Silence (Part One)

Literary Reflection

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A weird thing happens when I encounter a life changing writer. Words normally reserved to the page quickly leap up and start dancing about inside. This trips a light switch revealing a door. Passing through, I find myself sat at a beach-shack bar strung with bronze filament mood lights. Soulful lo-fi beats float in the background. It dawns on me that this is the shape of my innermost soul. I know. Please pray for me. Here, all my besties and inspirations are gathered in the mellow evening heat under a sky of shimmering green to break bread, spitball aesthetics, and sip dark rum to the tempo of the tides. Something of this, not in so many words, is captured in the Christian idea of the communion of saints. It’s never just about the text or even the power of unfolding story. It’s also an encounter with the author. A fellow writer. One who has passed through fire and is now born anew. If you will, it’s a gilded conversation across the great divide.

Blessed by the sense of this timeless gift, I turn to the guy next to me to share a smile and there in full suit and Windsor knot tie is none other than Shūsaku Endō. We clink glasses and I consider requesting a selfie before being overcome by the urge to slap myself with memorable force. He hasn’t changed at all since our last encounter. The opposite is true of me. Because of that encounter. As fine as any tantō blade, his masterpiece Silence slipped between the bone and marrow of the macho Catholicism of my early twenties. It prised away anything resembling religious self-assurance or triumphalism, leaving me utterly stunned. As in, lost for words. The title gave fair warning. I’d rather missed its personal intent.

Faith enables, indeed positively encourages, such disorienting exchanges. Back then, the great man was nearing the end of his earthly sojourn at the age of seventy-three, whereas I was just setting out on my own laurelled path to equivalent literary glory. He was, well, the writer of Silence, completed in his early forties! I was a desiccated theology reader being dragged by the Spirit towards the lifesaving wellsprings of beauty. He was a Japanese convert whereas I was a Hiberno-English cradle Catholic. Apart from both being blokes, our only significant commonality was faith. Except, that’s everything. So it matters not that we never physically met in this world. We were ever destined to meet on this here mystic beach.

When first reduced to Silence, then, writing fiction had not even entered my noggin. The story landed as gift, invitation, bristling vision, seduction, mystery, and, most significantly, demise. With a single stroke, this story brought so much vapid theologising to a befitting end. It painfully pointed the way to a much deeper sense of faith. One signally lacking inside me. Until then my God studies had been about God. In Silence, God cast the texts aside and stared straight into my soul. A most fearful gaze - found waiting patiently in the heart of a story! For whatever reason, I’d falsely assumed the sacred had no place in fiction. Novels were about worldly matters. They had neither the means nor power even to skirt the profundities of faith. Except it was I tip-toeing in the shallows.

For many years thereafter I followed the accepted analysis, (and my first intuition), that the story is an exploration of God’s silence in the face of those who suffer in His name; a reflection on the paradox of divine non-intervention - perhaps because matters relating to Theodicy have formed a large part of my own religious preoccupations. Yet, I recall all this, because, as said, I recently had the very great pleasure of Mr Endō’s company once more. Over a somewhat testing Christmas season, I rediscovered there’s no medicine like framing your own trials against the unimaginable ones of fellow brothers and sisters.

Once returned to Silence, I felt something instantly all such readers know in their bones: that the story you once read is no longer the story you are now reading, because you are a different person. Reacquainting with my favourite fictional character, Kichijiro, was a tremendous consolation. Mr Endō once compared himself to the character. The profound comparison with Judas drawn in the story struck me with much greater force than from memory. Better for whom not to have been born?

So, anyways, we’re sitting there at the bar, Mr Endō with that signature smile playing upon his lips, when I blurt out, “You canny bastard!” He responds with explosive laughter. No one so much as turns a head. Hey, it’s my bar and, in any case, we’re the only ones talking Japanese! “What?” he asks. I shake my head. “That bloody brilliant story of yours.” “Which one?” “Very funny. You know, the one where I thought I’d understood it because, well, the word is in the title and I must have encountered that same word at least fifty times on the page and at the most telling moments…” “Go on.” “And that story has been sitting in the substrate of my soul for years and years and has become one of my favourites.” “Well, thank you.” “Yes, but, as you know, I read it again just recently.” “Yes.” “And.” “Yes.” “It’s not about silence at all, is it? It’s about the very opposite.”

He raises an index finger to the bartender indicating another round and swivels to face me square on, eyes glistening with the eruptive joy of heartfired tears. I can smell the spirit on his breath as he pulls me in close for the anticipated man hug. Just me and Mr Endō. Story dudes. Upon the endless shores. Except he stops when his mouth nears my ear to whisper curious words of his own: “How the hell should I know? I’m only the writer.” After the laughter, we sink respectfully into something like silence.

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Photo by Hiroyoshi Urushima on Unsplash