Shūsaku Endō

"Shusaku Endo's classic novel of enduring faith in dangerous times"Silence I regard as a masterpiece, a lucid and elegant drama."-The New York Times Book Review Seventeenth-century Japan: Two Portuguese Jesuit priests travel to a country hostile to their religion, where feudal lords force the faithful to publicly renounce their beliefs. Eventually captured and forced to watch their Japanese Christian brothers lay down their lives for their faith,...

In India, four Japanese tourists converge on the River Ganges in search of absolution. The novel probes their consciences, from Isobe, grieving the death of the wife he ignored in life, to Kugachi, haunted by wartime memories of a man who saved his life by eating human flesh, then drank himself to death to forget. An analysis of the importance of religion.