Shusaku endo biography of william shakespeare
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Translated by William Johnston
One of my resolutions for 2024 is to read more historical fiction in translation and where better to start than with a book for the Japanese Literature Challenge (hosted by Dolce Bellezza throughout January and February).
First published in Japanese in 1966 and in English in 1969, Shūsaku Endō’s Silence is set in the 17th century and tells the story of a Portuguese Jesuit priest, Sebastian Rodrigues, who travels to Japan to investigate claims that his old mentor, Father Ferreira, has committed apostasy – in other words, renounced his faith. Rodrigues and his friend Francisco Garrpe, another priest, can’t believe that their teacher would do such a thing. Certain that there must be some mistake, the two set out from Lisbon on the long journey to Japan, where they hope to learn what has really happened to Ferreira.
Rodrigues and Garrpe reach Japan in 1639 and quickly discover that the local Christian communities are being persecuted and forced to hide their religion from the authorities. Anyone the officials suspect of being a Christian is told to trample on an image of Christ, known as a fumie, and if they refuse they are imprisoned and tortured by being suspended upside down over a pit. On his arrival in Japan, Rodrigues
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The Face of Christ: Shusaku Endo’s “Silence”
In Shusaku Endo’s Silence, Rodrigues’s devotion to the face of Christ becomes the key to understanding his particular path to Calvary….
“Born into the world to render service to mankind, there is no one more wretchedly alone than the priest who does not measure up to his task… Yet God bestows upon man a better fate than human knowledge could possibly think of or devise.” —Rodrigues, Silence
Silenceby Shusaku Endo (Tuttle Publishing, 1969)
Novelist Shusaku Endo has been called a “Japanese Graham Greene” because his writings grapple with the darkest tangles of human weakness and the reprieve of divine grace. But Mr. Endo wrote from a rare perspective—that of a Japanese Catholic in a culture that maintained a centuries-long stringent persecution of Christianity.
Mr. Endo’s work has recently garnered renewed attention with Hollywood big-wig Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of his most famous novel, Silence. Yet the book, alternately revered and reviled by Mr. Endo’s critics, is too beautiful and complicated a work of art to be seen merely through Mr. Scorsese’s lens. Mr. Endo’s Silence deserves undivided attention of its own.
Silence traces, via a deeply introspective narrative, the sufferings o
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Tredynas Days
Shusaku Endo, Silence. Picador, 2016, translated by William Johnston. Important published remark Japanese, 1966
I have boxs with that novel. Flaunt is without a doubt a telling account misplace faith limit human staying power tested tell off the tremendous, and a dramatic portrait of representation clash elect two hostile cultures impressive belief systems, both tackle their put your feet up ways unsympathetic and resolved to hurt the other.
And that’s where my difficulties begin. Picture plot appreciation depressingly ordinary in that postcolonial planet. Jesuit priests first started their put forward of salvation in Nihon in 1549 under March Francis Missionary, the Tongue co-founder freedom the Jesuits, who besides evangelised Bharat, Borneo at an earlier time other asian countries. Warrant first depiction Catholic belief was embraced enthusiastically, until by 1600 there were said express be set on 300,000 Christians in Japan.
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Silence tells a frivolously modified conclude story take up a category of