Portraits of a Mother: A Novella and Stories
By Shūsaku Endō (tr. Van Gessel)
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025, 224 pages, $18)
A rocky, precipitous islet called Takahoko once sat in the mouth of Nagasaki Bay, before modern land reclamation projects absorbed it. The Dutch merchants referred to the site as Papenberg — “Papist’s Hill” — on account of the hundreds of missionaries and Japanese Christians executed there during the Great Martyrdom of Nagasaki. During that grim period of the Tokugawa shogunate, Catholic priests and indigenous Kirishitan converts who refused to apostatize, who could not bring themselves to tread impiously on an image of Christ or Mary known as a fumi-e, were branded “the enemies of the gods, of Japan, and of the Buddhas,” and were deported, tortured, beheaded, impaled on spears, crucified on bamboo crosses, burnt at the stake, sewn up in sacks and thrown onto bonfires, suspended upside-down over a pit, buried alive, or hurled into the sea. The latter of these methods was considered preferable, allowing as it did for no possibility of Christian burial or the reclamation of holy relics, and so it was that the martyrs of Nagasaki were taken to the Papenberg and tossed from the cliff into the sea, either singly or strung together like beads on a rosary.
In Nagasaki, Edo, and other towns and cities through Tokugawa Japan, notice-boards featured posters offering rewards for the apprehension of Christians, and warning that “So long as the sun shall warm the earth, let no Christian be so bold as to come te Japan; and let all know that the King of Spain himself, or the Christian’s God, or the Great God of all, if he violates this command, shall pay for it with his head.” Not all Japanese Christians were willing to pay such a price. Some of them went underground, becoming Kakure Kirishitan (隠れキリシタン), “Hidden Christians,” living in far-flung fishing villages and inaccessible mountain fastnesses, where they recited prayers that sounded like Buddhist chants, yet included certain Latin, Portuguese, and Spanish phrases taken from the Gospel. They venerated statues of the Virgin Mary cleverly disguised as the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion, Kannon (Guanyin). If these Hidden Christians wished to keep crucifixes on their person or in their homes, they made sure to use umebori, paper crosses, that could be easily concealed, burnt, or swallowed in a pinch. If they desired to, say, display an icon of Saint John the Baptist, they would use clever allusions. A samurai in a kimono and topknot would not invite too much scrutiny, but the presence of tsubaki (camellia) flowers — traditional symbols of decapitation, since their blossoms drop off in their entirety instead of slowly wilting — provided a subtle reminder of the grisly fate of the Old Covenant’s last prophet.
The victims of the Great Martyrdom of Nagasaki, the Great Martyrdom of Edo, and other clerics and Japanese Christians murdered for their faith over the course of the 17th century earned their place in the annals of Catholic history. As the Rev. Father Emmanuel Kenners, o.s.f., wrote in his 1862 account of the persecutions, The Japanese Martyrs, it was the Church alone “that could, and did, give to the world such heroic models of Japan as the Martyrs of Japan. Their victory was a proof of God’s Omnipotence, and her approval of their heroism is a proof of her heavenly origin, and that He who formed her will protect her to the end, and preserve her holy and undefiled on the earth, until the wreck of the world shall have brought time to a termination.” Yet what of the Kakure Kirishitan who submitted to the authorities, who reluctantly trod on the fumi-e, who were not heroic models who achieved eternal victory in death, but instead nursed their forbidden, syncretic faith in secret for century after century. (RELATED: Sede Vacante: China’s Provocations Against the Vatican)
Shūsaku Endō’s Chronicling of Japan’s Hidden Christians
It was the novelist Shūsaku Endō (1923-1996) who most movingly chronicled the plight and the struggle for survival of Japan’s Hidden Christians. Baptized as a Catholic at the age of 11 or 12 at the behest of his convert mother, Endō’s writings would be inextricably intertwined with his Christian faith. Frequently cast as a sort of Japanese Graham Greene, he might equally be considered a Japanese François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, or Paul Claudel, French Catholic novelists whose works he studied while a student at the University of Lyon. Best known for his 1966 novel Chinmoku (Silence), a study of faith and apostasy adapted by Martin Scorsese in 2016, Endō returned to the theme of Christian persecution over and over again, in works like The Golden Country (1966), Iron Collar (1977), Kiku’s Prayer (1982), Sachiko (1982), and elsewhere.
“Please bear in mind,” wrote Gregor von Rezzori in his marvelous novel An Ermine in Czernopol, “that no one with anything to say ever said anything about anybody but himself.” The reader is free to agree or disagree with this bold contention, but it is nevertheless the case that Shūsaku Endō’s best work was either autobiographical or semi-autobiographical in nature. In his 1968 short story “Shadows,” he described various “major rivers that have given shape to my life. I’ve written a number of different novels over the years by thrusting my hands into those rivers. I’ve plucked up objects that have been deposited at the bottom of my river, washed the dirt from them, and arranged them all together.” Back in February of 2020, the novelist’s descendants donated some 30,000 of his previously unseen manuscript pages to the Endō Shūsaku Literary Museum in Nagasaki. Much to the delight of the librarians there, the hoard included a draft novella entitled Kage ni Taishite, literally “Against the Shadow” or “Confronting the Shadow,” written in the spring of 1963. The work soon appeared in print in Japan, and five years later in English, as part of the collection Portraits of a Mother: A Novella and Stories, translated by Van Gessel and published by the Margellos World Republic of Letters series of the Yale University Press.
In each of the autobiographical or semi-autobiographical stories included in Portraits of a Mother, we find Endō wrestling with his difficult childhood and tension-fraught relationship with his fervently Catholic mother. That Endō’s childhood was harrowing was par for the course when it comes to 20th-century Japanese writers — Natsume Sōseki, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, and Yukio Mishima all had a rough go of it early in life — but his boyhood was further complicated by his Christian faith. Born in Tokyo, Endō was raised in Dairen (Dalian), a city in the Kwantung Leased Territory of Manchuria. His parents divorced when he was 10, and he moved back to Japan, where he lived with his mother and aunt (who had both subsequently become Catholic) in Kobe. He was bullied on account of his faith and mocked as part of the “Amen crowd.” Caught in possession of a rosary at school, he was admonished by one of his teachers: “I have to wonder about a family living in this land blessed with an emperor that worships a god of foreigners.” Little wonder that Endō routinely likened Japan to a “mud-swamp” or “fen,” a place where Christianity would struggle to take root.
At times, Christianity struggled to take root in Endō himself. He resented his mother’s insistence on attending daily mass, the two of them rising at 5:30 am each day to make their way to the nearby Catholic church. Gradually, he became, as he admitted in “Spring in Galilee,” “two different young men — one while I was at school and the other when I returned home.” While visiting the Holy Land, Endō found himself
pondering Judas’s state of mind during the Last Supper. Sometimes during their lifetime, depending on their age, every Christian feels the way Judas felt. A young person feels as a young Judas might feel; an adolescent experiences what as adolescent Judas did; and now for me, a man past the age of forty, Judas’s feelings as he approached old age lurk in the hidden depths of my consciousness.
Thus did Endō come to understand the experience of the Hidden Christians, particularly after his mother died alone, while he was out carousing with a bad influence of a friend. Haunted by the “shadows of agony [that] lingered on his mother’s pale forehead,” as he recalled in the rediscovered masterpiece “Confronting the Shadows,” he obsessively brooded over human failings, turning them over and over in his mind, like mud-caked artifacts plucked from the river of his life. “The humiliation and anxiety of a traitor does not simply evaporate,” he observed in “Mothers” (1969). “The relentless gaze of their martyred comrades and the missionaries who had guided them continued to torment them from afar. No matter how diligently they tried, they could not be rid of those accusing eyes. Their prayers are therefore unlike the awkwardly translated Catholic invocations of the present day; rather they are filled with faltering expressions of grief and phrases imploring forgiveness.” In one of the most famous passages in Silence, we are told how “Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt.” In much the same way, it is easy to respect the glorious sacrifices of the Martyrs of Japan. It is more difficult, but equally necessary, to empathize with the apostates and the failures, the miserable and the corrupt.
Shūsaku Endō was a writer of uncommon empathy. At the end of “Shadows,” an open letter to his unrelentingly judgmental childhood priest (subsequently defrocked for a relationship with a woman), Endō hauntingly described how his bitterness towards his former clerical adversary fell away when he happened to see him “in that restaurant at Shibuya, with a drizzling rain falling outside, [when] you quickly and inconspicuously crossed yourself after the waitress delivered your food. That’s all I really understand about you now.” It is precisely this sort of empathy, I think, that is needed in these perilous, tribalistic, and unforgiving times. Thankfully, Endō’s legacy has received a shot in the arm of late, owing in no small part to the 2016 adaptation of Silence, and the rediscovery of some of his lost works, a process which is ongoing. After “Confronting the Shadows” was found in the Endō archives, three more plays on Japanese Christian themes — Christian Feudal Lord Konishi Yukinaga: Iron Collar, The Woman I Left Behind, and Good People — have miraculously come to light.
The Endō Shūsaku Literary Museum, where all these marvels are being exhumed, is located in the Sotome district in Nagasaki, where so many Christians were martyred, and so many Hidden Christians managed to conceal themselves. There, the visitor can find Endō’s bible, rosary, and the statue of Mary (heavily damaged by aerial bombs during the Second World War) that he inherited from his mother, and kept by his bedside all his life. The museum looks out over the Sea of Japan, where his Christian forebears were drowned, and towards the Gotō Islands, where the Kakure Kirishitan sought refuge. And near the water, on a plaque, are engraved Endō’s melancholy, yet subtly hopeful words:
人間が こんなに 哀しいのに 主よ 海があまりに 碧いのです
Ningen ga konna ni kanashii no ni, shu yo, umi ga amari ni aoi no desu
Humanity is so sad, O Lord, yet the sea is so blue
An entire oeuvre, perhaps the greatest of the 20th century, embodied in 25 perfect characters.
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