Silence

The magnum opus of Japanese author Shūsaku Endō, Silence is the fictional story of a sixteenth-century Jesuit, Sebastian Rodrigues, who travels to Japan with a fellow priest during a period of extreme Christian persecution. Exterior trials rapidly befall the priests as they evade the authorities and witness the martyrdom of many believers in their care. The turmoil of Rodrigues's interior life soon comes to the fore when he is made to confront the bitter consequences of refusing to renounce the faith. Endō's gripping meditation on sacrifice and betrayal is a haunting account of the demands of Christian life and the trials of conscience amid violent oppression.

Shūsaku Endō (1923-1996) was born in Tokyo and raised by his mother and an aunt in Kobe, where he converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of eleven. At Tokyo's Keio University, he majored in French literature, graduating with a BA in 1949, before furthering his studies in French Catholic literature at the University of Lyon in France between 1950 and 1953. Before his death in 1996, Endō was the recipient of a number of outstanding Japanese literary awards--the Akutagawa Prize, Mainichi Cultural Prize, Shincho Prize, and Tanizaki Prize--and was widely considered the greatest Japanese novelist of his time.