The warmth of Christ shines through in his novels, says Daniel Frampton on the Japanese author’s centenary.
"The thing we are most lacking in our modern world is love … the thing no one believes in any more; love is what everyone mockingly laughs at,” laments Fr Augustine Otsu, Shūsaku Endō’s tragic priest in Deep River (1993), Endō’s final and most exemplary novel of love. As a writer of fiction, Endō’s subject was love; and as a Japanese Catholic, he bravely bore witness to the truth of God’s love in a postwar world where any such sentiment seemed foolish. God was as silent as the firebombed suburbs of Tokyo, as hushed as the shattered ruins of Nagasaki, killed by the atomic age, the empty sockets of its buildings staring back at man without response to the atrocities of the century.
