And this, I think, is part of Endō’s purpose in the epistolary sections of this, and all his works: the epistle is deeply, though not uniquely, Christian such a large portion of the New Testament is composed of letters written from a place where the authors had to rework/understand their thoughts about love. The correspondence between Sachiko and Shūhei contains some of the most clear depictions of tender change in the novel, and Sachiko’s final reaction is so poignant, I felt I intruded on something sacred. There’s much about this novel I want to write about, and yet there’s such a profound kindness in these pages that I do not want to spoil, so I will direct these next paragraphs to some stylistic notes and reflections on how this book affected and challenged me.Įndō’s oeuvre demonstrates an interest in epistolary writing, and Sachiko is no exception to this. Central to Father Kolbe’s and Shūhei’s dilemma is this: Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.Įndō takes us back to this verse, words spoken by Christ in the hours before demonstrating them, nearly ten times in the book’s 400 pages, demonstrating its absolute centrality to understanding the novel and characters rightly. Their story alternates between Father Maximillian Kolbe’s internment in Auschwitz and his influence on its prisoners, and Shūhei’s profound distress at being called to war by his nation. Alongside this narrative is the story of Polish priests-based on real missionaries-who befriend Sachiko and Shūhei before returning to Poland. (And evil for Endō essentially equates to a loveless or misdirected love he comes, in Sachiko, as close to Dostoevsky’s portrayal of Christ in The Idiot as anything I’ve read since Wonderful Fool.) The main narrative follows Sachiko, a young Christian girl fascinated with the Ōura church in Nagasaki, and her relationship with a Christian pariah, Kōda Shūhei. Set in Nagasaki and Auschwitz in the years before and during World War II, Sachiko explores the lives of Christians questioning how they are to live in evil times. Endō, by Sachiko’s conclusion, has given this phrase plucked from scripture new dimensions, new problems for me, this novel is superbly Endōesque and recasts his other novels in a new nimbus-a glow that simultaneously distances us readers from the remarkable characters, and has us share in their saintliness. This question of love is central to Endō Shūsaku’s newly translated novel Sachiko at the center of this book is another love-phrase, made memorable and unfortunately opaque to us by familiarity: Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends. They are, to be sure, memorable and marketable in their brevity and wide applicability, but they often lack an aspect of love that seems to be largely forgotten today: its utterly demanding nature.
The multitude of pithy phrases about love circulating our physical and digital world add little to our understanding of love’s nature.
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