Five by Endo

By Shūsaku Endō

Book Overview

Five wonderful stories by the Japanese master. Winner of every major Japanese literary prize, his work translated around the globe, Shusaku Endo (1923-1996) is a great and unique figure in the literature of the twentient century. "Irrevocably enmeshed in Japanese culture, he is by virtue of his religion Endo was Roman Catholic] irrevocably alienated from it" (Geoffrey O'Brian, Village Voice). It is this aspect that has made Endo so particularly intriguing to his readership at home and abroad. Now gathered in a New Directions Bibelot edition are five of Endo's supreme short stories exemplifying his style and his interests, presenting, as it were, Endo in a nutshell. "Unzen," the opening story, touches on the subject of Silence Endo's most famous novel -- that is the torture and martyrdom of Christians in seventeenth-century Japan. Next comes "A Fifty-year-old Man" in which Mr. Chiba takes up ballroom dancing and faces the imminent death of his brother and his dog Whitey. In "Japanese in Warsaw" a business man has a strange encounter; in "The Box," an old photo album and a few postcards have a tale to reveal. Finally included is "The Case of Isobe," the opening chapter of Endo's novel Deep River in which Isobe, a member of a tour group, hopes to find in India the reincarnation of the wife he took so much for granted.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811214397
• ISBN13: 9780811214391
• Release Date: June 2000
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 4.8" x 6.9"

Customer Reviews

Five Easy Pieces, Vintage Endo

Mr. Endo is a rarity: a Japanese Catholic novelist, a literary Sadao Watanabe. His Catholicism and literary studies in Europe have made him the most accessible of Japanese novelists to the western reader. Those who know and appreciate his work will welcome these five short stories, and will recognize his usual style and typical concerns. A novelist retraces the steps of the Christian martyrs of Shimabara, but he is more interested in and identified with the apostate who agonizes spiritually because he did not have the faith to suffer physically. Japanese tourists on the make and their impassive guide wander Warsaw and find in the strangest of places St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish missionary to Japan who died in Auschwitz. A box of old postcards uncovers the secret life of a missionary's daughter during wartime Japan. A fifty-year old man takes dancing lessons amid intimations of mortality. A man who could not share his feelings with his wife watches her die and then wonders about her possible reincarnation. The last of these short stories is in fact the opening chapter of the novel "Deep River," but it becomes more intriguing on its own. Those who don't know Endo yet will find this a tasty and representative sampling of his work. Van C. Gessel, who has translated at least six Endo novels, has provided a very readable text.

Five By Endo

If ever there were an author who could wedge a knife into the cracks of the human soul, it must be Shusaku Endo. In these five stories -- Unzen, A Fifty-Year-Old Man, Japanese In Warsaw, The Box, and The Case of Isobe -- Endo draws back the curtain on a group of people obsessed with such themes as cowardice, sex, martyrdom, death and the love of animals.With bleak eloquence and hard-edged compassion, Endo creates a banquet of irony and emotion that succeeds in filling the void created by 95% of modern fiction.If you are weary of the predictable and formulaic fiction churned out by the big publishing houses, I recommend this slim volume. Shusaku Endo's stories feel like a gust of cold, clean and pungent mountain air from the top of Japan's highest mountains.