The anguish of an alien:

Confessions of a Japanese Christian

by David L. Swain

D e e p River. into Japanese; another was Masahisa Uemura's Japanese

By Shusaku Endo. Translated by Van C. Gessel New translation of Christian hymns. Other factors were the
Directions, 224 pp., $19.95. translation of Russian literature by Shimei Futabatei, trans-
lations of German poetry by Ogai Mori and essays by To-
The Final Martyrs. hoku Kitamura, one of the first Japanese writers attracted to
By Shusaku Endo. Translated by Van C. Gessel. New Christianity. These factors all helped to shape what Kamei
Directions, 208 pp., $21.95. called the "spiritual revolution" that followed the political
and social revolution carried out by Meiji leaders.

W
HEN WORLD WAR II ended in 1945 there was not A spiritual revolution involves the emotions, and it was
a single active Christian writer in Japan. By 1972,, in the concomitant "emotional revolution" of the late Meiji
when the Christian Literature Society (Kyo Bun years that translated hymns played a crucial role, provid-
Kwan) began publishing its 18-volume anthology ing a new poetic language that allowed adequate expres-
of contemporary Christian literature, there were over 20. Of sion of the faith confession that lies at the heart of Chris-
the 12 novelists included in the series, seven are Catholic tian experience. From this language, says Kamei, a Bud-
and five Protestant; of five playwrights, dhist, the Japanese learned about the act
three are Catholic and two Protestant. The and meaning of confession, something
anthology was edited by novelists Rinzo Shi- which had no precedent in Japanese tradi-
ina, a Protestant, and Shusaku Endo, a Endo's first aim tion. Buddhism has a sense of penitence,
Catholic who is undoubtedly the most popu- as a writer but nothing like the awakening of self in
lar and widely read Christian writer in Japan. was to make the modern European sense. From the
In a recent issue of Japan Christian 64 hymns and the Bible, and from the church
Quarterly, Kaname Takado, publisher of far-away" attendance common among young intel-
the anthology, describes "a Japanese Chris- Christianity lectuals at the time, aspiring Meiji writers
tian writer s life and work, in a 'heathen' land came to realize that, as Kamei says, there is
where Christians are less than 1 percent of
something such a thing as "the freedom to confess."
the population, as a threefold struggle: to be close and Kamei also realized that it is impossible
a Christian, to be a Japanese and to perse- familiar to transpose meaning fully from one lan-
vere as a writer." That more than 20 Chris- guage to another. Words in each language
tian writers had emerged from this struggle
to the have nuances that are linked to native con-
was in itself "a miracle," Takado said. Japanese. cepts and customs. The appeal of transla-
The pre-World War II generation of tions is "the spell they cast on us by the mi-
Christian writers faced the same complex rage-like charm of taking the language,
struggle. With the exception of influential Christian apolo- thought and feelings of another place and people and
gist Kanzo Uchimura, who had little use for literature any- grafting them into the life and pulse of our own." Kamei
way, all others lost the battle. Their faith eventually gave claims that "excellent translations of the Bible and hymns
way to a kind of humanism, or to a special mode of thought possessed the power to penetrate the hearts of Japanese
and style known in Japan as "naturalism." None of the people and actually evoked responses of faith."
Christian writers in the 1945-95 period, however, has re- Along with the reformation of language born of the
nounced the faith. Takado attributes their survival to a emotional and spiritual revolutions, there was another
clearer grasp of and commitment to the faith. crucial formative factor: the freedom of romantic love. In
Endo s readiness to confess gnawing doubts about his the strict Confucian world of premodern Japan the
own faith or faithfulness suggest an affinity with his prewar straightforward literary treatment of sexual matters was
predecessors. While genuine, this affinity is partly one of taboo, and open treatment of sexuality did not appear in
style, a confessional style that issued from the Christian literature until after World War II. But the reality of ro-
encounter with Japan of the Meiji years (1868-1912). A mantic love, so widely acknowledged in prewar literature,
brief look at that encounter may be useful to appreciating provoked a heightened sense of sin. This gave rise to a se-
Endo s tenacity. rious tension between religion and literature, then to the
Literary critic Katsuichiro Kamei has identified five de-
velopments in the Meiji era that helped shape modern David L. Swain is a freelance writer and retired United
Japanese literature. The first was the translation of the Bible Methodist missionary in Japan.

CHRISTIAN CENTURY November22-29,1995 1120

exaggerated tendency among a large coterie of writers to "the face of Jesus on the fumie is the mother's face in
dwell on the ugly and harsh dimensions of human nature, Japan." He notes Erich Fromms distinction between
the trend known as naturalism. mother-religion and father-religion. In the latter, God is to
be feared; he gets angry, judges and punishes. Mother-re-

S
OME OF the writers immersed in this naturalist ligion is different: God treats us as a mother treats a bad
mode seemed grossly egocentric and self-indul- child. She forgives and suffers with us. For this distinction
gent. Yet at its best this mode became a secularized Endo need not have relied on Fromm alone. Most East
tell-it-like-it-is confessional style that contempo- Asian countries have a strong shamanistic tradition where-
rary Japanese writers have adopted as a way of attesting to in the gods, often female, are nurturing and forgiving. In
their own sincerity. Endo has made himself a master of this contrast to this is the enduring and dominant Confucian
style: much of his writing is autobiographical in its source tradition, which is more interested in order than in deity;
if not in its specifics. What sets Endo apart from prewar like a traditional father, it is ethically rigid and demanding,
writers is that he uses the confessional expression of his and fully capable of anger and punishment.
doubts and failings as a way of indicating how doggedly de- In any case, Endo found that European Christianity
termined he is to hang on to his faith. This point is particu- overemphasized the paternal, judgmental aspect of reli-
larly evident in the 11 stories compiled in The Final Mar- gion, and neglected the maternal, nurturing, forgiving side
tyrs and in the novel Deep River, ably translated by of faith. Silence marked the end of the period in which he
Brigham Young University scholar Van C. Gessel. (Deep focused on rectifying this imbalance.
River has recently been made into a film by Kei Kumai.) Most of Endo's themes recur throughout his works, as
In a 1973 essay, Endo described his sense of distance evidenced in The Final Martyrs. The tide story concerns
from both Christianity and its European cultural setting. the "far-away Christianity" resisted by Japanese culture,
At his mother's insistence and his sister's bidding, he was and the pain of apostasy. "Adieu" reflects the alienation he
baptized at age 11. He enjoyed an untroubled boyhood felt while studying in France. In "Shadows" and "The Last
until he entered prep school, where he dis- Supper" we find the compassion of Jesus
covered that his faith was a "ready-made for sinful weaklings. Endo's confessional
suit that did not fit." At the university he style is particularly vivid in several stories
majored in French literature and read Endo uses that draw on his childhood in China, and
many European "conversion accounts." his confessions his parents' divorce in 1933. The theme of
They seemed to him like a return to one's paternal-maternal tension underlies
hometown. By contrast, his own journey of
ofdoubt "Heading Home," a story of his mother's
faith was not a homeward-bound journey; and failure funeral. A Japanese priest serving in the
instead, it filled him with "the anguish of an as a way Philippines returns home, a stolen dog
alien." The first Japanese student to study finds his way home and now his mother has
overseas after the war, he was in France for
of indicating headed home (heaven). Maybe, Endo im-
two and a half years and his loneliness was his determination plies, he too will someday make it home.
acute. But his main problem was his in- to hang The more forthrightly autobiographical "A
tense sense of distance not only from Eu- Sixty-Year-Old Man" suggests Endo's
ropean culture and sensibilities, but even onto struggle to be a faithful Christian/Japanese/
more from Westernized Christianity his faith. writer by exposing his vague temptations to
Hence his first aim as an aspiring writer flirt with teenage girls at the very time he
was to make "far-away Christianity" into was trying to rewrite his Life ofJesus. Only
something close and familiar for the Japanese. "The Box" touches on the problem of indigenous world-
In this endeavor he needed to develop a suitable style, view: it depicts a sincere European woman, trapped in
and in his first medium-length novel, White Man (1955), he wartime Japan and desperate for food, who is cruelly be-
apparently found the key, for it won him the coveted Akuta- trayed by the secret police—an ugly picture of a supreme
gawa Prize for promising new writers. The crowning success state that renders all else relative and thus dispensable.
of this initial phase of his writing was Silence (1966), the story The stories of The Final Martyrs, with publication
of a foreign missionary in Nagasaki during the early 17th- dates ranging from 1959 to 1985, are a good sampling of
century persecution of the Christians. The missionary's in- his style and themes. But there is no distinct thread that in-
herited image of Christ is of a Jesus of majesty and power, an dicates Endo's own consciousness of the evolution of his
orderly Jesus who is himself governed by order. The hero, work. The inclusion of an essay like "The Anguish of an
like many of his Japanese associates, is forced by his perse- Alien" would have served this purpose well.
cutors to tread on afumie plaque with an image of Christ or

E
the Holy Mother Mary. Refusing to step on the plaque NDO HAS labored to depict Jesus as one who is
meant torture and death; the alternative was betrayal and not the all-powerful, majestic Jesus, but one who
renunciation of faith. The threatened hero sees in thefumie stands with us an ever-faithful companion. He
an image worn smooth by the footsteps of broken-spirited undertook seven visits to Israel with a twofold
apostates: the face of a Christ who suffers as we suffer. goal: to create a portrait of Jesus that would ring true to
Endo credits critic Jun Eto with having clearly seen that Japanese readers, and to construct a background that drew

1121 CHRISTIAN CENTURY November22-29,1995

on more than his own subjective feelings. The result was a gether when they happen to join the same sightseeing
novel, Around the Dead Sea, and a critical biography, The tour of India. Isobe has recently lost his wife to cancer,
Life of Jesus, both issued in 1973. and is on a vague and somewhat guilty search for her in
What impressed Endo most during his sojourns in Is- some reincarnated form. Mitsuko is a bitchy divorcee
rael was the absence of rivers like those he knew in Japan. who has faked everything in life, including love; she has
The one river that looks like a river, he said, is the Jordan; no admitted goal except a curious longing to find a man
but it is-too small to be called a river, and it is framed by named Otsu, whom she once seduced. Kiguchi seeks ex-
bleak wilderness, not fields and villages. It falls short of the piation; during a desperate retreat in Burma during
river as the image of the flow of humanity. But then he vis- Japan's Asian war, he had eaten the flesh of a fallen com-
ited India, where he saw people burn their dead and throw rade. The tour guide Enami came to India to study reli-
the ashes into the Ganges. "I also saw them lay the corpse gion, but he works as a guide to make a living; he is both
of a child in a small boat and set it adrift in that mother the prism that provides the reader with insights into
river/ The land that gave birth to the religion in which India's realities and the mirror that reflects the crassness
Jesus was brought up is a land without a mother river. I of culturally illiterate tourists.
think perhaps Jesus himself suffered from this lack." While each member of the party finds some solution to
If it sounds audacious to suggest that Jesus suffered a his or her problem, the story focuses on the strange re-
cultural handicap, consider this: Endo suggests that Jesus union of Mitsuko with Otsu, whose former awkwardness
found a substitute for a mother river in the Sea of Galilee. as a student is now magnified by his status as a Catholic
It was from this lake region that Jesus drew together his priest—or his nonstatus, for he is constantly reprimanded
community of followers—those who would betray and for- by his superiors for some discrepancy or perversion of tra-
sake him, but then become men of conviction and boldly ditional doctrine or practice. An outcast from his own re-
spread their faith in him. ligious community, Otsu locates the corpses of the poor
Deep River grew from Endo's discovery of the Ganges who have no one to carry their bodies to the cremation
and from his effort to rediscover a face of Jesus that site, and casts their ashes into the Ganges. He does this
would appeal to the "pagan" sensibilities of the Japanese. because he believes that if "that man" were here, he
His confessional instincts produce in the novel a gener- would do the same.
ous range of Japanese characters. They are brought to- The Japanese tourists are appalled that he puts the

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 ashes of the dead into a river teem-
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A Special Offer from the CHRISTIAN CENTURY ters. Mitsuko is equally repelled by
Otsu's weird calling, for she sees
The articles constituting the CENTURY'S
Sexual Ethics and the Church Otsu s God as impotent and pathet-
symposium on sexual ethics and the A Christian Century Symposium ic. Yet in the end she wades into the
church, which appeared in these
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pages between February 1987 and
April 1988, are now available in a sin-
Mitsuko turned her body in
gle volume, including an introduction
the direction of the rivers flow.
and conclusion by James B. Nelson.
"This is not a real prayer. Fm
•
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Essays by:
tionalized, embarrassed at her-
John J. McNeill
self. "Like my fabrications of
Karen Lebacqz
love, this is just a fabricated
Mary Pellauer
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Allen J. Moore
At the end of her range of vi-
Lois Gehr Livezey
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Charles E. Curran Introduction and Conclusion
by James B Nelson there the light sparkled, as
Merle Longwood
though it were eternity itself.
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 was yearning for through all the many mistakes of my lin solo that plays the tune of only one aspect of [our]
past. inner self. Rather it should be an orchestra that responds
She clutched her fist tightly and searched for the fig- to all the chords of [our] being, just because it is [ours],
ure of Otsu beside the funeral pyres. good or bad/'
What I can believe in now is the sight of all these If literature is to deal with the fullness of humanity,
people, each carrying his or her own individual bur- then it must be able to go beyond psychological novels, or
dens, praying at this deep river. At some point, the those which tackle the unconscious. It must forge its way
words Mitsuko muttered to herself were transmuted into a third dimension: "the territory of demons." Endo
into the words of a prayer. I believe that the river em- does not boast that his work always gets into the demonic,
braces these people and carries them away. A river of but he feels that his efforts to do so set his work apart. If it
humanity. The sorrows of this deep river of humanity. does, it is because, as he says, "I have to read the Bible. It
And I am part of it. is the supreme work of literature. It excels Greek tragedy
She did not know to whom she directed this manu- and other drama in describing man's struggle with the
factured prayer. Perhaps it was towards the Onion transcendent." •
[Otsus playful word for
God] that Otsu pursued.
Or perhaps it was towards
something great and eter-
nal that could not be limit-
ed to the Onion.

When Silence was first

INTRODUCTION TO
NEW TESTAMENT A clear and comprehensive introduction to New
Testament textual criticism, this revised edi-
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River may also spark criti- J. HAROLD GREENLEE New Testament it has . . . no equal in English."
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cism, for Endo suggests that
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duism, Buddhism and Islam.
THE FORMATION OF
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canon of the Old and New Testaments, in
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LEE MARTIN MCDONALD
braced by the eternal arms
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JESUS THE JEWISH
THEOLOGIAN Y oung establishes jesus firmly within the con-
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BRAD H. YOUNG interpreting the New Testament. Insights from
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ROMANS
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I n his foreword to Schlatter's classic exegetical/
theological commentary, Peter Stuhlmacher
notes: "Schlatter endeavored to comprehend the
That, however, is not of Cod apostle's message holistically and without stric-
Endo's primary concern. He ADOLF SCHLATTER tures. . . . he obviously thereby did us in the pre-
has always been suspicious TRANSLATED BY sent a service for which we ought to be grateful,
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1125 CHRISTIAN CENTURY November22-29,1995

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