Endō Shūsaku has the rare distinction of having one of his novels, Silence, adapted for the silver screen by none other than Martin Scorsese. Those who aren’t familiar with his opus may be surprised to find that Endō wrote from the perspective of a Roman Catholic. Sachiko, originally published in 1982 and only just now appearing in English translation, fits squarely into this tradition.
The novel, a coming-of-age story for the title character and a boy of the same age, Shūhei, opens in Nagasaki in 1930, with the arrival of five Polish priests, when Sachiko and Shūhei are little more than toddlers. Endo’s choice of time and place surrenders some dramatic tension, as scarcely a single adult in 1980s Japan would not have known what rough beast was slouching toward Sachiko and Shūhei, to arrive on 9 August 1945, the atomic bombing that translator Gessel reminds us of in his introduction. Readers can’t fail to guess what’s coming, to the degree that we sometimes want to say to the two young people, “get out of there!!”
A key dramatic element is one Endō explores in most of his work, his literary animus: the interaction of Christianity with Japan. Endō was baptized Roman Catholic in 1934; he and Graham Greene eventually formed a mutual admiration pair. Silence, Endō’s most famous work, fictionalizes 1640s Kyushu, just after the Shimabara Rebellion (1637-1638), in which the vanquished fought under a Catholic banner. In Sachiko’s pre-WW II Japan, known Christians faced an increasing level of suspicion and harassment—they were, after all, followers of the faith of the enemy. Sachiko and Shūhei, both members of Catholic families, regularly encounter ominous Kempeitai officers who challenge their loyalty.
The Shimabara Rebellion ended with the beheading of 30,000 plus members of the rebel community—men, women and even children. No one moral may attempt to excuse mass murder, but the Rebellion was an attempt to overthrow a government, mostly because of tax policy, abetted by the Portuguese missionary community. The Dutch in the area, Protestants and therefore arch enemies of the Catholics (the Thirty Years War was still raging in Europe), were pleased to contribute munitions and a ship from which to shell Hara Castle, the rebel stronghold. In part for their support of the Shogunate in the Rebellion, but in large part because they forswore evangelism of the Japanese, the Dutch retained the favor of the Tokugawa Shogunate for two plus centuries to follow, while the Portuguese—missionaries and traders alike—were expelled from the country. Thus, the Rebellion doesn’t serve quite so well as an example of unbidden Christian martyrdom.
A central theme in Sachiko is likewise the victimhood of Catholics, Japanese with the exception of several chapters on Father Kolbe, one of the priests who did in reality arrive in Nagasaki in 1930 to establish a Franciscan monastery. Early in Sachiko, Father Kolbe gives the girl a bookmark with an inscription from John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” This verse becomes a talisman—Shūhei later muses on it as he is conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Navy, and eventually the tokubetsu kōgeki tai, which after the war became commonly known as the kamikaze (more “get out of there!!”). Kolbe returned to his native Poland in 1933, where he later opposed the Nazi occupiers and eventually became a Catholic saint for his self-sacrifice to save another Polish prisoner, also Catholic and a sergeant in the by-then-destroyed Polish army, in Auschwitz in 1941. In Sachiko, Kolbe reflects on James 15:13 before he offers himself as a replacement for the condemned Polish soldier in the death camp.
Since they seem to have little dramatic purpose, one can only conclude that Endō devotes these several chapters to the Kolbe story because he seeks to bolster his meta-narrative of Christian, specifically Catholic, noble suffering at the hands of evil regimes, be they the Tokugawa Shogunate, the Nazis or Imperial Japan of the early 20th century. As with the Shimabara Rebellion, that narrative doesn’t always do so well under the light of history. While Kolbe’s sacrifice is of course laudable, Polish Catholics as a group were rather famously tangential among the categories that the Nazis murdered. Indeed they were far more often on the delivery vs the receiving end of the treatment meted out in the concentration camps.

A few years before Sachiko, Endō published Kiku’s Prayer, set during the final decade of Japan’s overt Christian suppression, the 1870s. Endō has Kiku fall in love with Seikichi, a young man who, unbeknownst to her when they meet, is Christian, and is later discovered by the authorities to be so, and is therefore persecuted. Kiku is persuaded by a scheming official that he can gain Seikichi’s release, at the price of Kiku’s virtue, which she eventually surrenders. In Gessel’s appendix to Sachiko, Kiku,
recognizing that she is now tainted and feeling unworthy to marry Seikichi once he is released … continues selling her body so that she can send more money to the man she truly loves. Her health eventually fails, and one snowy night she goes again to pray for Seikichi before the statue of the Blessed Mother in the Oura Church. She collapses there …
Cue the violins. Readers may, with good reason, recall Madame Butterfly, whose (Christian) “temporary” husband, Pinkerton, is the villain. Madame Butterfly derives from Pierre Loti’s semi-autobiographical 1887 novel, Madame Chrysanthème. “Kiku” is Japanese for “chrysanthemum”, and O-Kiku-san is the Japanese title of Loti’s work. Another similar legend, hugely popular in Japan, is that of Tōjin Okichi, supposedly consigned to the first US ambassador to Japan, Townsend Harris, in the 1860s. In the legend, once Harris has dismissed Okichi, she realizes she cannot return to her true love, because (in this case) she had nobly surrendered her body as a shield to protect other Japanese women from the lustful predations of the barbarian foreigner. Okichi continues into prostitution, alcoholism and an early death.
The legend of Okichi has thrived through the decades, spawning movies and enka songs. In autumn 1945, it even became a “patriotic” message to recruit impoverished women for the Recreation and Amusement Association, an industrial-sized brothel system organized by the Japanese authorities for the first few months of the Allied occupation, supposedly to protect Japanese women in general from the feared mass rape and pillage. (Given the Imperial Japanese Army’s behavior elsewhere in Asia, such fear wasn’t unreasonable. And given their experience organizing brothels on an industrial scale, this final attempt wasn’t logistically daunting.) There’s a shrine to Okichi in her hometown area, not far from Yokohama, a locality that gains a fair amount of revenue from the tourist trade.
Okichi is an historical figure, and the history doesn’t support the legend, but Kiku is a fictional creation (well, mostly—Loti did call his actual paramour Kiku), so Endō is entitled to, er, have his way with her. In Sachiko, Endō has the title character hear the story of Kiku, kneeling in prayer with her final breaths at the feet of the Virgin Mary in the local Urakami Cathedral. The child Sachiko is not told the full nature of Kiku’s tragic demise, but concludes that Kiku is another of the novel’s evocations of John 15:13, while the reader is left with a another romance-novel rendition of a would-be victim of Catholic persecution.
Love in a time of coming war might have provided alternative dramatic tension, yet while the development of the relationship between Sachiko and Shūhei is occasionally touching, it is more often merely predictable:
With her eyes closed, Sachiko felt the strength in his arms. She would give him everything, if he were to ask for it now. This was Shūhei, so she would do anything he wanted. It no longer mattered to her whether her mother or the priests would be angry with her.
This might admittedly be an inevitable result of translating Japanese into English—even something delicate and ineffable in the original may become merely formulaic, more romance-novel fodder in translation, through no fault of Gessel’s.
The novel’s verisimilitude isn’t helped by Endō’s use of Jim Walker, a young American boy character Endo has in 1930s Nagasaki as one of the children in an expatriate family of the time. Nothing particularly unusual about that, but Endō later puts Jim on the crew of Bockscar, the B-29 that dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. This plot device presages the risible 2001 movie Pearl Harbor, in which two gallant pilots first take to the air during the Japanese attack, and months later become part of the Doolittle Raid of April 1942. Endō has Jim thinking “what an unbelievable series of coincidences!” as Bockscar flies away, as it actually did, from its originally designated target city, Kokura, for the secondary target, Nagasaki. Unbelievable indeed, as no such airman was on the plane, and Endō doesn’t do himself any literary favors, at least not with English readers, with the bathos Jim’s presence in Bockscar creates.
Nagasaki’s Urakami Cathedral was almost directly under the atomic bomb blast in August 1945, and was utterly destroyed, as were the lives of the many parishioners there for a mass at the time. The fate of the cathedral, and of the Catholics in the area starting three centuries before, resonates with Endō’s other work, specifically Silence, whose title suggests the other existential question that Endō unveils: why would the God of the Catholic Church be silent in the face of the suffering of His faithful? Having left his beloved literature studies for his military obligation, Shūhei sends a final letter to his former professor:
Christianity in Japan has been negligent. It has offered us no words of truth that would help us respond when we are faced with the predicament of having to kill another person. Yet, I imagine that the church is suffering just as I am. I imagine that they have no answers.
In his 1982 author’s afterword, Endō, whose studies at Tokyo’s Keio University were also interrupted by the war (he spent the rest of it working in a factory producing military goods) opens and closes by evoking another silence:
Each time I see a housewife about my same age, whether on a train or a bus or standing in front of the train station, I feel a sudden undefinable affinity with her…
… she is one who experienced true love, and who lived in a real-life drama, though now she says nothing, maintaining an anguished silence…
Finishing the final page of Sachiko, we readers may have a related reaction, despite the maudlin bits. Considering the surviving characters, the fate of Nagasaki, the world of the time, we may all pause for a moment of empathy, of silence.
Van Fleet’s first book, Tales of Old Tokyo, a scrapbook history of the city from 1853 to 1964, was published in 2015. Resident in Japan for the decade of the 1990s, Van Fleet has lived in China since. He is steadily producing episodes of his multimedia project, Quarreling Cousins: China and Japan from Antiquity to the 2020s. He serves as Director, Corporate Globalization, at the Antai College of Economics & Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
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