Stained Glass Elegies: Stories

The eleven short stories contained in Stained Glass Elegies span nearly two decades of Shusaku Endo's life and literary career, and concisely show the development of their author's moral and spiritual thinking, albeit in much easier-to-swallow fashion than his novels (and, moreover, chronologically). Some of the situations and characters that are focal points in the stories hearken directly to longer Endo works, such as the myna bird in "A Forty-Year-Old Man" and "Retreating Figures" that reappears in Deep River, or Kichijirou in "Unzen," who is a major character in Silence. Other stories may have no direct equivalencies in Endo's more famous work, but thematically are very much linked. Stained Glass Elegies can be appreciated not only for its stories' inherent quality, but also as an excellent survey of a Endo's thought between the years 1959 and 1977. For those to whom Endo's overarching literary career is of little interest, however, this collection provides an extremely worthwhile read all the same. Endo's writing style is deceptively simple and quietly profound, like the best writers of the Japanese tradition. Endo's work is all the more meaningful for the way it unabashedly stares into the face of human conflict and presents moral dilemmas without any holds barred (and with a marked disregard for easy answers and shallow solutions; see "Despicable Bastard" for the most raw example). Above all, however, the stories are simply beautiful. They burrow into your heart without your noticing, and only when you find your thoughts constantly straying to them days later that you realize how much they affected you. The strength and sincerity of Endo's spiritual questioning - as exhibited, for example, in the grim humor of "The Day Before" or the personal reflections of "My Belongings" - make it impossible to remain unmoved. Endo treats his subjects with breathtaking gentleness; the utter lack of judgment or condemnation in his stories is welcome and refreshing in an era when so-called `Christian' thought is often equated with intolerance and hypocrisy. Stained Glass Elegies is recommended to anyone looking for a collection of short but thought-provoking stories, told from a very human perspective. It ranges from despair to hope and in the bizarre but hilarious "Incredible Voyage" even to humor, leaving few meaningful human emotions untouched. Moreover, it is a good sample and jumping-off point for readers interested in getting to know Endo's literature further. Buy this book and treasure it.

I've found it to be the case that short stories often make a greater impact and impression on me than novels. That is, I wasn't as captivated by these stories as I was with some of Endo's novels, but now a year or so later I can remember the events in them almost as though they happened to me myself. Please allow me to try explaining how I mean that by way of an example: when I was younger, I often had to walk several miles through the cold to get to school. I dreamed one year that I'd been given a pair of blue gloves, and for a long time afterword, on these walks, I'd sometimes wonder why I hadn't brought my gloves. The dream was so detailed, so mundane that I'd momentarily confuse it with reality. Perhaps a short story is similar in the respect that it gives us a level of detail which can't be easily sustained through a novel? At any rate, I'll ask you to take my word for it that I can recall making a war-time, school trip to a run down Japanese leper colony on a grey winter day as though it happened. The subject matter is rather typically grim, for Endo. It mostly concerns sick, dying men, crisis of faith, the Japanese inquisition, dour war-time Japan then dour post-war Japan, etc.. Endo's talent makes this much less painful reading than it may sound. One of the author's primary plot concerns is the fate of religious apostates -does grace extend to those who believe but aren't strong enought to endure? It's a question that makes for compelling literature, but for Endo, a religious minority in an often hostile land, we may assume that this wasn't a strictly academic concern! If I could just throw my humble own opinion in, it always seemed to me that the point of Christianity was that people had utterly failed to stay to the law, thus it'd be odd if grace was denied to any but the perfect. That's what I hope anyway. There is one very odd thing about this book (it's the reason I'm hurrying to write this review on new years eve.) A science-fiction story, set in the year 2005, is included in this collection. Not just a science-fiction story but a toilet humored (literally) science-fiction story. That Endo would write such a story is pretty remarkable in itself, that such a story can still be of an overall dour tone is truly amazing. Dissapointingly, the technology in Endo's 2005 doesn't bear much resemblance to that of the year that just ended. Personally, I'm so amazed that I lived to see the year 2000 that none of the years that followed have made much of a numerical impression on me. Anyway.. happy 2006 (and beyond) everyone! Maybe this will finally be the year that our scientists crack the riddle of the shrink ray.

This book is a collection of eleven short stories written by Shusaku Endo. Some of the stories are more like essays giving the reader a glimpse of the life of the author. Endo spent his early childhood in Manchuria before the war. After his father divorced his mother, he went with his mother back to Japan. Divorce was a big issue in Japan then. His mother turned to the Catholic Church for solace, and Shusaku Endo became baptised as well. Then the war came. Being Christian was once again looked at as following a foreign religion. Shusaku Endo never felt quite comfortable with the religion. In the story, "A Forty-Year-Old Man", which is about a man called Suguro who is about to undergo a major operation, there is this scene of Suguro going to confession. Suguro said these words at confession, "I...When I was a child, I was baptized because my parents wanted me to be, not because I wanted to. As a result, I went to church for many years as a formality, because it had become a habit. But after that particular day, I knew that I could never cast off the ill-fitting clothes my parents had dressed me in." Was that also how Shisuka Endo felt about his being a Catholic? In "Despicable Bastard", "Fuda-no-Tsuji" and "Unzen", he makes us realise chances are, we are all cowards and under torture, chances are we will apostasize our faiths! But, and this is the interesting part, what was not written but some how one is made to feel it, is this feeling that Christ would forgive and understand that we are after all human, and therefore, cowards. This theme of apostasy is further examined in another work of Shisuka Endo, "Silence". The book "Silence" and this book are highly recommended.

Somehow Endo--or, I suppose, his translators--always seem to make simplicity a true virtue. His writing tends to be clear and direct, but not pushy--he lets you draw your own conclusions, a trait he shares with Abe Kobo and most of the rest of their generation of Japanese novelists. Anyway this book is lovely in that tradition, dealing with the conflicts entailed by being Catholic in Japan and living across cultures in general. While I don't have any experience personally of strong religious conflict, the stories he tells ring true on other levels as well. Particulalrly here I liked the story of the Japanese student on exchange in a French university.

This is a collection of short stories spanning a twenty year period from the late 50's to the late 70's, and in these stories we come across most of Endo's favourite themes - martyrs of Christianity in Japan, the stories of those who apostatized (gave up their religion for fear of torture and persecution), Endo's own prolonged illness and his fear of suffering, and his own religious uncertainty.These themes sound altogether pretty depressing, and yet when you read his writing, the crisp, clear style seems so effortless that you might think,like I did, that you could gladly read anything he wrote, on any topic no matter how turgid. His ability to contrast the depth of one person's belief with the weakness and uncertainty of another's is genuinely masterly. I think he manages to do this so well because he is able to comprehend both types perfectly, and he clearly does not favour one over the other. His message is ultimately humanist - that we are none of us perfect, n! either those who seek perfection nor those who give up, knowing perfection cannot be achieved, neither those who face fear and suffering nor those who run from it, and furthermore that the idea of sin should not be used by one person to chastise another, but rather to help guide each of us in our own lives. Endo is able to conjure up powerful emotion in only a few pages, as he does recounting his own feelings of guilt towards his mother in one story, or his joy at a reunion with some childhood friends, or the ambiguous guilt of the 'kakure' apostates on a small island off Kyushu. Though I cringe to admit it, I honestly thought on reading these stories 'If only I could write like this!'