Silence

Sustained by dreams of glorious martyrdom, a seventeenth-century Portuguese missionary in Japan administers to the outlawed Christians until Japanese authorities capture him & force him to watch the torture of his followers, promising to stop if he will renounce Christ.°°° Shûsaku Endô(遠藤周作), born in Tokyo in 1923, was raised by his mother & an aunt in Kobe where he converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of eleven. At Tokyo's Keio University he majored in French literature, graduating BA in 1949, before furthering his studies in French Catholic literature at the University of Lyon in France between 1950 & 1953. A major theme running through his books, which have been translated into many languages, including English, French, Russian & Swedish, is the failure of Japanese soil to nurture the growth of Christianity. Before his death in 1996, Endo was the recipient of a number of outstanding Japanese literary awards: the Akutagawa Prize, Mainichi Cultural Prize, Shincho Prize, & Tanizaki Prize.(from the backcover of Volcano). Beneath the light of the candle I am sitting with my hands on my knees, staring in front of me. And I keep turning over in my mind the thought that I am at the end of the earth, in a place which you do not know and which your whole lives through you will never visit. It is 1640 and Father Sebastian Rodrigues, an idealistic Jesuit priest, sets sale for Japan determined to help the brutally oppressed Christians there. He is also desperate to discover the truth about his former mentor, rumoured to have renounced his faith under torture. Rodrigues cannot believe the stories about a man he so revered, but as his journey takes him deeper into Japan and then into the hands of those who would crush his faith, he finds himself forced to make an impossible choice: whether to abandon his flock or his God.