Shusaku Endo: at the river's edge.

With the recent death of Shusaku Endo, in Tokyo, at seventy-three, after a long struggle with hepatitis, Japan lost one of its foremost novelists, short-story writers, and playwrights. Endo's readers across the continents will surely feel deeply the departure of a major literary figure whose special interest and talent was to offer a repeated (and each time brilliantly original) consideration of our moral and spiritual fate as creatures of language, all too aware of the mere second of eternity granted us - at least biologically. For his Japanese compatriots, Endo was a learned interpreter of the Christian story, many of whose mysteries have not been either understood or welcomed on an island-nation determined for so long to exclude foreign influences. For us in the West, Endo has naturally been a helpful observer of his country's modern life, with its mix of an aggressive (and sheltered) capitalism and a traditional culture; and too, he has been an eager chronicler of Japanese history as it has been connected with the West's commercial and religious expansionism.

Endo was brought up by a mother who divorced his father a few years after their son was born, then became a Catholic, and had the boy baptized at the age of eleven. He went to college, did graduate work, and very important, spent three years of study during his late twenties in France, where he became admiringly familiar with the novels of Francois Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Indeed, his Catholicism is close kin to theirs - personal, passionate, humbly and self-critically confessional, anything but triumphal. His fictional priests, not to mention his Jesus, are like those of Mauriac and Bernanos, innocents all too readily betrayed, vulnerable at every turn to the cynical manipulations of a world whose nature, of course, their presence paradoxically both confronts and defines.

If those two twentieth-century French novelists helped Endo to get his spiritual bearings, it is the seventeenth-century of attempted Catholic penetration of Japan that inspired two of his most important novels, Silence, the one best known to Westerners, and Samurai, the one that was the most successful in Japan. Silence draws on the ill-fated effort of the Portuguese missionaries to convert Japan's ordinary people to Catholicism - the novel tells of a priest's search for the truth of another priest's encounter with the fierce, persecutory response of Japan's religious and civil authorities to Western evangelism. Soon enough the priest as investigator becomes the priest as pursued outsider, and in time, the priest as captive, threatened with torture and death, but threatened even more by the huge moral choice put to him by relentless and cruelly ingenious persecutors, who in their own way have absorbed enough of the Catholic faith's tenets and values to know how to use them to stunning effect on those who have come to Japan. If the priests apostatize, they spare others torture and death. All these men of the cloth need to do to save their fellow Catholics is to desecrate an icon, trample on it. The alternative, naturally, is their own martyrdom - but accompanying such a slow and painful death would be the knowledge that many fellow Christians will go down with them and would endure unspeakable suffering, which it is given to these priests to prevent. Here a theology (and psychology) becomes exceedingly complex: apostasy as, in effect, a cowardly self-serving renunciation of faith, elaborately rationalized to be an act of compassionate generosity, a sacrifice of one's principles on the behalf of others; or apostasy as itself a leap of faith, a victory over the sin of sins, pride - in this instance, the pride of martyrdom. Not that the novel ever gets didactic or smugly sure of what is right or wrong. Rather, we are drawn into the gripping story's enormous ethical and spiritual dilemmas, its dramatic, surprising plot, its compelling evocation of character, of priestly inwardness as it tries to come to terms with social reality, political power, and most challenging of all, the conceits and deceits to which we are all heir, including, of course, men of the cloth.

Silence scandalized some in Japan's relatively small Catholic community, as it has others in countries more populously Catholic, even as many Catholics and non-Catholics have regarded it as a major witness to Christian introspection. The novel's central protagonist is not unlike the cure in Bernanos' The Diary of a Country Priest, with his learned skepticism of his own church, his lovely, endearing innocence (which, however, can set in motion its very own kind of evil), and ultimately, his terrible frailty - his physical and moral jeopardy a prelude to his spiritual salvation, we begin to realize.

In Samurai, Endo also calls upon the seventeenth century. A Japanese warrior goes West (to Mexico, Spain, even the Vatican) in pursuit of trade agreements for Japanese merchants; to that end, he feigns conversion to the Catholic church, but all to no avail. History betrays his mission (the doors to open trade are yet again shut) and the samurai (who had only pretended his conversion) becomes a persecuted outsider. Through suffering, the protagonist grows to understand how Jesus lived, what he tried to do and to be, and to love him dearly. As in Silence, Samurai renders a spiritual journey, connects it to an intercontinental one (Endo's inevitable East-West preoccupation), and most tellingly, makes use of a many-layered, subtle psychology (deceptions, self-deceptions, pretenses that become hauntingly, ironically, sincerely held convictions). Endo studied psychoanalysis intently, especially Jung's version of it, and no doubt got a bit of help from that knowledge in his representation of his characters' interior life.

A last novel of this Japanese master, Deep River (New Directions), was published earlier this year in an English translation. A plane load of Japanese men and women, well-to-do but far from well-off mentally or spiritually, go to India, and journey to the awesome, puzzling, unnerving shores of the mighty Ganges river; a secular world of comfort and unease, of self-assurance and apprehension, boredom, disappointment, and melancholy arrives at the banks of Hinduism. As he has in many of his novels and short stories, Endo yet again confronts contemporary affluence (its achievements, its sway and might) with its other face, the hunger and thirst for meaning, the moral neediness of so many of us. The result is a story that addresses a universal audience, pilgrims, wayfarers, seeing yet blind, hoping against hope for a visionary break-through. The history of such a break-through. is what Shusaku Endo has offered us secular materialists who with him have inhabited this century of great progress, this century of unparalleled murderousness: a sense of moral distinction, a glimpse of what moral choices and responsibilities await us, even a sighting, as it were, of the Lord himself. (Endo, like his mentor Mauriac, wrote A Life of Jesus.) That is no small gift in a time that has presented us with hazards, trials, and possibilities as momentous as any faced by those martyrs, those much-beleaguered, much-challenged seekers of the past who populate Silence or Samurai.

Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist, and the author, most recently, of The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism (Houghton Mifflin).