Endö Shüsaku

A Literature of Reconciliation

Mark B. Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134825479
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Endö Shüsaka is probably the most widely translated of all Japanese authors. In this first major study of Endö's works, Mark Williams moves the discussion on from the well-worn depictions of Endö as the 'Japanese Graham Greene', and places him in his own political and cultural context.

1
TOWARDS
RECONCILIATION

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

(Hamlet, Act 2, sc. ii)

We have tacitly assumed, for some centuries past, that there is no relation between literature and theology. This is not to deny that literature—I mean, again, primarily works of the imagination— has been, is, and probably always will be judged by some moral standards.

(T.S.Eliot)

If it has been believed hitherto that the human shadow was the source of all evil, it can now be ascertained on closer investigation that the unconscious man, that is, his shadow, does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc.

(C.G.Jung)

The discussion in the second half of the Introduction described, in broad brush strokes, the distinctive features of the literature of the Daisan no shinjin, the group with which Endo found affiliation on his return from his period of study in France. Critics have, as noted, played down the significance of this ‘nominal’ affiliation,¹ choosing rather to identify Endo as engaged in a somewhat lonely literary pursuit in search of a form of Christianity better suited to the Japanese spiritual climate than that he had inherited with his baptism into the Catholic tradition, undertaken largely at his mother’s instigation, at the age of 11. The reasons for this critical response are not difficult to discern. Not only is there an overwhelming tendency, pervading the author’s entire oeuvre, to address in his literature the questions raised by his faith; equally, there is at first glance very little to link Endo’s diligently researched and carefully crafted portrayals of characters who bear little overt resemblance to the author who created them with the seemingly indefatigable emphasis on young male protagonists who appear to double with their authors, at least in physical and autobiographical detail, that characterises the works of other members of the group.

The distinction is marked, the jealously guarded distance between Endo as author and the protagonists who occupy the pages of his narratives seemingly at complete odds with the portrayals of protagonists, all too readily interpreted as self-portraits, in the works with which fellow members of the coterie established their reputations. The portrayal of the directionless Shintaro struggling to come to terms with the reality of his dying mother in Yasuoka Shotaro’s Kaihen no kokei (A View by the Sea, 1959; trans. 1984); that of Shunsuke desperately seeking to halt the fragmentation of his family in Kojima Nobuo’s Hoyo kazoku (Embracing Family, 1966); that of Toshio helpless to stem his wife’s psychological disorder occasioned by his own marital infidelity in Shimao Toshio’s Shi no toge (The Sting of Death, 1960–77): the seemingly overt attention to autobiographical detail in such works, repeated in each case in a string of short stories ostensibly focusing on the same events in the author’s personal lives, seems a far cry from even the earliest Endo narratives. Here, in contrast we shall see a variety of protagonists, ranging from a French student-turned-Nazi collaborator, through a doctor implicated, however vicariously, in the wartime experiments in vivisection on Allied POWs, to a Western missionary desperately seeking to circumvent the ban on all Christian proselytisation imposed by the Tokugawa shogunate between 1600 and 1867. In short, in contrast to the proliferation of protagonists in the texts of the other members of the Daisan no shinjin who appear to echo the factual reality of the lives of the artists who created them (whether delivered as first- or third-person narratives), Endo’s corpus seems devoid of attention to such autobiographical detail. Not only is his oeuvre notable for a marked dearth of first-person narratives,² but the various protagonists are clearly distinguished from their models, even where these are identifiable. To cite but one example, as Endo himself remarked with reference to the various wives who populate his works:

[In the creation of a particular character], I obviously take certain traits from various people: for example, my portraits of my wife are actually an amalgam of various traits stemming from my observation of various wives.³

In view of the superficial distinctions between Endo’s narratives and those of his peers in the Daisan no shinjin, the tendency to downplay the significance of his affiliation with the coterie is understandable. And it is certainly true that, for all the close personal friendships he forged with several of its members,⁴ Endo remained at best a fringe contributor to the formal activities of the group. But here we are merely scratching the surface: a consideration of the qualities attributed to the group in the Introduction to this book suggests a greater degree of affinity between Endo and his peers— one born of a mutual determination to probe deeper into the psychological worlds of their protagonists—than is readily acknowledged. It is to these points of common interest—and, in particular, to Endo’s very real contribution to examination of the literary possibilities of these shared concerns— that this discussion will now turn.

In the Introduction, much was made of the tendency, shared by the various members of the Daisan no shinjin, to focus on the inner horizons of their creations through more consistent observation of the artistic distance separating author and protagonists than is evident in many of the pre-war shishosetsu. The commitment was shared by Endo, whose determination to fathom the psychology of his characters is, with the arguable exception of Shimao Toshio’s portraits of his protagonists struggling to come to terms with the concept of the previously unconscionable ‘future’ following his aborted kamikaze mission, unrivalled within the group. For Endo, the challenge for all his narrators was to highlight the ‘deep inside of man’,⁵ a challenge that can be directly attributed to the author’s vision of the composite human being as summarised in a 1988 interview:

Man is a splendid and beautiful being and, at the same time, man is a terrible being as we recognised in Auschwitz —God knows well this monstrous dual quality of man.⁶

The portrayal is of the individual as representing an amalgam of conflicting forces, the implicit challenge to Endo, as author, being the need to seek a literary reconciliation of the conscious and unconscious elements within human nature. As we shall see, the attempt can be seen as the defining moment of Endo’s oeuvre. The effect of this attempt, however—the portrayal of protagonists engaged in the gradual process of coming to terms with a deeper level of their being than that to which they had previously assented —is reminiscent of a similar tendency that pervades the literature of the Daisan no shinjin.

We are talking here of Endo as an author at the forefront of the move towards assertion of a ‘new literary self, a process already identified as integral to an understanding of the narratives of the Daisan no shinjin. Of even greater relevance to our current discussion is the extent to which, in pursuit of this goal, Endo conforms to the model, depicted in the Introduction, of the Daisan no shinjin authors exercising greater care in the positioning of their narrators, in an attempt thereby to give voice to the full extent of the conflict within the self. For Yasuoka, for Shimao and the other members of the Daisan no shinjin, as we have noted, the ensuing ‘splintered perspective’ contributed to the overall depiction of characters engaged in constant confrontation with an ‘other’—whether as an independent being or as an alternative facet of the self with whom the protagonist seeks reconciliation. Nowhere, however, is the technique used as extensively, or with such effect, as in the Endo narrative as, in work after work, the ‘voice of the narrator’s doppelgänger—his spirit double’ results in a subversion of initial character depictions and a reassessment of narrated events. The ‘critical commentary’ provided in this way is integral to Endo’s design and, as such, we shall be returning to this aspect of the author’s art later in this chapter. At this stage, however, let us remain with the Daisan no shinjin— with a consideration of other narrative elements, identified in the Introduction as representative of the group, which serve to locate the Endo shosetsu more readily within this remit than is often acknowledged.

One aspect, cited in the Introduction as distinguishing the literature of the Daisan no shinjin from their precursors in the pre-war shishosetsu, was the emergence, in the former, of a truly ‘socialised self’. In contrast to the earlier protagonists who remained, on the whole, isolated from social interaction, there is a concern for the social implications of their scenarios in the works of the Daisan no shinjin that leads to portrayal of protagonists who accept their status as insignificant entities in a much broader social spectrum. The generalisation certainly appears to hold true for the Endo narrative. Whether it be the protagonists of several of the earlier works, troubled by a social conscience in the wake of their instinctive responses to confrontation with the forces of evil,⁷ the foreign missionary, Rodrigues in Silence, whose actions are dictated, in large measure, by concern for the outcome of his actions on the Japanese whose destinies rest largely in his hands, or the self-effacing Otsu in Endo’s final novel, Fukai kawa (Deep River, 1993; trans. 1994), the Endo protagonist is acutely aware of his membership of a larger society. As such, he is rarely tempted to determine the course of his actions without reference to the implications of this on those with whom his destiny is linked.

Closely tied to this determination to look beyond the immediate worlds of his protagonists is the tendency, again identified earlier as a distinguishing feature of the Daisan no shinjin text, to allow the sensibilities of more than one ‘focus figure’ to dominate his dramas. The Endo protagonist is an elusive figure, the novel in which a single protagonist is identified at the outset as the fulcrum around which the subsequent drama will revolve and whose perspective subsequently dominates the entire text the exception rather than the rule. Instead, the Endo narrative tends to cater for a variety of ‘focus figures’, each of whom is provided with the opportunity, however rare, to assume centre stage and whose perspective consequently dominates, if only briefly. The technique used to give expression to these varying voices may vary—from the exchange of letters in Shiroi hito (White Man, 1955), through the alternating diary extracts of Yoshioka and Mitsu in Watashi ga suteta onna (The Girl I Left Behind, 1964; trans. 1994) and the carefully considered juxtaposition of the perspectives of Velasco and Hasekura in Samurai (The Samurai, 1980; trans. 1982), to the overt division of Deep River into chapters devoted to the worlds, not merely of Otsu and Mitsuko, the purported protagonists, but of a series of other fellow tourists on the trip to the Ganges.⁸ The effect in each case, however, is similar: by virtue of the introduction of the perspectives on narrated events of a series of ‘protagonists’ —by implicitly questioning the validity of any single perspective—the author attributes a more universal significance to his narratives than he would have achieved with a single-focus narrative style.

There remains, however, one further characteristic that provides a powerful link between Endo and his contemporaries in the coterie. The distinction between ‘factual reality’ and remaining ‘true’ to the dramas as they evolve even whilst emphasising the distance between author and protagonist was cited in the Introduction as central to the discussions of the evolution to the shosetsu effected by the Daisan no shinjin in general in the immediate post-war period. The issue was to prove crucial to Endo in his attempts to portray, by means of imaginative reconstruction, the ‘truth’ surrounding his own, intensely personal, spiritual journey. In all but a few cases, the protagonists of his narratives may bear little overt resemblance, in terms of physical and autobiographical detail, to Endo himself. For all this, however, there is a degree of empathy, an identification with the pains and struggles that his protagonists experience as an inevitable part of their journeys toward greater self-awareness no less intense than that of the other authors in the group. The details of the events depicted—the agonising choices with which so many of his protagonists are confronted—may bear little resemblance even to the archival records that represent the wellspring of so much of Endo’s literary production, let alone to anything that the author may have personally experienced. For all their ‘fabrication’, however, there is an underlying ‘truth’ to the events, one that is close to the author’s heart. Indeed, as Endo admitted in an interview with the critic, Kazusa Hideo, even in the case of those protagonists who ultimately succumb to the force of evil, there is an empathy between author and protagonist born of a sense of shared spiritual turmoil:

If I had been confronted with the decisions faced by [the Nazi collaborator in White Man, by Suguro in Umi to dokuyaku (The Sea and Poison, 1957; trans. 1972) or by Rodrigues in Silence], who am I to say that I would not have responded as they did?⁹

The Endo protagonist is, in this sense, remarkably ‘true’ to the reality of the author’s personal experience. More specifically, however, the empathy achieved with his protagonists is a powerful testimony to the consistency with which Endo has indeed sought to pursue the doubts occasioned by his own spiritual journey in his fictional narratives. Before examining the texts themselves, therefore, let us briefly consider the salient elements of the journey upon which the author embarked on that December day in 1933 when, at the behest of his mother and aunt, he agreed to go through with the ritual of baptism into the Catholic tradition.

Unforeseen consequences

As Endo himself was the first to admit, the full significance of the baptismal vows was lost on the young boy. The following depiction of events of that day may benefit from more than thirty years of hindsight. It nevertheless serves to encapsulate a sense of the frivolity with which Endo and his friends viewed the entire ceremony, a frivolity disturbed only by frustration at the enforced abandonment of the game of soccer they had been enjoying before being summoned inside to take part in the service:

I was baptised along with several other children from the neighbourhood on Easter Sunday. Or more precisely, since this was not an act taken of my own free will, perhaps I should say that I was forced into baptism. At the urging of my aunt and my mother, I went along with the other children and, despite my predilection for disturbing the class, eventual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Towards Reconciliation
• 2. White Man, Yellow Man
• 3. The Sea and Poison, Wonderful Fool, the Girl I Left Behind
• 4. Silence
• 5. The Samurai
• 6. Scandal
• 7. Deep River
• Afterword
• Appendix A: A brief biography of Endo Shusaku
• Appendix B: Synopses of the works discussed
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index