In one story in Shusaku Endo’s Portraits of a Mother, the narrator lies in a hospital bed after a serious operation with the vague impression that his mother is holding his hand. He wakes to the realization that this was a dream and that the “gray shadow” of his mother is nothing more than a recurrent spectre that still visits him two decades after her death. Though at first content, he soon feels resentment for the bonds that continue to bind him to her. As far as the narrator can recall, there was never a time outside of his dreams when this austere woman had shown him such affection.
Portraits of a Mother is a collection of six semi-autobiographical pieces on the ambivalent feelings for a maternal figure intertwined with uncertain religious faith. The stories here, translated by lifelong Endo translator Van C. Gessel, feature spiritual journeys that are made in both the literal sense, such as in pilgrimages to holy sites or sequestered religious communities, and also figuratively into the past, where faith began and the connection to it and the mother was at its strongest.
Whatever the setting and whenever the memory, the complicated figure of the mother and a conflicted faith are ever present. The link between the two is made explicit in the story “Spring in Galilee”, in which the narrator takes an underwhelming trip to Israel that his mother had vainly aspired to take before her death: “My faith, if indeed it can be called faith,” he admits, “is linked to my attachment to my mother”.
In his introduction, novelist Caryl Philips writes that Endo’s fiction is markedly autobiographical, and evidence is littered throughout—straightforwardly in the epistolary and confessional “Shadows”, but also in the more fictionally-framed “A Fairy Tale”. The latter echoes the author’s time living in Manchuria and the rift that opened up between his parents, concluding in their divorce and Endo’s return to Japan with his mother. It was then that the author was received into the Catholic faith. By this point (1934), less than 1% of the Japanese population were Christian, and so it is of little surprise that, alongside troubled parental relationships, Endo’s work is full of characters trying to consolidate their minority religion with their Japanese identity.
Despite returning often to the plight of the Kakure (hidden) Christians, the violent treatment of whom forms the narrative foundation of his most famous novel, Silence, the greatest struggle for Endo’s characters is always one in which Catholic guilt is wrapped up in a persistent fear of filial abandonment. However much the characters are wounded by their faith, they nevertheless struggle to let that faith go, and likewise they are unable to move on from an equally caustic maternal figure.
The mothers in Portraits are stern and uncompromising, driven with no concern for anything besides their pursuit of “something higher”, whether that be artistic perfection or spiritual ascendance. Such striving leaves little time for others, even family members. Endo’s maternal juggernaut practices the violin until her fingers bleed, deaf to her hungry child’s pleas for food. She drags her chronically unwell son to church each day before dawn to pray. As punishment for declining grades at school, she removes the family dog from their home and abandons it to die. All of these drastic acts are committed to reiterate a straight-laced piety that one narrator speculates may have been founded on nothing more than the allure of a handsome foreign priest.
The mothers here are self-superior and puritanical in a way that makes everyone else suspect, quite rightly, that they are being judged, and yet despite their conceited nature, for Endo’s male characters they possess a laudable nobility behind their ambition. The son of each story even feels sympathy for this woman, whose lofty aims they see as compromised by her duty to her child. In contrast, they hate the father for one reason alone: his contented mediocrity. The mother, representing a spiritual ideal, can be cruel and demanding, yes, but these traits seem mere trifles when compared to the distasteful, smug human-ness of the paternal figure.
Suguro, the narrator of the last story in this collection, “Confronting the Shadows”, even suggests that his decision to become a writer was informed by a desire to follow in the footsteps of his mother and pursue his own ideal, even if that pursuit compromises his everyday happiness:
Suguro suddenly wondered why there should be anything wrong with this kind of life. Why do I need to write a novel at this point in my life? I’m getting along just fine right now, aren’t I? Why should I feel ashamed that I’m spending these days this way? Just then, like some cruel joke, the image of his mother’s face in death popped into his head.
In death, his mother becomes the ideal Christian figure: the martyr. The son’s failure to live up to her shining example leads to a renewed sense of sinful agnosticism that develops into a Judas complex. In Portraits, guilt comes not only to characterise the spiritual beliefs of the sons and their relationship with their mother, but to become an indelible part of their self-castigating characters. Their relentless criticism of themselves ultimately leads to a lack of conviction, best shown in “Shadows” and a letter addressed to an unnamed priest who stands in for the deceased mother:
You had confidence in your way of life, in your faith, in your body, and you performed your missionary work in Japan with firm conviction. In contrast, not once in my life have I been able to feel confidence and conviction about every facet of my life.
The struggle to find a meaning and place for oneself in the world is interesting considering the post-war context in which these stories were written. Endo’s work was especially popular in the ’50s and ’60s, a time when Japan itself was struggling to forgive the authoritative figure of the government, which had been, to put it lightly, driven in colonial and military campaigns that were validated by state religion—the ideal again justifying suffering and violence. Moreover, the nation was feeling the loss of a religious parental figure following the denouncement of the emperor’s divinity. Despite holding “foreign” beliefs, the struggle of these characters therefore parallels that of many others in Japan who were, as Endo puts it, looking for a “power to live” that did not entirely forsake their ancestral and cultural heritage.
This collection, which features never-before translated stories and a novella undiscovered until 2020, offers not only a fascinating insight into the mind of a religious outsider, but also more generally into the guilt associated with religious doubt. Reconciling faith in an environment of guilt is, like reconciling the love for a “tempestuous” mother, extremely difficult to accomplish. Indeed, the stories here appear as attempts to repeatedly work over the same events, coming at each from a different perspective until the problem is solved and shame removed. Life, of course, is never so simple, and the onetime devotee who turns from faith will never be entirely free of the guilt associated with that betrayal—confession, for a Catholic, is a lifelong pursuit.
In Endo’s case, the shame is all the more difficult to shake given how connected his faith is to the image of his imperious mother, who despite her failings represents a vital link to his roots. It is as difficult to pull away from such foundational pillars as it is to shake off the precepts of religion. Standing before his mother’s grave, the narrator in, “Mothers”, the very first story of Portraits, seems consigned to his inevitable fate: “At some point I too will be buried here, and as in my youth I will be living alone again with my mother”.
In Endo’s stories, the trials of faith and maternal connection become alluring, despite their violence, because they lead to the ideal. In fact, the violence validates the ideal because the greater the suffering, the greater the reward. For Endo’s characters, guilt born from religious doubt ultimately becomes a religion in itself.
You must be logged in to post a comment.