Five by Endo: (New Directions Bibelots) [Paperback]

Shusaku Endo (Author), Van C. Gessel (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Bibelots | Publication Date: June 2000

Five wonderful stories by the Japanese master. Winner of every major Japanese literary prize, his work translated around the globe, Shusaku Endo (1923-1996) is a great and unique figure in the literature of the twentient century. "Irrevocably enmeshed in Japanese culture, he is by virtue of his religion [Endo was Roman Catholic] irrevocably alienated from it" (Geoffrey O'Brian, Village Voice). It is this aspect that has made Endo so particularly intriguing to his readership at home and abroad. Now gathered in a New Directions Bibelot edition are five of Endo's supreme short stories exemplifying his style and his interests, presenting, as it were, Endo in a nutshell. "Unzen," the opening story, touches on the subject of Silence Endo's most famous novel -- that is the torture and martyrdom of Christians in seventeenth-century Japan. Next comes "A Fifty-year-old Man" in which Mr. Chiba takes up ballroom dancing and faces the imminent death of his brother and his dog Whitey. In "MJapanese in Warsaw" a business man has a strange encounter; in "The Box," an old photo album and a few postcards have a tale to reveal. Finally included is "The Case of Isobe," the opening chapter of Endo's novel Deep River in which Isobe, a member of a tour group, hopes to find in India the reincarnation of the wife he took so much for granted.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Not as well known in the West as Mishima or Kawabata, the late Endo is one of Japan's most revered novelists, his most famous work being Silence, in which the Roman Catholic author deals with the torture and martyrdom of Christians in 17th-century Japan. That theme carries over into the first two of these finely crafted and engaging stories. "Unzen" tells of a Japanese history student who visits the Valley of Hell, where Christians were tortured in the hot springs on Mt. Unzen. Mired in his own "spiritual slovenliness," the student struggles to understand why they embraced martyrdom. "Why had they been so indomitable?" he asks. "Japanese in Warsaw" is a moving and merciless story of 10 Japanese businessmen who visit Warsaw mainly for the impoverished, beautiful prostitutes. The tourists mock the city and are uninterested in its history, but their trip takes on an unexpected resonance when they learn that Warsaw residents associate the Japanese men with a noble Polish priest, Father Kolbe, who once lived in Nagasaki, and who was killed at Auschwitz. This story ends with an eerie revelation, and there is an eerieness, too, to "The Box," in which a collection of letters and postcards delineate the life of a French/Japanese woman who may have been a spy during WWII. In "A Fifty-year-old Man," Mr. Chiba, feeling his mortality, takes up ballroom dancing as he deals with his brother's illness and the death of his faithful dog. The final story is the opening chapter of Endo's novel Deep River, in which Isobe's dying wife sets the plot in motion by saying to him, "... I'll be reborn somewhere in this world. Look for me... find me... promise... promise!" Endo's sentences are as ephemeral (and as beautiful) as mist, yet they evoke sights, sounds, tastes and smells to make the ordinary exquisite. Like a mouthwatering appetizer, this small sampler will stimulate a hunger for more of Endo's work. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Endo's sentences...evoke sights, sounds, tastes and smells to make the ordinary exquisite. -- Publishers Weekly, 1 May 2000

The stories collected in Five by Endo are among his best. -- The New York Times Book Review, Janice P. Nimura, 30 July 2000

The stories collected in Five by Endo are among his best.... -- The New York Times Book Review, Janice P. Nimura

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation; First Edition edition (June 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811214397
• ISBN-13: 978-0811214391
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.8 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #846,341 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Five By Endo, August 29, 2000

By 

Rebecca (Tucson, AZ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Five by Endo: (New Directions Bibelots) (Paperback)

If ever there were an author who could wedge a knife into the cracks of the human soul, it must be Shusaku Endo.

In these five stories -- Unzen, A Fifty-Year-Old Man, Japanese In Warsaw, The Box, and The Case of Isobe -- Endo draws back the curtain on a group of people obsessed with such themes as cowardice, sex, martyrdom, death and the love of animals.

With bleak eloquence and hard-edged compassion, Endo creates a banquet of irony and emotion that succeeds in filling the void created by 95% of modern fiction.

If you are weary of the predictable and formulaic fiction churned out by the big publishing houses, I recommend this slim volume. Shusaku Endo's stories feel like a gust of cold, clean and pungent mountain air from the top of Japan's highest mountains.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Five Easy Pieces, Vintage Endo, February 5, 2001

By 

Peter Fennessy (Bloomfield Hills, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Five by Endo: (New Directions Bibelots) (Paperback)

Mr. Endo is a rarity: a Japanese Catholic novelist, a literary Sadao Watanabe. His Catholicism and literary studies in Europe have made him the most accessible of Japanese novelists to the western reader. Those who know and appreciate his work will welcome these five short stories, and will recognize his usual style and typical concerns. A novelist retraces the steps of the Christian martyrs of Shimabara, but he is more interested in and identified with the apostate who agonizes spiritually because he did not have the faith to suffer physically. Japanese tourists on the make and their impassive guide wander Warsaw and find in the strangest of places St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish missionary to Japan who died in Auschwitz. A box of old postcards uncovers the secret life of a missionary's daughter during wartime Japan. A fifty-year old man takes dancing lessons amid intimations of mortality. A man who could not share his feelings with his wife watches her die and then wonders about her possible reincarnation. The last of these short stories is in fact the opening chapter of the novel "Deep River," but it becomes more intriguing on its own. Those who don't know Endo yet will find this a tasty and representative sampling of his work. Van C. Gessel, who has translated at least six Endo novels, has provided a very readable text.