A silence that is not hollow:

...As far as he knows, he has chosen neither of these identities...

...This haiku stops us in time, in midfeeling...

...It's not what language looks like that matters, but how it makes us think...

...The compact form of the ideograph is amplified in haiku...

...When your parents, whom you love and who, for all you know, run the world, put all your toys in storage, and pack you off to a life where even the language is unknown, you may go happily...

...Everywhere...

...Choices...

...What followed was worse than her predictable nightmares...

...Was all-embracing love not sufficient to change the world...

...And such forgetfulness is the source of all human sorrow...

...There's no doubt that this may be the main question that arises in the reader's mind, for the Western reader is lodged in a world of curiosity over human motivation, a world in which actions stand for something, a world in which plots unfold...

...If the harsh counterclaims of Japanese culture and Catholic tradition have made life seem perilous, then the labor of fiction has made it seem bearable...

...Implicit in the motion of the dance is the stillness between the steps of the dance...

...Buson's spirit...

...Most of all it matters that his embrace of these two identities puzzles and hurts him, sends him right into a still place, full of yearning and gentle suffering, from which he writes...

...We are used to reading with speed along smooth lines of print...

...This is the way it is...

...Ultimately, all of Endo's novels are about the same predicament: being misunderstood or mis-"taken...

...Take Kichijiro, the man who betrays Rodrigues...

...He reflects: "[T]hese guards, too, were men...

...The sound and glow of the lines resonate with this spirit...

...there is no betrayal in a world of love...

...they were indifferent to the fate of others...

...Elementary school may teach many of us that this form of Japanese poetry is easy to write, if only we can count, but the finest haiku essentially concerns that which cannot be written...

...Mindlessness creates the atmosphere in which evil thrives...

...The account of Rodrigues's ordeal is stunning in its vividness (Endo employs the device of reproducing his character's letters to his superiors), but relatively simple in its premise...

...We are his accidental, Occidental readers and, as such, run the risk of misunderstanding the way in which his narratives function...

...Then followed a disturbing struggle with his faith during his college work in Tokyo, studies of French literature in Lyons, return to his native Japan, and three long years in the hospital...

...But finally this hardly matters...

...How did Christ feel about this...

...Acts of murder and sexual damage are clearly antisocial, but what happens when a whole community chooses to stop thinking...

...If apostasy is not a sin, then what is...

...God exists...

...To deny Jesus would be to be unable to see him at all...

...Although we know that such attentive reading requires our senses, we may not want to know that it requires more than what we usually give when we read, even in the case of poetry...

...neither is his frail health...

...To be mindless...

...But stop...

...We don't have to be Japanese to be lifted by the feel of bell-sound even as it wells forth, but it's no secret that most of our familiar literatures don't engage in this simultaneous play of sound/sight/emotion/pace...

...No great shafts of light from heaven illuminate this world...

...If it is hard for us to understand how a writer can embody mystery without employing techniques of magical realism or surrealism, English translations of Endo's work can give us hints...

...all experience is relational...

...When Endo brings this Jesus to life in his remarkable A Life of Jesus, we hear a warmth and excitement that is simply not present in the fiction...

...Evil exists...

...It means sin...

...Mindlessness plagues us all as individuals, but our collaboration in a forgetful state produces evil that even society detests...

...it is not to steal and tell lies...

...It is not God's silence we need to fear, but our own silence...

...He can understand the miracle of Jesus' companionship, can imagine what it might feel like to touch the hem of his garment...

...It matters that he is Jap-enese...

...Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are...

...For Endo, Jesus alone can show us how to live...

...I'd bought a new book...

...Behind each of these impulses lies the desire to control something about the human lot...

...Here's eighteenth-century Buson: Coolness: the sound of the bell as it leaves the bell...

...I think Endo is asking something much simpler: does apostasy really mean the denial of God...

...But Christ, the one who was and is forever mindful...

...But simply because you trust them to make good choices, it doesn't necessarily follow that you want to make no choices at all...

...What happens when a city government chooses to believe the study that assures them that the volcano hovering over the planned convention hotel will not erupt, even though another study suggests it will...

...But this doesn't mean that Endo has made no choices at all...

...When silence is broken in this manner, the priest's apostasy seems like a shocking betrayal...

...We, his audience, can find his work more or less accessible, more or less successful, more or less well-executed...

...They're satisfied...

...She raged and begged for the Sendak, hugged her pillow, sobbed out a frenzy of grief...

...Read as a pile of "stories," Endo's fiction seems to cover a wide range of topics...

...He has chosen to be a fiction writer and, as such, within the field of language and vision in his eight novels and one collection of stories, he has been free to play out choice after choice, to create the world again and again...

...Rodrigues, within his cell, listening to the guards chatting outside, for a moment understood a deep meaning of sin...

...How deeply we need to choose , again and again, the story that tells us exactly what we already know...

...Throughout this time, Endo was wondering what made him Catholic...

...What happens...

...But it scared her...

...Let her choose something," my mother told me, "even if she chooses wrong...

...A Christ who might sound like my own mother when she says,"Let her choose something, even if she chooses wrong...

...An aesthetic experience may be one reward, but that's not the point...

...The meaning of the ideograph lies not in its motion, but in the relation of black to white, of field to ground...

...if God won't speak to him, then Rodrigues won't speak on his behalf...

...In Scandal (1988), Endo's most recent novel, the nature of sexual evil in contemporary Japan is explored...

...If what you just read sounds like the real story of Silence, let me remind you of the premise from which this "real story" unfolds...

...it is human terrain...

...She wasn't frightened when we read the book in the small West African village where we were then living and working, but when she and I traveled back to the states to visit my mother for a month, a ritual began...

...If literacy suggests that we respond to black and white together, we can see that all perception is, at least, twofold...

...Implicit in our knowledge of speech is the silence that cradles the sounds...

...I think of Shusaku Endo, not a child, but a man of such mindfulness, such gracious poise, telling the same story about the world time after time...

...I don't remember how I calmed her, but after a time she slept...

...The act of trampling Jesus'face, taking one's foot and stepping on Christ's face, calls Christ's presence into being...

...When Christ finally speaks, as Rodrigues raises his foot over the fumie, he urges the priest to trample upon him...

...The mystery that startles Endo is that with this knowledge, we keep forgetting to do something...

...it matters that he is Catholic...

...If sin derives from mindlessness, then no one is immune...

...A SILENCE THAT IS NOT HOLLOW THE MINDFULNESS OF SHUSAKU ENDO ELIZABETH BEVERLY There was a time when one of our daughters loved a book that scared her...

...It's not the church that sustains him with its Western dogmas and sacraments...

...he has decided to write from the world of the sorrowful, the weak, the cowardly...

...Because to everyone else, apostasy means betrayal...

...it is produced by humans...

...I said that it seems that the main question is whether or not Rodrigues will deny his God...

...The image of ideograph as ideal story may be hard for us to understand...

...Shusaku Endo is Japanese, a Catholic...

...Isn't it possible that built into the very act of apostasy is an error of human logic, both emotional and rational...

...It's important to remember that Endo is writing for a Japanese audience...

...It was so clean and simple that no one could make sense of it, and no one could produce its like...

...is not what it is usually thought to be...

...Near the end of his delicate but sinewy nonfiction account of Christ's life, A Life of Jesus (1973), Endo addresses his Japanese readers: "That's the whole life of Jesus...

...The church certainly believes so, as well as the Japanese government...

...It stands out clean and simple like a single Chinese ideograph brushed on a blank sheet of paper...

...Yours...

...The suspense in the plot derives not so much from our interest in Rodrigues's eventual action, but in the nature of God's silence...

...he is their companion...

...Endo's Jesus loves the people who betray him partly because they are free to betray him...

...black brushstrokes on a white sheet stop the eye...

...His fiction does not exist to attract us, to invite us...

...What happens when the Catholic church believes its doctrine on apostasy, and forgets the life of the single Christian locked within the moment of being seen by God...

...Being Japanese in Japan is a fact of birth...

...This was the feeling that their laughing and talking stirred up in his heart...

...Being Japanese and being Catholic are not choices for Endo...

...But what about Rodrigues...

...Nothing is known by itself...

...Endo has taken Jesus quite seriously...

...Endo offers us a Christ who doesn't simply tolerate human choice, but loves it...

...Once again the inquiry begins not with the problem of pleasure, but with the problem of selfishness...

...Endo's belief in Jesus, both man and God, is the essential truth of his Catholicism...

...Endo wants nothing less than to draw upon his chosen work in order to embody the mystery of the unchosen life...

...To be oblivious...

...But if we insist on such reading, we miss the heart of Endo's moral universe, his instruction through illumination...

...There's no skimming this kind of verse...

...Then there's Flatfish from When I Whistle (1974...

...Some of us, given a life that seems arbitrary, might find art appealing precisely because it can let us escape our helpless state and have some fun...

...Love does not control...

...How can we be drawn to such unattractive characters...

...In the slim final chapter, following this apostasy, Rodrigues the ex-priest functions as a real priest, offering the sacrament of absolution to Kichijiro, the man who surrendered Rodrigues to the authorities...

...Catholic or not...

...that's not what Endo offers us...

...Endo's Christ, the embodiment of mindfulness, knows that love is meaningless if it is simply indiscriminate...

...The meaning within the black strokes can emerge only because the white space contains it...

...We all know what happens...

...he knows you and lives for you...

...What happens...

...Our chances of being blinded are slight, because the light that sparks the world of Endo's fiction emanates from the characters: some glimmer faintly, some erupt in bursts of momentary clarity, some just flicker and die...

...How can we trust them to show us the right way to live...

...As harsh circumstances mount and the priest's weaknesses are revealed, we suspect that Rodrigues will apostatize Just as his former teacher, Christovao Ferreira, had done before him...

...Implicit in the lover's absence is his or her presence...

...At times, we may believe that such desire is what calls art into being...

...his fiction exists in order to bear witness, to permit us to see the way it is with us...

...One night, feeling that the pattern we had entered was unnecessary, I told her that I had already chosen another story...

...Pain may flourish, but life is possible because people are at least trying to be good to each other...

...Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind...

...wasn't that great...

...Being a Catholic began as an intention of his mother, who had her son baptized in 1934 when he was eleven...

...All that is needed is faith and the knowledge that a single voice counts, and an essential unwavering listener waits.wavering listener waits...

...I think of little Miranda in her dark American nights, torn between cultures, calling out for a story that is all about being torn between cultures...

...It's not common for most American readers to notice the paper as well as the print, but such notice yields rich rewards...

...Fiction that lies outside the narrative realm of simple cause and effect always promises that unreconcilable elements may be held side by side on the same page where they find a home together in words...

...Almost always they are unappreciated and misunderstood...

...He can pass through a crowd and feel the touch of a single woman who needs his care...

...Trampling a presence does not deny the presence...

...But it happens only because people stop thinking...

...Flatfish is ridiculous in the eyes of his fellow classmates, but he alone understands the meaning of devotion...

...Such characters pace the pages of all the stories, all the novels...

...Living in a perilous world in which people cin which people cannot or will not resonate with one another, or with the life around them...

...More than that, Endo is not afraid to imagine what it must have felt like to be Jesus, the man, alone, misunderstood, always disappointing the crowd...

...Finally the priest understands love...

...Within the experience of health lies illness...

...The reason for this must be that it had become a part of me after all...

...Endo may not write haiku, but this is precisely the kind of attention his work requires if we are to probe the mystery within it...

...Suguro, the protagonist of Scandal (1988), provides us with another model of hope...

...Even the nightmares and the calling for me in the night...

...He is not sufficiently mindful to avoid sin, but at least he achieves moments in which he knows and claims the magnitude of his sin...

...As Endo spins their lives onto the page, he doesn't glorify them or heal them...

...All of Endo's work brims with the sorrow of this knowledge...

...Silence (1969), the most widely read of his novels in English translation, quite deftly explores this predicament in a setting charged with religious tension...

...love accepts...

...And if the presence is a voice who reminds you that he lived just so that you could, at this very moment, be as weak and cowardly as you are being, then the act of apostasy is one not merely of affirmation, but of faith...

...What distinguishes Endo's "heroes" from his other characters is their ability to remember, even occasionally, what they are doing, what they have done...

...At bedtime Miranda would ask for Wild Things, I would read it, and later she would wake in fear...

...In Endo's early novel The Sea and Poison (1958), a startling collection of first-person narratives describing the life surrounding the vivisection of American PO Ws in World War II Japan, we understand how easily the unthinking individual helps to create the murderous institution...

...This is lonely knowledge for Rodrigues, even for Endo...

...Taken singly, and at breakneck American pace, Endo's novels easily resemble other kinds of work: historical novels, philosophical ruminations on the banality of evil or the crisis in cross-cultural relations, fictional exposes of the sexual underworld in contemporary Japan or of corruption in the hospital or the government, the story of midlife suffering, an inquiry into the torments of faith, etc...

...For Endo, this is sin...

...Set in seventeenth-century Japan, the novel brings to life a period of religious persecution when to be Catholic was knowingly to embrace martyrdom or to apostatize by trampling on the fumie, an embossed image of Christ's face...

...One way in which Wild Things was vital to Miranda was that, in a life that seemed to be determined by the whim of others, she had chosen this bedtime book herself, and the life that surrounded this choice felt like hers...

...To forget the meaning of another's life, another's body, is to sin against that life, that body, and against us all...

...The story made her cry, and she wanted to cry...

...He can do this because the act of writing so perfectly resembles the act of prayer...

...Some of us might write because we believe that our suffering has privileged us and through such privilege we can model better ways of being...

...These identities have claimed him, shaped his life, created his sense of self...

...Warmed by the glow of Jesus' love, Endo can liken Christ to the ever-mindful mother, the loving woman...

...He's one of those characters whose biography so closely resembles his author's that the novel bristles with an extra-textual intrigue...

...What Jesus really offers is the gift of being known, and being loved anyway...

...What I do remember is my mother waiting in the darkened hallway to take me by the hand and remind me of something...

...He can construct the lives of the disciples as they danced around Jesus and longed for him to be someone else, someone not quite so disappointingly unworldly...

...But Endo's desire lies elsewhere...

...We can't...

...What happens when the hospital chooses to forget that the lives of the elderly are real lives, and decides that this population is ideal for certain types of casual care...

...It seems that the priest wants to use this silence against God...

...we either get it, because we choose to allow it within us, or we don't get it and call it really simple...

...Distracted by pride, or even by humility, they forget...

...As he attests, "There were many times when I felt I wanted to get rid of my Catholicism, but I was finally unable to do so...

...If this is the darkness in the soul of Endo's fiction, then where is the light...

...He may seem foolish in his longing for the unattainable dream girl, but he never forgets who she is...

...If these are the models of redemption offered to us by Endo, how can we take heart...

...A Christ who calls out, "Trample me...

...the main question that the novel seems to pose is whether or not Rodrigues will deny his God...

...all he knows is what he must do in the future in order to redeem his own mindlessness...

...It calls on the spirit...

...But I'm not convinced that this is the question that Endo is asking himself and his characters as he writes them into life...

...We keep being surprised by our capacity to be disappointed...

...Here...

...Japanese or not...

...Between 1614-1640 it is estimated that between five and six thousand believers were martyred...

...My spirit...

...And in a world in which choice seems to be limited by the conditions of birth or health, the knowledge that God always offers one the choice to think and to act is a serious charge...

...Endo has chosen to follow a fictionalized Portuguese missionary, Sebastion Rodrigues, through the test of faith that leads to his eventual apostasy...

...But Suguro doesn't have any idea what he has done in the past...

...Often they are pathetic, unattractive, even repulsive...

...And what about God...

...We're all packed in there together...

...It is not just that I did not throw it off, but that I was unable to throw it off...

...Endo knows, as Jesus did, that "a person begins to be a follower of Jesus only by accepting the risk of becoming himself one of the powerless people in this visible world...