if she were still alive. Who does this? A medical professional? Medicine is a field in which we are always making life and death decisions. Sometimes we accidentally make the wrong decisions. Sometimes we make the right decisions, and patients die anyway. Not creating incident reports and covering up the truth in the medical field is one of the darkest, most profane things that can happen to medical practice. I am so tired of lies and unethical behavior in day-to-day real life that it is excruciating to also be "reading for pleasure" about such behavior.

Should you read this book? Absolutely, yes. It's beautifully written and tries to present evil truth by revealing it carefully in fiction. I was wondering at the end if the author wrote this novel to teach more people about the truth of WWII. I hope so. show less

As a Catholic child around the age of 11, I read a lot of books about saints. In my classroom at St. Agnes school there was a small library consisting almost entirely of the lives of saints - there were two about archaeology. Many saints were martyrs so it was a big question for me as to whether I would be able to give my life for my faith. I tried to imagine it, flames burning, lashes coming down, hot coals in my mouth.

Frances Xavier was one of the saints I read about. I remember reading show more about his mission to the far east and about the persecution of Christian converts in Japan.

Silence is about a later stage of this persecution. It is told from the point of view of Father Rodriguez, a young Portuguese priest who has come to minister to whatever Christians remain, holding onto their faith in secret, and to find out what has happened to another priest who had taught him and who is said to have apostatized (denied his faith), something he has trouble believing, having known him and his character. Father Rodriguez has to sneak in. The Catholic Portuguese are no longer allowed into Japan.

At first he hides with another priest on an island of Japanese peasants who are barely surviving between poor conditions and high taxes. But they are Christian, and they hide the two priests and protect them. From that point the story is unflinching in depicting the results of their coming. The challenge I imaged at 11 was a child's fantasy of remaining brave in the face of physical pain. What the priest has to confront is something much more immense. Silence is about adult experience and despair. It is the most powerful book that I have read in some time. show less

This short novel, consisting of three unconnected parts--two short vignettes and a longer novella--traces the feelings of three Japanese students studying abroad. In all three parts, the experiences are rather pessimistic, with all characters expressing deep unease about the gulf that exists between them and European culture. The takeaway seems to be that those who enjoy their overseas experiences, or "who return home fatter after their period of studying abroad" (224) are somehow proceeding show more through their experience with closed eyes to what is most important. The pessimism doesn't stop with students on short, study abroad trips. In the third novella, one of the sub-characters, a Japanese interpreter who has spent much of his life in Paris, is always expressing nostalgia about the Tokyo of his past, stating that he can never go back to that Japan, but at the same time will never be accepted as a Frenchman in France. In short, he is 50% Japanese, but also 50% nothing. Having spent most of my adult life as an American living in Japan, I appreciate Endo's views on the difficulty of fully understanding another culture, but reject the the pessimistic idea that one cannot "exchange blood" with a foreign race, and that any honest attempt to dip into the history and culture of a foreign people will result in a spiritual and physical exhaustion. show less