Approaching Silence: New Perspectives on Shusaku Endo’s Classic Novel ed. by Mark W. Dennis, Darren J. N. Middleton, and: Endo Shusaku: A Literature of Reconciliation by Mark B. Williams (review)

Feeding the popular interest in the work of Shusaku Endo, Dennis and Middleton offer an anthology of scholarly articles related to Silence and to Endo’s career more generally. The volume is commendable for the breadth of its selections, and may be one of the easiest “on ramps” for scholars new to Endo and interested in what has been said about his best-known work in American circles. As another such “on ramp” would be a good scan of ’90s-vintage issues of Christianity and Literature, those who have come by that path will recognize several names and much of the critical direction of this anthology. If the volume is somewhat excessively deferential both to Endo and to Martin Scorsese, who gets a brief afterword, and if this deference is hard to think of as a “new perspective” in a reception history dominated by deeply deferential American critical perspectives, it is nonetheless a useful updating of that critical tradition that offers a few new insights.

Approaching Silence is indeed commendable first for the sheer number of well-edited essays it gathers, a sufficient number that it is necessary to divide them into thematized sections. Divisions titled “Background and Reception,” “Christianity and Buddhism,” and “Endo’s Theology” each get between four and six essays, and the book is rounded out by two under-strength sections called “Teaching Silence,” with only one essay, and a play adapting Silence in its own section, oddly titled in the plural as “Later Adaptations.” The brief afterword by Scorsese stands alone and without comment between this play and the apparatus. The apparatus itself is adequate, with a solid “Further Reading” list possibly justifying the use of this book in seminars by itself, and an index which seems representative.

Everyone who has studied Endo will recognize several names here, including some outstanding ones such as Van C. Gessel and Mark Williams. Gessel’s essay has a retrospective character, updating his past discussions of the reception history of Silence and offering some conclusions and summary comments of his own, some of which will be familiar to those who have profited by his commentary on Endo in the past. Mark Williams offers an excellent wrestling with Endo’s specific source texts and their implications for various interpretations of the elusive ending of Silence. “The ‘Formality’ of the fumie? A Re-Consideration of the Role of the fumie Scene in Silence” alone makes the book worth considering for any graduate seminar.

The volume’s editors, of course, have also contributed essays: Middleton offers “Endo and Greene’s Literary Theology,” while Dennis offers “A Buddhist Reading of the Blue Eyes of Jesus in Silence.” Middleton’s discussion of several examples of Greene’s theological depictions offers some detail to help readers understand and evaluate the frequent popular references to Endo as “the Japanese Graham Greene.” Dennis writes at some length, and diffusely, of various Buddhist approaches to self and text, and mentions a number of classes and colloquies; yet his interpretive engagement with Silence comes down to an oddly simplistic opposition between the “blue eyes” that Rodrigues in his perfervid imagination attributes to Jesus and the “yellow eyes” of Kichijiro. It should probably be noted that Kichijiro’s eyes are “drunken and dirty yellow” because of his alcoholism, as the priest’s will be “bloodshot and yellow” after many deprivations; that the over-whelming majority of Portuguese people have brown eyes, as does the image of Christ by Piero della Francesca (Resurrection, in the Borgo san Sepolcro) upon which Rodrigues fixates; that the interpreter is also described as having yellow eyes, and Ferreira as having blue eyes; but Dennis explores none of this. (In the...