Endō’s novel of people and ideas out-of-place is indeed grim. Christian missionaries had been in Japan for nearly a century prior to the action Endō describes, but tensions among Japanese daimyo, or local lords, European traders, and European missionaries had led to the persecution of Christians by the end of the sixteenth century and the dawn of a new one, which itself ushered in the Tokugawa Shogunate on the heels of a brutal civil war.ĭuring this process of pacification, Christians were tortured and executed by crucifixion and anazuri, the practice of hanging a victim upside-down above a pit until he bled out or apostatized. Silence, the haunting 1966 Shūsaku Endō novel of faith, apostasy, and martyrdom in seventeenth-century Japan, tells the story of a Jesuit priest, Sebastião Rodrigues, in search of a former mentor, Cristóvão Ferreira, an historical figure who apostatized after undergoing torture at the hands of the Tokugawa state.
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