Silence
by Shusaku Endo
A Jesuit in Japan. God is silent. People are dying.
For you if
you want to understand faith under torture — what it demands and what it costs and whether it survives
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A Portuguese Jesuit missionary travels to 17th century Japan to find his mentor, who is rumored to have apostatized under torture. What he finds is a community of hidden Christians, a brutally effective persecution, and the question that the novel refuses to answer easily: what does God's silence in the face of suffering mean? Endo was a Japanese Catholic — doubly marginal — and writes from inside the experience of faith tested to its absolute limit. One of the great religious novels in any language. The most formally honest dispatch about what persecution does to belief.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Japan • East Asia
- Voice
- Written by a Japanese author
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Silence(2016)
dir. Martin Scorsese
What does God's silence sound like?
Two 17th-century Portuguese Jesuit priests travel to Japan to find their missing mentor and continue his mission, only to be captured amid a brutal state campaign to eradicate Christianity. Adapted from Shusaku Endo's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in staying inside the missionary's doubt rather than resolving it — apostasy here isn't simple failure, it's a real moral question the film refuses to answer for you. Pedagogical in showing how colonial-era evangelism collided with a society determined to survive it, at real human cost on both sides.