Shusaku Endo, a 20th-century Roman Catholic Japanese writer, first published Silence in 1966. It won the Tanizaki prize in Japan the year it was published and has since earned a reputation as a classic of postwar Japanese literature. Silence is a fictionalized account of the persecution of Christians that took place in Japan in the 16th and 17th centuries: it tells the story of two young priests who set out from Europe to find their missing mentor, who is rumored to have been made to give up his faith. Along the way, the priests and their faith are challenged in ways that they never expected.
Endo's harrowing, heartfelt, and trenchant account of the struggle to maintain a belief in...
