Customer Reviews

Stained Glass Elegies (Penguin International Writers S)

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Somehow Endo--or, I suppose, his translators--always seem to make simplicity a true virtue. His writing tends to be clear and direct, but not pushy--he lets you draw your own conclusions, a trait he shares with Abe Kobo and most of the rest of their generation of Japanese novelists. Anyway this book is lovely in that tradition, dealing with the conflicts entailed by being Catholic in Japan and living across cultures in general. While I don't have any experience personally of strong religious conflict, the stories he tells ring true on other levels as well. Particulalrly here I liked the story of the Japanese student on exchange in a French university.

This book is a collection of eleven short stories written by Shusaku Endo. Some of the stories are more like essays giving the reader a glimpse of the life of the author.

Endo spent his early childhood in Manchuria before the war. After his father divorced his mother, he went with his mother back to Japan. Divorce was a big issue in Japan then. His mother turned to the Catholic Church for solace, and Shusaku Endo became baptised as well.

Then the war came. Being Christian was once again looked at as following a foreign religion.

Shusaku Endo never felt quite comfortable with the religion.

In the story, "A Forty-Year-Old Man", which is about a man called Suguro who is about to undergo a major operation, there is this scene of Suguro going to confession.

Suguro said these words at confession, "I...When I was a child, I was baptized because my parents wanted me to be, not because I wanted to. As a result, I went to church for many years as a formality, because it had become a habit. But after that particular day, I knew that I could never cast off the ill-fitting clothes my parents had dressed me in."

Was that also how Shisuka Endo felt about his being a Catholic?

In "Despicable Bastard", "Fuda-no-Tsuji" and "Unzen", he makes us realise chances are, we are all cowards and under torture, chances are we will apostasize our faiths! But, and this is the interesting part, what was not written but some how one is made to feel it, is this feeling that Christ would forgive and understand that we are after all human, and therefore, cowards.

This theme of apostasy is further examined in another work of Shisuka Endo, "Silence". The book "Silence" and this book are highly recommended.