Thrilled to learn that filmmaker Martin Scorsese will shoot a film adaption of Shusaku Endo's "Silence." Silence is an incredible historical novel about the brutal 17th-century persecutions of Japanese Christians. Endo is a kind of Japanese version of Graham Green, the British novelist and Catholic convert whose tortured characters in classics like "The Power and the Glory" and "The End of the Affair" struggled to resolve conflicts between the demands of their faith and the moral dilemmas posed by human existence. I lived in Japan for four years and read most of Endo's novels.
I especially recommend his collection of short stories, "The Sea and Poison." Based on historical accounts of Japanese war crimes during the Second World War, it weaves together the individual stories of women and men appointed to a Japanese medical team, which is ordered to perform illicit experiments on American POWs. Another memorable work is "The Samurai," an historical novel about a Japanese samurai who accompanies a Christian missionary on a trip to the New World.
After I returned to the United States, and heard that Endo had died, I wrote an article about him for Crisis magazine.
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