Tag - shusaku-endo

 
 

SHUSAKU ENDO

Japan Times
CULTURE / Books / ESSENTIAL READING FOR JAPANOPHILES
Jul 8, 2017
'The Sea and Poison': Shusaku Endo dissects the human capacity for evil
This 1957 novel has at its heart Shusaku Endo's fascination with a seemingly tranquil and civilized postwar Japan still traumatized by the horrors of the Pacific War. Even a harmless-looking gas station attendant might be a grizzled war veteran involved in brutal killings on the front line little more than a decade before.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jan 21, 2017
The triumphant second coming of Endo's 'Silence'
Martin Scorsese's adaptation of "Silence," Shusaku Endo's tale of Catholic missionaries suffering brutal repression in 17th-century Japan, has met with mixed reviews. Some have found it ponderously overlong and, for those unfamiliar with Japanese history, baffling in context. It is, in fact, not a minute too long — agony and anguish can't be rushed — and well worth the 25-year wait. Scorsese spent decades trying to realize this "passion project," overcoming numerous production difficulties and legal wrangles along the way.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 18, 2017
'Silence': A test of faith — and of patience
After spending nearly 30 years shepherding his adaptation of Shusaku Endo's "Silence" to the screen, Martin Scorsese may be starting to feel as forsaken as the book's Jesuit protagonist, abandoned by an uncommunicative and apparently uncaring God. The movie has been roundly ignored by Hollywood awards voters and it flopped at cinemas in the U.S., where viewers were apparently reluctant to sign up for a 161-minute theological discourse conducted partly in Japanese.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Dec 24, 2016
Japan's first Christmas
In a letter home to Portuguese brethren, Jesuit missionary Pedro de Alcacova writes of singing a Mass to Japanese believers in 1552: "Our voices weren't good," he recalls, "still the Christian believers rejoiced."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jul 16, 2016
'When I Whistle': A tale from the war between the spiritual and material
In Endo Shusaku's 1974 novel "When I Whistle," businessman Ozu recalls his youth in the days before World War II, after he happens to meet an old friend. Meanwhile, his doctor son, Eiichi, is ruthlessly advancing his career through dishonesty and some highly immoral medical practices. The novel moves back and forth between the lives of the father and son.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books / ESSENTIAL READING FOR JAPANOPHILES
Feb 27, 2016
A volatile mix of Catholicism and indigenous culture in Shusaku Endo's 'Volcano'
In "Volcano," first published in 1959, Shusaku Endo examines the fates of characters linked to the condition of a volcano he names "Akadake," based on the active cone of Sakurajima in Kagoshima. During the research for the novel, Endo is said to have chartered a helicopter so that he could peer firsthand into its caldera.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Sep 12, 2015
Jesus Christ, the Nobel Prize and Shusaku Endo
In 1994, on the day when Kenzaburo Oe was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature — the second Japanese writer to receive the award — eminent literary scholar Donald Keene received a long-distance call from Peter Owen, publisher of novelist Shusaku Endo's works in London, demanding to know why the Swedish judges had not given the prize to Endo instead.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Sep 12, 2015
Martin Scorsese and experts analyze Shusaku Endo's 1966 novel in 'Approaching Silence'
An adaptation of Shusaku Endo's 1966 novel "Silence" — about Jesuit priests and Christian converts suffering repression in 17th-century Japan — is currently being filmed by Martin Scorsese in Taiwan and scheduled for release next year.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books / ESSENTIAL READING FOR JAPANOPHILES
Jun 20, 2015
Shusaku Endo's 'Wonderful Fool' is an incisive commentary on the materialism and spiritual emptiness of 1950s Japan
There's loads of literature that illuminates the foreigner's struggle in Japan. But these tales about "strangers in a strange land" are mostly written from the stranger's point of view. It's more unusual to read the Japanese perspective, which is one reason why Shusaku Endo's "Wonderful Fool" — first serialized in the Asahi Shimbun in 1959 — is notable.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books / ESSENTIAL READING FOR JAPANOPHILES
Dec 13, 2014
Deep River
In "Deep River" a group of elderly Japanese tourists and a couple join a tour of holy Buddhist sites in India. Motivated by different forms of grief and guilt, each is searching for healing. The narrative involves four main characters: Isobe, recently widowed, Kiguchi, a war veteran haunted by memories of Burma, Numada, a writer recovering from a serious illness, and Mitsuko, a cynical nurse searching for a heretical priest she knew in her youth.

Longform

Later this month, author Shogo Imamura will open Honmaru, a bookstore that allows other businesses to rent its shelves. It's part of a wave of ideas Japanese booksellers are trying to compete with online spaces.
The story isn't over for Japan's bookstores