Is Christianity an exclusively Western faith? In his most famous novel Silence, published in 1966 and adapted by Martin Scorsese in 2016, Japanese Catholic writer Shūsaku Endō (1932-1996) follows the stories of seventeenth century Jesuit missionaries in Japan amid brutal persecution. At the end, the missionaries seem to fall into despair, failing to convert others and even losing faith themselves. What should we make of such stories, particularly considering Endō’s own experience as a Roman Catholic in Japan?

Though Silence, being set in the 1600s, seems primarily to be a historical novel, the newly published collection of Endō’s works, Portraits of a Mother, suggest Silence is far more autobiographical than it appears.

While museums are tasked with preserving precious artifacts, sometimes they are not fully aware of their own treasures. And so, in 2020 a curator discovered the manuscript of an unreleased novella “Confronting the Shadows” in the Endō museum in Nagasaki, nearly a quarter century after the writer’s death in 1996. In this new translation, the novella “Confronting the Shadows” is grouped with five other shorter stories. All six texts tell a similar story of life-long personal significance for Endō. Like variations on a theme, each story is distinct yet recognizable in relation to the author’s own life.

Born in 1923, Endō was the younger son of parents who divorced when he was ten. At the time, they were living in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, but following the divorce, he and his brother returned to Japan with his mother. That pivotal moment brought him into the Catholic Church through the fervent faith of the aunt whose influence first led to the conversion of his mother. While initially agreeing to be catechized, Endō eventually rebelled against his mother’s faith and moved back with his father, who vehemently opposed Christianity. By the time Endō began university, however—studying literature against his father’s will—he was openly living as a Christian. These parallel struggles with his mother and his Catholic faith are at the core of all the stories in this book.

The novella and the short stories alike all center on the life of a boy—sometimes already an adult agonizing over his childhood, and other times still a child, his experiences filtered through the author’s adult voice. In each retelling, the boy’s childhood is defined by his parents’ dramatic divorce that continues to haunt him. In some of the stories he chooses to stay with his mother post-divorce, moving back to Japan from Manchuria—as in “Mothers” and “A Six Day Trip.” In others, like “A Fairy Tale” and “Confronting the Shadows,” he betrays his mother by choosing his father instead—and each time, the language of betrayal in the story makes it clear that this is how he saw it. Adding to his sense of betrayal of his mother, sometimes she dies of a heart condition while he is a teenager—as in “Mothers.” Wandering the streets late after school as an act of rebellion, he arrives home late, finding his mother dead with his priest and aunt waiting for him, their silence rebuking him.

On and on, the story repeats, unfurling in anguish the author’s doubts and desires as well as his conviction as an adult that his mother was truly a saint. In the story “A Six Day Trip,” for instance, the narrator returns to his old childhood neighborhood and visits the church he attended with his mother. He recognizes several elderly faces—young once, decades ago, when he himself was a child—and remembers that it was his mother who was instrumental in their conversion. Likewise, in the story “Spring in Galilee,” he visits Israel with his wife and feels melancholy joy in traveling where his mother wished to but never could.

He reflects on his mother’s notes in her Bible and how she underlined some verses, circling the most important in red. The Sermon on the Mount was of special significance to her: “Blessed are the clean of heart.” Is he himself clean of heart? This uncertainty follows him across the various stories.

In the short story “Mothers,” finally, the narrator’s autobiographical present as a writer collides with Endō’s interest in the kakure, the 17^th century apostates that the Jesuits interact with in Silence, who “over the long years of national isolation had drifted far from true Christianity and had embraced elements of Shinto, Buddhism, and local superstition.” Visiting a remote island, he climbs ominous hills and treads mysterious paths in search of the kakure, all the while reflecting that the crags and cliffs of this island were once places of execution for the unrelenting faithful, who were tied to each other and hurled into the sea.

The writer’s own faith questions quickly surface. How might he have handled true, visceral persecution, had it ever been handed to him as his own lot? Would he have renounced Christ to be able to live, or might he have embraced sure death? At least he knows for certain his mother’s choice.  

And so, in “Spring in Galilee,” the narrator concludes with an attempt to reconcile himself with both his faith and his mother. Traveling with his wife near Capernaum, on a hill where (the locals said) Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount:

“‘We’re here at last,’ I mumbled to my mother. This was the place mentioned in the Bible that she had most wanted to visit. We sat down on a slope where clover and red flowers bloomed, and I recited to my wife each of the verses in the Sermon on the Mount that my mother had underlined and then circled with a red pencil. ‘Blessed are the meek,’ I read, which she followed with ‘Blessed are the clean of heart.’”

Parents model God’s love for their children. But reading this collection, I could not help but conclude that it took a lifetime of angst, wrestling, and reflection for Endō to come to terms with his mother, particularly as the progenitor of his own faith. This wrestling is both remarkably Christian while also culturally transcendent. At heart, every human being desires to be known and loved. But receiving love—both God’s and that of others, including our own parents—is difficult too for our sinful hearts.

Dispelling the shadows of long-standing mourning is not easy. But God’s grace is in these shadows too.