Is Christianity an exclusively Western faith? In his most famous novel Silence, published in 1966 and adapted by Martin Scorsese in 2016, Japanese Catholic writer Shūsaku Endō (1932-1996) follows the stories of seventeenth century Jesuit missionaries in Japan amid brutal persecution. At the end, the missionaries seem to fall into despair, failing to convert others and even losing faith themselves. What should we make of such stories, particularly considering Endō’s own experience as a Roman Catholic in Japan?
Though Silence, being set in the 1600s, seems primarily to be a historical novel, the newly published collection of Endō’s works, Portraits of a Mother, suggest Silence is far more autobiographical than it appears.
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