In Isobe, a man’s wife is dying of cancer. In the story, The Box, a man attaches religious meaning to a collection of random postcards he buys at an antique shop. The story is not about the priest, per se, but about a visiting Japanese man who learns about Kolbe. He was imprisoned at Auschwitz and voluntarily gave up his life as a substitute for another prisoner who had a wife and children. Japanese in Warsaw centers around a Franciscan Friar, Father Kolbe, who founded a monastery in Japan and returned to Poland. The story is about a contemporary man retracing the footsteps of Christian martyrs who were tortured and executed. It goes into detail with names of missionaries, dates, and scholarly books about the history of early Catholicism in Japan. The first short story in this book, Uzen, seems to be a preliminary story to that novel, Silence. I have read his novel, Silence, about early (1600’s) Catholic missionaries in Japan and three of these stories have a Christian orientation. 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.įive short stories by this Catholic Japanese author (1923-1996). 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. Chiba takes up ballroom dancing and faces the imminent death of his brother and his dog Whitey. Next comes "A Fifty-year-old Man" in which Mr. "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. 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. It is this aspect that has made Endo so particularly intriguing to his readership at home and abroad. "Irrevocably enmeshed in Japanese culture, he is by virtue of his religion irrevocably alienated from it" (Geoffrey O'Brian, Village Voice). 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. Five wonderful stories by the Japanese master.
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