The Samurai by Shūsaku Endō, translated from the Japanese by Van C. Gessel, new edition by New Directions, August 2018
The Samurai is Shūsaku Endō’s 1980 historical fiction that won him the prestigious Noma Literary Prize in Japan in the same year. As stated by Endō himself, this novel’s purpose was not meant merely as historical illustration—it is the story of a spiritual journey through suffering and, in some ways, a story of Endō himself. The Samurai has been published in a fresh edition by New Directions, featuring Van C. Gessel’s original English translation.
The Samurai begins in a poor village in the marshlands of northeast Japan at the very beginning of the seventeenth century. Peasants slave in the fields to pay rice taxes to their feudal lords, often unable to keep any to feed themselves. The samurai, Hasekura Rokuemon, looks after the village dutifully and works alongside the peasants in the fields. Based on real historical events, the samurai is commanded by his feudal lord to leave behind his village and set sail to New Spain (now Mexico) as an emissary to establish trade relations. Along with three fellow Japanese envoys, an ambitious, Jesuit-hating, Franciscan missionary named Velasco, and a horde of Japanese merchants looking for profits, the samurai’s voyage takes him across the deserts of New Spain, Madrid, and finally to Rome, at the foot of the Pope. This voyage is modeled after the real historical journey known as the Keichō Embassy (1613-1620). This historic embassy was one of Japan’s last diplomatic outreaches before the Tokugawa shogunate enacted a strict isolation policy known as the Sakoku, which lasted for the next two hundred and twenty years.
The novel is written in a mixed narration style. In the objective third-person point of view, we are introduced to the samurai and his foil, the missionary named Velasco. The samurai is revealed as a humble and dutiful man, “wearing the same hangiri working clothes of the peasants” and with a face resembling theirs: “the sunken eyes, the protruding cheekbones, the pervasive smell of the soil.” In the same third-person view, Velasco is introduced as a proud, ambitious, and somewhat delusional missionary, who wishes to “subdue Japan with the word of God”. Endō occasionally switches to Valesco’s perspective which is presented as excerpts from the missionary’s travelogue. This first-person account allows for a deeper exploration of the delusional mind and ego of Velasco. Alone at a writing desk in his personal bunk, he proclaims his humble servitude to the Lord in the same breath as he pleads to become Bishop of Japan. We never read from the perspective of the samurai, though in historical fact both he and the missionary kept logs of their voyage. Endō omits the samurai’s first-person view and thus emphasizes his role as a humble servant who never pays mind to his own desires but only to the duty which binds him to his superiors, his family and ancestors:
“The samurai blinked his eyes. He sensed the blood of many generations of the Hasekura family flowing through his own body, their ways permeating his own life. He could not willfully alter that blood or those ways by himself.”
“It began to snow”—the first line in The Samurai is utterly simple and yet instantly immersive. Throughout the novel, Endō writes with a special awareness and respect for the natural world that surrounds the actions of his characters. “Beyond the roof the samurai could see snow falling. Swirling flakes seemed like the white swans of the marshland.” Descriptions of the weather are commonly found but their purpose is not simply one aesthetic appreciation. Weather is temporal by definition, impermanent, notoriously hard to predict, and largely out of human control. Endō uses these attributes to contrast his characters actions in the world. When Velasco and the Japanese envoys arrive in Madrid, a place that represents their last hope for a successful mission, they are met with grey rain-promising clouds looming above them. The foreboding rainstorm is completely out of their control and yet under the gloomy sky they struggle for the success of their mission. When Velasco returns from his final meeting with the Council of Bishops in Madrid he stands in the doorway of his Japanese companions “like a beggar drenched by the rain”—they must return to Japan as failures.
Endō also uses this novel to criticise institutionalized religion. Critique surfaces in small descriptions like “the lips of [a] ruddy, well-fed bishop” and heightens as the journey continues. In an audience with the archbishop of Madrid, Velasco pleads for more missionary support in Japan, citing Jesus as a Man of Love who would not abandon even a single lost sheep. The archbishop responds, “And because of His love… he was murdered in the world politics. And, sadly, our organization cannot flee this world of politics either. The Vatican cannot adopt any measures that would weaken the influence of the Catholic nations.” Endō rejects what he sees as the bureaucratic corruption of faith and outlines his own spiritual conclusion, that of a personal faith unique to each individual. This personal creed is most clearly found in an exiled Japanese monk in Tacali whom the Japanese meet along their journey. When the samurai and the other envoys return to New Spain after their failed mission, they pay a final visit to this monk. The travelers state their disbelief in Christianity and describe the corruption of the Church they encountered on their journey. The monk responds, “Do you think He is to be found within those garish Cathedrals? He does not dwell there… I think He lives in the wretched homes of these Indians.” For Endō, faith is not found pre-packaged in regal Cathedrals or lavish ceremony, but rather it is to be discovered along one’s own journey through life and the suffering that comes with it.
Though Endō is a Christian, his portrayal of human existence in The Samurai is essentially Buddhist in nature. One of the fundamental principles of Buddhism is known as dukkha and states that suffering is an inherent feature of human existence. Endō emphasizes this idea of dukkha by presenting characters with dreams for a brighter future that, to say the least, do not come true. When the embassy ultimately fails the characters are left to cope in the mire of their failure. Velasco, who dreamt of becoming Bishop of Japan and transforming it into a nation of God, is sent back to a small monastery in Manila on “a tiny decrepit ship”. Tanaka, a member of the Japanese envoy who had hopes of reclaiming the land of his ancestors after completing the mission, commits seppuku, a ritual suicide and the only way he could maintain honor for his family. The samurai, who wanted nothing more than to carry out his duty, returns to Japan to find only disdain and suspicion from the Elder Council and his four-year journey is disregarded as a meaningless folly. Even the optimism and excitement of the youngest envoy, Nishi, is not permitted to survive in Endō’s dark world: “The world was very wide. But I can no longer believe in people.”
To complement his view of a world of suffering, in Camus-esque fashion, Endō underscores the futility of human ambition. In Madrid, Velasco is walking the streets under a cloud-covered sky, preparing to say a prayer of thanks on his rosary for a successful meeting with the Council of Bishops. Then suddenly:
“I felt as though somewhere I heard a voice laughing. It was the laughter of a woman who seemed to be choking on something. I looked behind me…but the street was deserted.”
Compare that to a very similar scene in The Fall by Albert Camus, where the narrator is walking the streets of Paris at night:
“I straightened up and was about to light a cigarette, the cigarette of satisfaction, when, at that very moment, I laugh burst out behind me. Taken by surprise, I suddenly wheeled around; there was no one there.”
But despite the employment of this identical device, the laughter is treated very differently by the two authors. Camus welcomes that existential laughter as part of a healthy and wholesome worldview: “There was nothing mysterious about that laugh; it was a good, hearty, almost friendly laugh, which re-established the proper proportions.” Endō’s laughter belongs to the voice of brooding despair, a laughter that “[pierces] the grey clouds floating in the sky.” It laughs at Velasco’s pride and his ambition and promises nothing and guarantees suffering and failure.
To fully understand how and why this view is so pervasive throughout The Samurai, it’s helpful to know more about Endō himself. He was plagued by disease and bad health throughout his life. He was also baptized at an early age and eventually grew into his faith later in life as he experienced more trauma due to his health. Looking at the novel with Endō’s life in mind, it can be seen as spiritual journey analogous to his own. Was The Samurai simply a retelling of his own spiritual journey through his fortè—medium of historical fiction? Or was it Endō’s goal to transcend his own experience and thus persuade others to find faith? Whatever his intentions were, the end result is a story of an incredibly bleak and spiritual journey that brings that far away world of the seventeenth century Japan back to life, if only in the imagination.
Ben Saff is an avid reader, writer, musician, and technologist currently living in Philadelphia. He is a Responsive Layout Designer at Asymptote. He makes up one half of the alternative rock band, Kintsugi. His personal writings can be found on Medium.
*****
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