The Samurai by Shūsaku Endō

First published:Samurai, 1980 (English translation, 1982)

Type of work: Historical realism

Time of work: 1612-1624

Locale: Edo, Nunozawa, and Tsukinoura, all cities in Japan; various places in New Spain; Seville and Madrid in Spain; and Rome, Italy

Principal Characters:

• Rokuemon Hasekura, the samurai of the novel’s title, holder of a small fief in northeast Japan
• Lord Ishida, Hasekura’s feudal superior and patron
• Masamune Date, invariably called His Lordship, the daimyo holding the district in which Ishida and Hasekura live
• Father Velasco, Provincial at Edo for the Franciscan order, the translator for the mission to New Spain authorized by Masamune Date
• The Man in Tecali, a Japanese Christian convert living among the Indians in New Spain
• Yozo, Hasekura’s faithful servant and companion

The Novel

Dealing with a relatively obscure mission to New Spain, today known as Mexico, mounted by the feudal overlord of a district in seventeenth century Japan surrounding the modern northeastern city of Sendai, Shūsaku Endō’s The Samurai focuses on the fundamental effects of the Tokugawa period on Japan, of Japan’s association with European Roman Catholic missionaries, and of its ultimate decision to close the country to all foreign influence. Endō’s interest in the episode arises from its relative obscurity and the lack of surviving historical records. His imagination was stirred by the situation of unsophisticated Japanese of the lowest rank in the samurai class being forced to play large roles on the international stage.

The novel begins with descriptions of the two men central to the action of The Samurai. The first is Rokuemon Hasekura, a samurai and the holder of a small fief in the marshlands in Masamune Date’s district. At home in his estate and among the people who serve his family, Hasekura cannot imagine a life different from the one he leads. He is of the land he tills, and he suffers the privations of the peasants tied to it. The second man is Father Velasco, Provincial at Edo (the older name of the modern city of Tokyo) for the Franciscan order of missionaries in Japan. Velasco is, in nearly every respect, the apparent opposite of the samurai. An alien in Japan, having fought with the Jesuits for control of missionary efforts, Velasco nurses the ambition of being named Bishop of Japan and gaining control of the effort to Christianize its people. Two more different men could not be imagined, but Endō links their destinies in the novel.

Summoned by Lord Ishida, his feudal superior and patron, Hasekura is told to hold himself ready to undertake a mission at the direction of Lord Shiraishi, a leading figure in His Lordship’s provincial council. Hasekura’s elderly uncle is overjoyed at the news, believing that the family will regain the property from which they were dispossessed two generations before, when they found themselves on the wrong side in a political conflict. Hasekura is less optimistic about the prospect of leaving his native place. An occasional white swan flies into the marshes each winter, and he marvels at the fact that it has seen places he cannot even name. Hasekura thinks that he is unprepared for the mission when it materializes; he is instructed to join three other low-ranking samurai as envoys from Masamune Date to the government of New Spain. The four will board a Western-style ship, designed under the supervision of shipwrecked Spanish sailors, and seek to persuade the colonial government in New Spain to trade directly with Date’s district of Japan. To that end, they are instructed to offer the prospect of uncontrolled opportunities for Christian missionary activity.

Attached as translator to the group of Japanese envoys as they embark on the San Juan Baptista, Father Velasco exudes self-confidence about the success of the mission. He sees in this effort an opportunity for the Franciscans to supplant the Jesuits as the prime group undertaking missionary activity in Japan. The journey, however, proves more difficult than he anticipated, and the Japanese envoys and their attendants are less easy to control than he thought. Velasco does make some converts among the group, in part because he demonstrates the political expediency of becoming a Roman Catholic, but, from the first, Hasekura resists Velasco’s arguments. He finds the man Jesus Christ beyond comprehension, for his conduct is the antithesis of behavior which a samurai finds natural. “This ugly, emaciated man,” Hasekura thinks, reflecting on the image of the crucified Christ. He continues,

This man devoid of majesty, bereft of outward beauty, so wretchedly miserable. A man who exists only to be discarded after he has been used. A man born in a land I have never seen, and who died in the distant past. He has nothing to do with me, thought the samurai.

Nevertheless, Hasekura accepts Christian baptism in the guise of political expediency. Arriving in New Spain, the Japanese envoys find the colonial officials unresponsive. Three of them, Hasekura among them, accept Velasco’s advice to cross the Atlantic to appeal to the King of Spain and the Pope. In Madrid the three envoys become Roman Catholics, but Hasekura is overcome during the ceremony by feelings of guilt: “He felt a loathing like a woman must when she is forced to sleep with a man she neither loves nor trusts.” Yozo, Hasekura’s companion and servant, accompanies his master in this momentous step, but his acceptance of Christ is genuine and unreserved.

The political consequences of Hasekura’s actions are momentous, but they are hardly the ones that he anticipated. The Spanish king sends the Japanese envoys on to Rome, where they linger about the city until they are granted a single audience with the Pope. The Roman Catholic church seems on the verge of endorsing the aims of the embassy and of naming Velasco’s Franciscans the chief missionary group in Japan, but word comes from the Jesuits in Macao that the Tokugawa government in Edo has formed a trading alliance with England and that Masamune Date, who had sent out Hasekura’s mission, has begun to persecute the Christians living in his district. Their mission unsuccessful, Hasekura and his companions retrace their steps, hoping only to return to Japan and to be allowed to live unobtrusively. Meeting Chusaku Matsuki, an envoy who turned back and did not accompany them to Europe, they are told that the government never intended the mission to succeed. It was merely a ploy to hide the government’s intention to gain knowledge of European methods of shipbuilding. “That’s why they didn’t choose qualified people as envoys,” Matsuki explains. “Instead, they appointed low-ranking lance-corporals who could die or rot anywhere along the way and no one would care.”

The Characters

Abandoned by his patron, Lord Ishida, and no longer protected by the disgraced Lord Shiraishi, Hasekura comes to question the basic workings of Japan’s feudal society. Ideally, it is built upon the fulfillment of mutual obligations, but Hasekura sees how easily an insignificant member of it, one such as he, can be sacrificed to the policy decisions of the social elite. Cautioned to live quietly, he is allowed to go home to his family. In the process of destroying everything in his possession that suggests Christian sympathies, Hasekura comes upon a manuscript thrust into his hands by a Japanese living with the Indians in New Spain. A convert to Roman Catholicism, the man has rejected institutional religion for a personal relationship with Christ. The Man in Tecali (he has no other name) “had wanted not the Christ whom the affluent priests preached in the cathedrals of Nueva Espana, but a man who would be at his side, and beside the Indians, each of them forsaken by others.” Painfully aware of his own isolation, Hasekura turns to the Christ he rejected even at the moment of his own baptism. Arrested for having converted to Roman Catholicism during his journey abroad, Hasekura is tried and sentenced to death by a Japanese government intent on stamping out Western influences. Hasekura, on the way to his execution, accepts “emphatically” the import of Yozo’s parting words: “From now on...He will be beside you.”

If Hasekura’s rejection of class and culture for belief in Christ is dramatic, Father Velasco’s transformation is equally impressive. Barred by the Tokugawa regime from returning to Japan, Velasco slips into the country to continue the missionary effort that has gone underground since the prohibition of Christianity by the government. No longer does he desire to become Bishop of Japan; his motives are no longer political. Chastened by the collapse of the Japanese mission to New Spain, Velasco no longer believes in his own skill as a negotiator. He has a new humility. Captured and tried in Nagasaki, Velasco accepts the sentence of death and receives comfort from a Jesuit in his cell. Confessing his sins to this man on the eve of their execution, he says, “I confused my will with the will of God.” When he learns of the deaths of Hasekura and his fellow envoy Kyusuki Nishi, he expresses joy at the prospect of joining them: “Only the wind and the sound of collapsing firewood could be heard. Finally from within the white smoke which enveloped Velasco’s stake, a single cry rang out. ‘I...have lived!’”

Velasco’s words affirm his essential human dignity, and, as such, they represent Hasekura’s achievement as well. Both men have broken through the limitations of roles imposed by culture and personality. Both recognize the essential isolation of the individual, and both realize the comfort to be derived from the Christ envisioned by the Man in Tecali. This man is a type of Christ, as is Hasekura’s servant Yozo, for he seeks to serve the hopeless rather than to exploit them. Many of the other characters in Endō’s novel are genuinely exploitive. Chief among them is the series of Japanese political leaders, starting at the top of the society with the Naifu, including Ieyasu Tokugawa himself, who use both Hasekura and Velasco to further their particular ends. The feudal structure is characterized by such inhumanity, Endō suggests, because it values the integrity of the group over that of the individual. The same point is made about the court of the King of Spain and the Roman Curia surrounding the Pope.

Critical Context

Given the fact that Shūsaku Endō is a Roman Catholic who, after World War II, studied in France, becoming aware of the work of novelists such as Francois Mauriac and Graham Greene, it would be tempting to make a strong case for European influences on his fiction. Endō’s work, however, despite the subject matter of many of his novels, deals more with the ways in which Japanese culture responds to Roman Catholicism than with the doctrines of the faith itself. The protagonist of Obaka san (1959; Wonderful Fool, 1974), for example, is a holy innocent named Gaston Bonaparte, but the focus of the novel is on the inability of people in contemporary Japan to recognize and value the virtue beneath Bonaparte’s comic exterior. The decision of Father Cristovao Ferreira, the Jesuit missionary in Endō’s Chimmoku (1966; Silence, 1969), to apostatize at the instigation of Japanese interrogators comes as a result of Ferreira’s hearing Christ’s voice instructing him to deny his faith as a way of relieving the suffering of his Japanese charges. There are European novels—those of Graham Greene come to mind—which deal with similar priests, but Endō’s character acts from so strong a sense of group identity as to be uniquely Japanese.

The Samurai does not deal with a character who is as engaging as Gaston Bonaparte or as holy as Father Ferreira; neither does it have the concise construction characteristic of both earlier novels. The Samurai is bigger and bolder than Endō’s previous fiction, and in it he struggles to get closer to the appeal that noninstitutional Christianity has for those isolated within their societies. Endō suggests the complexity of the appeal by giving the novel two focal characters and by treating them with equal seriousness. He might have chosen to cast Hasekura and Velasco as antagonists, and in their conflict he might then have suggested the ethical or spiritual superiority of Japanese or Western systems of belief. Endō chose, instead, to demonstrate the insensitivity of both systems and to use Velasco and Hasekura to point the way to a moral alternative to both. That The Samurai fails to dramatize and explore that alternative does not mean that it does not exist.

Bibliography

America. CXLVII, December 4, 1982, p. 354.

Elliot, William. “Shūsaku Endō: A Christian Voice in Japanese Literature,” in The Christian Century. LXXXIII (September 21, 1966), pp. 1147-1148.

Howe, Irving. “Mission from Japan,” in The New York Review of Books. XXIX (November 4, 1982), pp. 31-33.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. December 5, 1982, p. 3.

Moynihan, Julian. “The Conversion of Japan,” in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII (December 26, 1982), pp. 7, 27.

New Age. VIII, October, 1982, p. 67.

New Statesman. CIII, May 7, 1982, p. 22.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXII, August 27, 1982, p. 347.

Ribeiro, Jorge. “Shūsaku Endō: Japanese Catholic Novelist,” in America. CLII (February 2, 1985), pp. 87-89.

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Times Literary Supplement. May 21, 1982, p. 567.