There was a time when one of our daughters loved a book that scared her. She was only four, and the book was wonderful. But it scared her. Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. 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. At bedtime Miranda would ask for Wild Things, I would read it, and later she would wake in fear.
One night, feeling that the pattern we had entered was unnecessary, I told her that I had already chosen another story. I'd bought a new book; wasn't that great? What followed was worse than her predictable nightmares. She raged and begged for the Sendak, hugged her pillow, sobbed out a frenzy of grief. I don't remember how I calmed her, but after a time she slept.
What I do remember is my mother waiting in the darkened hallway to take me by the hand and remind me of something. 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. But simply because you trust them to make good choices, it doesn't necessarily follow that you want to make no choices at all. 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. Even the nightmares and the calling for me in the night. "Let her choose something," my mother told me, "even if she chooses wrong."
Shusaku Endo is Japanese, a Catholic. As far as he knows, he has chosen neither of these identities. Being Japanese in Japan is a fact of birth. Being a Catholic began as an intention of his mother, who had her son baptized in 1934 when he was eleven. 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. Throughout this time, Endo was wondering what made him Catholic. 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. It is not just that I did not throw it off, but that I was unable to throw it off. The reason for this must be that it had become a part of me after all."
Choices. Being Japanese and being Catholic are not choices for Endo; neither is his frail health. These identities have claimed him, shaped his life, created his sense of self. But this doesn't mean that Endo has made no choices at all. 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. 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. 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. Behind each of these impulses lies the desire to control something about the human lot. At times, we may believe that such desire is what calls art into being.
But Endo's desire lies elsewhere. It matters that he is Japanese; it matters that he is Catholic. 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. 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. 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. Endo wants nothing less than to draw upon his chosen work in order to embody the mystery of the unchosen life.
It's important to remember that Endo is writing for a Japanese audience. We are his accidental, Occidental readers and, as such, run the risk of misunderstanding the way in which his narratives function. 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. 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. It stands out clean and simple like a single Chinese ideograph brushed on a blank sheet of paper. It was so clean and simple that no one could make sense of it, and no one could produce its like."
The image of ideograph as ideal story may be hard for us to understand. We are used to reading with speed along smooth lines of print; black brushstrokes on a white sheet stop the eye. The meaning of the ideograph lies not in its motion, but in the relation of black to white, of field to ground. The meaning within the black strokes can emerge only because the white space contains it. It's not common for most American readers to notice the paper as well as the print, but such notice yields rich rewards. An aesthetic experience may be one reward, but that's not the point. It's not what language looks like that matters, but how it makes us think. 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. Implicit in the motion of the dance is the stillness between the steps of the dance. Implicit in the lover's absence is his or her presence. Within the experience of health lies illness.
Nothing is known by itself; all experience is relational.
The compact form of the ideograph is amplified in haiku. 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. Here's eighteenth-century Buson:
Coolness:
the sound of the bell
as it leaves the bell.
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. This haiku stops us in time, in midfeeling. 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. It calls on the spirit. The sound and glow of the lines resonate with this spirit. Buson's spirit. My spirit. Yours. We're all packed in there together. There's no skimming this kind of verse; we either get it, because we choose to allow it within us, or we don't get it and call it really simple.
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. 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. Read as a pile of "stories," Endo's fiction seems to cover a wide range of topics. But if we insist on such reading, we miss the heart of Endo's moral universe, his instruction through illumination.
Ultimately, all of Endo's novels are about the same predicament: being misunderstood or mis-"taken." Living in a perilous world in which people cannot or will not resonate with one another, or with the life around them. Silence (1969), the most widely read of his novels in English translation, quite deftly explores this predicament in a setting charged with religious tension. 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. Between 1614-1640 it is estimated that between five and six thousand believers were martyred.
Endo has chosen to follow a fictionalized Portuguese missionary, Sebastion Rodrigues, through the test of faith that leads to his eventual apostasy. 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; the main question that the novel seems to pose is whether or not Rodrigues will deny his God. 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. 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. It seems that the priest wants to use this silence against God; if God won't speak to him, then Rodrigues won't speak on his behalf. When Christ finally speaks, as Rodrigues raises his foot over the fumie, he urges the priest to trample upon him. When silence is broken in this manner, the priest's apostasy seems like a shocking betrayal.
But stop. 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. I said that it seems that the main question is whether or not Rodrigues will deny his God. 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.
But I'm not convinced that this is the question that Endo is asking himself and his characters as he writes them into life. I think Endo is asking something much simpler: does apostasy really mean the denial of God? The church certainly believes so, as well as the Japanese government. They're satisfied. But what about Rodrigues? And what about God?
Isn't it possible that built into the very act of apostasy is an error of human logic, both emotional and rational? The act of trampling Jesus'face, taking one's foot and stepping on Christ's face, calls Christ's presence into being. To deny Jesus would be to be unable to see him at all. Trampling a presence does not deny the presence. 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. God exists; he knows you and lives for you.
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. Finally the priest understands love; there is no betrayal in a world of love. Pain may flourish, but life is possible because people are at least trying to be good to each other. This is lonely knowledge for Rodrigues, even for Endo. Because to everyone else, apostasy means betrayal. It means sin.
If apostasy is not a sin, then what is? Rodrigues, within his cell, listening to the guards chatting outside, for a moment understood a deep meaning of sin. He reflects: "[T]hese guards, too, were men; they were indifferent to the fate of others. This was the feeling that their laughing and talking stirred up in his heart. Sin... is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. 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."
To be oblivious. To be mindless. For Endo, this is sin. Evil exists; it is produced by humans. But it happens only because people stop thinking. Distracted by pride, or even by humility, they forget. And such forgetfulness is the source of all human sorrow. Mindlessness creates the atmosphere in which evil thrives.
All of Endo's work brims with the sorrow of this knowledge. Mindlessness plagues us all as individuals, but our collaboration in a forgetful state produces evil that even society detests. 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. In Scandal (1988), Endo's most recent novel, the nature of sexual evil in contemporary Japan is explored. Once again the inquiry begins not with the problem of pleasure, but with the problem of selfishness. To forget the meaning of another's life, another's body, is to sin against that life, that body, and against us all.
If sin derives from mindlessness, then no one is immune. Acts of murder and sexual damage are clearly antisocial, but what happens when a whole community chooses to stop thinking? 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? 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? 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?
What happens? What happens? We all know what happens. The mystery that startles Endo is that with this knowledge, we keep forgetting to do something. We keep being surprised by our capacity to be disappointed. It is not God's silence we need to fear, but our own silence. If this is the darkness in the soul of Endo's fiction, then where is the light?
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. No great shafts of light from heaven illuminate this world; it is human terrain. What distinguishes Endo's "heroes" from his other characters is their ability to remember, even occasionally, what they are doing, what they have done. Take Kichijiro, the man who betrays Rodrigues. 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.
Suguro, the protagonist of Scandal (1988), provides us with another model of hope. He's one of those characters whose biography so closely resembles his author's that the novel bristles with an extra-textual intrigue. But Suguro doesn't have any idea what he has done in the past; all he knows is what he must do in the future in order to redeem his own mindlessness.
Then there's Flatfish from When I Whistle (1974). Flatfish is ridiculous in the eyes of his fellow classmates, but he alone understands the meaning of devotion. He may seem foolish in his longing for the unattainable dream girl, but he never forgets who she is. Such characters pace the pages of all the stories, all the novels. Almost always they are unappreciated and misunderstood. Often they are pathetic, unattractive, even repulsive. If these are the models of redemption offered to us by Endo, how can we take heart? How can we be drawn to such unattractive characters? How can we trust them to show us the right way to live? We can't; that's not what Endo offers us. His fiction does not exist to attract us, to invite us; his fiction exists in order to bear witness, to permit us to see the way it is with us. Here. Now. Everywhere. Catholic or not. Japanese or not. This is the way it is.
For Endo, Jesus alone can show us how to live. Endo's belief in Jesus, both man and God, is the essential truth of his Catholicism. It's not the church that sustains him with its Western dogmas and sacraments. But Christ, the one who was and is forever mindful. 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. Warmed by the glow of Jesus' love, Endo can liken Christ to the ever-mindful mother, the loving woman. He can understand the miracle of Jesus' companionship, can imagine what it might feel like to touch the hem of his garment. 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.
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. 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." How did Christ feel about this? Was all-embracing love not sufficient to change the world? Endo's Christ, the embodiment of mindfulness, knows that love is meaningless if it is simply indiscriminate. He can pass through a crowd and feel the touch of a single woman who needs his care. What Jesus really offers is the gift of being known, and being loved anyway.
Endo's Jesus loves the people who betray him partly because they are free to betray him. Love does not control; love accepts. 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 offers us a Christ who doesn't simply tolerate human choice, but loves it. A Christ who calls out, "Trample me!" A Christ who might sound like my own mother when she says,"Let her choose something, even if she chooses wrong."
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. The story made her cry, and she wanted to cry. How deeply we need to choose , again and again, the story that tells us exactly what we already know.
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. We, his audience, can find his work more or less accessible, more or less successful, more or less well-executed. But finally this hardly matters.
Endo has taken Jesus quite seriously; he has decided to write from the world of the sorrowful, the weak, the cowardly. As Endo spins their lives onto the page, he doesn't glorify them or heal them; he is their companion. He can do this because the act of writing so perfectly resembles the act of prayer. All that is needed is faith and the knowledge that a single voice counts, and an essential unwavering listener waits.
