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By Shusaku Endo. Translated by Van C. Gessel. New Directions, 224 pp., $.

By Shusaku Endo. Translated by Van C. Gessel. New Directions, 208 pp., $.

WHEN WORLD WAR II ended in 1945 there was not a single active Christian writer in Japan. By 1972, when the Christian Literature Society (Kyo Bun Kwan) began publishing its 18-volume anthology of contemporary Christian literature, there were over 20. Of the 12 novelists included in the series, seven are Catholic and five Protestant; of five playwrights, three are Catholic and two Protestant. The anthology was edited by novelists Rinzo Shiina, a Protestant, and Shusaku Endo, a Catholic who is undoubtedly the most popular and widely read Christian writer in Japan.

In a recent issue of Japan Christian Quarterly, Kaname Takado, publisher of the anthology, describes "a Japanese Christian writers life and work, in a `heathen' land where Christians are less than 1 percent of the population, as a threefold struggle: to be a Christian, to be a Japanese and to persevere as a writer." That more than 20 Christian writers had emerged from this struggle was in itself "a miracle," Takado said.

Endo's readiness to confess gnawing doubts about his own faith or faithfulness suggest an affinity with his prewar predecessors. While genuine, this affinity is partly one of style, a confessional style that issued from the Christian encounter with Japan of the Meiji years (1868-1912). A brief look at that encounter may be useful to appreciating Endo's tenacity.

Literary critic Katsuichiro Kamei has identified five developments in the Meiji era that helped shape modern Japanese literature. The first was the translation of the Bible into Japanese; another was Masahisa Uemura's Japanese translation of Christian hymns. Other factors were the translation of Russian literature by Shimei Futabatei, translations of German poetry by Ogai Mori and essays by Tohoku Kitamura, one of the first Japanese writers attracted to Christianity. These factors all helped to shape what Kamei called the "spiritual revolution" that followed the political and social revolution carried out by Meiji leaders.

A spiritual revolution involves the emotions, and it was in the concomitant "emotional revolution" of the late Meiji years that translated hymns played a crucial role, providing a new poetic language that allowed adequate expression of the faith confession that lies at the heart of Christian experience. From this language, says Kamei, a Buddhist, the Japanese learned about the act and meaning of confession, something which had no precedent in Japanese tradition. Buddhism has a sense of penitence, but nothing like the awakening of self in the modern European sense. From the hymns and the Bible, and from the church-attendance common among young intellectuals at the time, aspiring Meiji writers came to realize that, as Kamei says, there is such a thing as "the freedom to confess."

Kamei also realized that it is impossible to transpose meaning fully from one language to another. Words in each language have nuances that are linked to native concepts and customs. The appeal of translations is "the spell they cast on us by the mirage-like charm of taking the language, thought and feelings of another place and people and grafting them into the life and pulse of our own." Kamei claims that "excellent translations of the Bible and hymns possessed the power to penetrate the hearts of Japanese people and actually evoked responses of faith."

Along with the reformation of language born of the emotional and spiritual revolutions, there was another crucial formative factor: the freedom of romantic love. In the strict Confucian world of premodern Japan the straightforward literary treatment of sexual matters was taboo, and open treatment of sexuality did not appear in literature until after World War II. But the reality of romantic love, so widely acknowledged in prewar literature, provoked a heightened sense of sin. This gave rise to a serious tension between religion and literature, then to the

David L. Swain is a freelance writer and retired United Methodist missionary in Japan. exaggerated tendency among a large coterie of writers to dwell on the ugly and harsh dimensions of human nature, the trend known as naturalism.

SOME OF the writers immersed in this naturalist mode seemed grossly egocentric and self-indulgent. Yet at its best this mode became a secularized tell-it-like-it-is confessional style that contemporary Japanese writers have adopted as a way of attesting to their own sincerity. Endo has made himself a master of this style: much of his writing is autobiographical in its source if not in its specifics. What sets Endo apart from prewar writers is that he uses the confessional expression of his doubts and failings as a way of indicating how doggedly determined he is to hang on to his faith. This point is particularly evident in the 11 stories compiled in The Final Martyrs and in the novel Deep River, ably translated by Brigham Young University scholar Van C. Gessel. (Deep River has recently been made into a film by Kei Kumai.

In a 1973 essay, Endo described his sense of distance from both Christianity and its European cultural setting. At his mother's insistence and his sister's bidding, he was baptized at age 11. He enjoyed an untroubled boyhood until he entered prep school, where he discovered that his faith was a "ready-made suit that did not fit." At the university he majored in French literature and read many European "conversion accounts." They seemed to him like a return to one's hometown. By contrast, his own journey of faith was not a homeward-bound journey; instead, it filled him with "the anguish of an alien." The first Japanese student to study overseas after the war, he was in France for two and a half years and his loneliness was acute. But his main problem was his intense sense of distance not only from European culture and sensibilities, but even more from Westernized Christianity. Hence his first aim as an aspiring writer was to make "far-away Christianity" into something close and familiar for the Japanese.

In this endeavor he needed to develop a suitable style, and in his first medium-length novel, White Man (1955), he apparently found the key, for it won him the coveted Akutagawa Prize for promising new writers. The crowning success of this initial phase of his writing was Silence (1966), the story of a foreign missionary in Nagasaki during the early 17th-century persecution of the Christians. The missionary's inherited image of Christ is of a Jesus of majesty and power, an orderly Jesus who is himself governed by order. The hero, like many of his Japanese associates, is forced by his persecutors to tread on a fumie plaque with an image of Christ or the Holy Mother Mary. Refusing to step on the plaque meant torture and death; the alternative was betrayal and renunciation of faith. The threatened hero sees in the fumie an image worn smooth by the footsteps of broken-spirited apostates: the face of a Christ who suffers as we suffer.

Endo credits critic Jun Eto with having clearly seen that "the face of Jesus on the fumie is the mother's face in Japan." He notes Erich Fromm's distinction between mother-religion and father-religion. In the latter, God is to be feared; he gets angry, judges and punishes. Mother-religion is different: God treats us as a mother treats a bad child. She forgives and suffers with us. For this distinction Endo need not have relied on Fromm alone. Most East Asian countries have a strong shamanistic tradition wherein the gods, often female, are nurturing and forgiving. In contrast to this is the enduring and dominant Confucian tradition, which is more interested in order than in deity; like a traditional father, it is ethically rigid and demanding, and fully capable of anger and punishment.

In any case, Endo found that European Christianity overemphasized the paternal, judgmental aspect of religion, and neglected the maternal, nurturing, forgiving side of faith. Silence marked the end of the period in which he focused on rectifying this imbalance.

Most of Endo's themes recur throughout his works, as evidenced in The Final Martyrs. The title story concerns the "far-away Christianity" resisted by Japanese culture, and the pain of apostasy. "Adieu" reflects the alienation he felt while studying in France. In "Shadows" and "The Last Supper" we find the compassion of Jesus for sinful weaklings. Endo's confessional style is particularly vivid in several stories that draw on his childhood in China, and his parents' divorce in 1933. The theme of paternal-maternal tension underlies "Heading Home," a story of his mother's funeral. A Japanese priest serving in the Philippines returns home, a stolen dog finds his way home and now his mother has headed home (heaven). Maybe, Endo implies, he too will someday make it home. The more forthrightly autobiographical "A Sixty-year-old Man" suggests Endo's struggle to be a faithful Christian/Japanese/ writer by exposing his vague temptations to flirt with teenage girls at the very time he was trying to rewrite his Life of Jesus. Only "The Box" touches on the problem of indigenous worldview: it depicts a sincere European woman, trapped in wartime Japan and desperate for food, who is cruelly betrayed by the secret police--an ugly picture of a supreme state that renders all else relative and thus dispensable.

The stories of The Final Martyrs, with publication dates ranging from 1959 to 1985, are a good sampling of his style and themes. But there is no distinct thread that indicates Endo's own consciousness of the evolution of his work. The inclusion of an essay like "The Anguish of an Alien" would have served this purpose well.

ENDO HAS labored to depict Jesus as one who is not the all-powerful, majestic Jesus, but one who stands with us an ever-faithful companion. He undertook seven visits to Israel with a twofold goal: to create a portrait of Jesus that would ring true to Japanese readers, and to construct a background that drew on more than his own subjective feelings. The result was a novel, Around the Dead Sea, and a critical biography, The Life of Jesus, both issued in 1973.

What impressed Endo most during his sojourns in Israel was the absence of rivers like those he knew in Japan. The one river that looks like a river, he said, is the Jordan; but it is too small to be called a river, and it is framed by bleak wilderness, not fields and villages. It falls short of the river as the image of the flow of humanity. But then he visited India, where he saw people bum their dead and throw the ashes into the Ganges. "I also saw them lay the corpse of a child in a small boat and set it adrift in that mother river. The land that gave birth to the religion in which Jesus was brought up is a land without a mother river. I think perhaps Jesus himself suffered from this lack."

If it sounds audacious to suggest that Jesus suffered a cultural handicap, consider this: Endo suggests that Jesus found a substitute for a mother river in the Sea of Galilee. It was from this lake region that Jesus drew together his community of followers--those who would betray and forsake him, but then become men of conviction and boldly spread their faith in him.

Deep River grew from Endo's discovery of the Ganges and from his effort to rediscover a face of Jesus that would appeal to the "pagan" sensibilities of the Japanese. His confessional instincts produce in the novel a generous range of Japanese characters. They are brought together when they happen to join the same sightseeing tour of India. Isobe has recently lost his wife to cancer, and is on a vague and somewhat guilty search for her in some reincarnated form. Mitsuko is a bitchy divorcee who has faked everything in life, including love; she has no admitted goal except a curious longing to find a man named Otsu, whom she once seduced. Kiguchi seeks expiation; during a desperate retreat in Burma during Japan's Asian war, he had eaten the flesh of a fallen comrade. The tour guide Enami came to India to study religion, but he works as a guide to make a living; he is both the prism that provides the reader with insights into India's realities and the mirror that reflects the crassness of culturally illiterate tourists.

While each member of the party finds some solution to his or her problem, the story focuses on the strange reunion of Mitsuko with Otsu, whose former awkwardness as a student is now magnified by his status as a Catholic priest--or his nonstatus, for he is constantly reprimanded by his superiors for some discrepancy or perversion of traditional doctrine or practice. An outcast from his own religious community, Otsu locates the corpses of the poor who have no one to carry their bodies to the cremation site, and casts their ashes into the Ganges. He does this because he believes that if "that man" were here, he would do the same.

The Japanese tourists are appalled that he puts the ashes of the dead into a river teeming with worshipers who not only bathe in but also drink from its waters. Mitsuko is equally repelled by Otsu's weird calling, for she sees Otsu's God as impotent and pathetic. Yet in the end she wades into the murky waters.

Mitsuko turned her body in the direction of the river's flow.

"This is not a real prayer. I'm just pretending to pray," she rationalized, embarrassed at herself. "Like my fabrications of love, this is just a fabricated prayer."

At the end of her range of vision, the river gently bent, and there the light sparkled, as though it were eternity itself.

I have learned, though, that there is a river of humanity. Though I still don't know what lies at the end of that flowing river. But I feel as though I've started to understand what I was yearning for through all the many mistakes of my past.

She clutched her fist tightly and searched for the figure of Otsu beside the funeral pyres.

What I can believe in now is the sight of all these people, each carrying his or her own individual burdens, praying at this deep river. At some point, the words Mitsuko muttered to herself were transmuted into the words of a prayer. I believe that the Tiver embraces these people and carries them away. A river of humanity, The sorrows of th deep river of humanity. And I am part of it.

She did not know to whom she directed this manufactured prayer. Perhaps it was towards the Onion [Otsu's playful word God] that Otsu pursued. Or perhaps it was towards something great and eternal that could not be limited to the Onion.

When Silence was first published, its harshest critics were Catholics. Deep River may also spark criticism, for Endo suggests that the many faces of God are seen not only in Christianity and Judaism but also in Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. Worse, he has embraced universalism: the whole of humanity is ultimately embraced by the eternal arms of the mother river. Acceptance of Endo's version of Indian spirituality is also uncertain in the pragmatic, materialist ethos of Japan. Still, an emphasis on the awesome mystery of godhead and the wondrous ambiguity of humanity may be welcomed in a jaded postmodern world.

That, however, is not Endo's primary concern. He has always been suspicious of the term "Christian literature," for that generally turns out to be mere apologetics. There is only literature, and sometimes the writer is a baptized Christian. "If the Christianity that I believe in, that I am trying to believe in, that I want to believe in all my life, is really the truth, then it is not a violin solo that plays the tune of only one aspect of [our] inner self. Rather it should be an orchestra that responds to all the chords of [our] being, just because it is [ours], good or bad."

If literature is to deal with the fullness of humanity, then it must be able to go beyond psychological novels, or those which tackle the unconscious. It must forge its way into a third dimension: "the territory of demons." Endo does not boast that his work always gets into the demonic, but he feels that his efforts to do so set his work apart. If it does, it is because, as he says, "I have to read the Bible. It is the supreme work of literature. It excels Greek tragedy and other drama in describing man's struggle with the transcendent."