By the Western calendar, the events chronicled in Shusaku Endo's latest novel take place between 1613 and 1624. But of course that is an artificial way of looking at the matter. Half the book takes place in Mexico and Europe; Endo has the cosmopolitan range of a partly 'Westernised' figure, educated in the Catholic faith. Nevertheless, the heart of the issue concerns Japan, 'a wall with windows no larger than gunports, windows to keep an eye on those coming in, not to look out upon the wider world'. We are encouraged by the translator's postscript, and by one or two unguarded phrases in the text, to see the book as a metaphysical disquisition, a scrutiny of the nature of politics in any time or place. But the specifics are more imaginatively vital than any abstract moralising. Endo is, pace many commentators, pervaded by history: the morality emerges from that history.

LRB 3 June 1982 | PDF Download