(2015)
Edited by Mark W. Dennis and Darren J. N. Middleton, this anthology is both a celebration of Shūsaku Endō’s award-winning novel as well as a significant contribution to the growing body of work on literature and religion. It features eminent scholars writing from Christian, Buddhist, literary, and historical perspectives, taking up, for example, the uneasy alliance between faith and doubt; the complexities of discipleship and martyrdom; the face of Christ; and, the bodhisattva ideal as well as the nature of suffering. It also frames Silence through a wider lens, comparing it to Endō’s other works as well as to the fiction of other authors.
Includes an Afterword by Martin Scorsese on adapting Silence for the screen as well as the full text of Steven Dietz's play adaptation of Endō’s novel.
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Expository Times 128.10 (2017) [“book of the month”]
“This excellent collection of essays admirably opens up the multiple meanings and dimensions of this complex text [Silence]. At one level it is a historical text, drawing closely on the details of the Japanese persecution of Christians and in particular on the historical figures of Ferreira, Giuseppe Chiara (on whom Rodrigues is modelled) and the Japanese inquisitor Inoue, the Lord of Chikugo. It is based on historical documents, letters and diaries, and the important Appendix with which it concludes consists in a delicate reworking of the 17th-century ‘Diary of an officer at the Christian Residence’. At the same time, as the present volume demonstrates, it is a text which can be read from different perspectives: as the journey of the author from his early ‘forced’ Catholicism to a religious faith which is a form of Christian pluralism, which explores the inner tensions of faith and doubt; from the perspective of a Buddhist understanding of human existence and its search for enlightenment; from a theological perspective which seeks to give an account of the reality of the text itself: what kind of thing is a novel of this rich complexity? As one reads, the text appears more clearly, surprising in its complexity and richness…What fascinates and draws one to further reading of Endo’s text—and to engagement with its powerful afterlife in Martin Scorsese’s film—is the way in which, as one is introduced to further dimensions of Endo’s life and context, Endo’s story continues to present itself in ever new guises, probing the contours of Christian faith and its relations to other forms of belief and religiosity. A deeply rewarding book.”