Book Review: Silence

Silence was written by Shusako Endo, who is described by the book’s notes as being Japan’s foremost novelist. This fact brings the total number of Japanese novelists that I’ve read or ever known of to a whopping one. What’s notable about his eminence—an eminence which may still hold true since his death in 1992—is that much of Endo’s work, with Silence as its flagship publication, deals with Christianity, particularly Catholicism. While Silence isn’t necessarily didactic in the way we might regard Christian literature as didactic, the subject matter is notable seeing as only 1% of the population in Shinto-drenched Japan professes to be Christian.

The narrative follows priest Sebastião Rodrigues’ infiltration into the nation’s interior, and is based on the 17th century missionary endeavors of Portuguese Jesuit Catholics to Japan. After the Shimabara Rebellion in 1638 the shogunate was in high Christian- and foreigner-ousting mode. Christians were sought out and killed unless they publicly apostatized—your standard framework for religious persecution. In this setting the bulk of the novel deals with the issue of apostasy, both the apostasy that Rodrigues sees in others and his own interior battle of faith and the pull to stay alive by outwardly rejecting his belief system.

The story itself, carrying the theme of “God’s silence”, or inaction, in the midst of His followers’ suffering, was stirring and you can find summaries and reviews online elsewhere. Here, though, I wanted to mention some things implied by the novel that I found surprising. The first is that nowhere in the history of western culture will you hear anything about any eastern religion, particularly Buddhism, being oppressive towards unbelievers. The reason for this is that America has an inexplicable romanticism with eastern thought that throws up some cognitive barriers: when one is infatuated with a foreign belief system, dissonant information that would result in a double moral standard would be ignored or easily explained away. The seeker would only have to read publications by Laurence Waddell, Spencer Chapman, Percival Landon, or Capt. W.F.T. O’Connor to know how “bad apple” some members of a eastern religion can be (thanks to Tim O’Neill for the references). Good luck shelling out $30+ for their obscure books on amazon.

The other implication is that, despite the near invisible presence of Christianity in Japan, modern Christianity’s missionary response is abysmally asymmetrical. The time in which Silence takes place is the first stab by the church to outreach into the country yet it doesn’t seem to have gotten much better. I believe there are two reasons for this. One is that the exchange rate into yen isn’t as favorable as with non-developing nations (thanks to Marcia for this idea), so high school kids looking to go on a all-expense paid poverty tour short-term missionary journey have to sell a boatload of Krispy Kremes just to get it started. This is understandable, and it’s easier to go after poor people on the verge of starvation than the materially well-off who have no practical need to consider pesky, airy things like metaphysical propositions. The other reason is that, perhaps because of the stated microeconomic cause, Africa*, because of its poverty (caused and perpetuated primarily by terrible governments, in my opinion) is often hoisted as the go-to baptismal font for American Christians to become absolved of their misplaced guilt of living in the post-Industrialized west. Japan is home to Sony, weird teenage fashion, and vending machines. They have electricity; they don’t need the Gospel message as desperately.

Aside from all of that, given the subject matter, the book is depressing and its ending mirrors Endo’s own life, in which he hinted at straying from Catholicism. Silence gives a good (fictional) introduction to a subject not many may know about.

*Africa, by the way, is not a monolithic demography but a continent of countless different histories, cultures, and beliefs. Whenever you hear or see something about helping “Africa”, it might behoove you to find out which version of Africa out of the thousands of versions is being addressed.