Volume 28, Number 2 · February 19, 1981
Embers of Guilt
By Garry Wills
English Translations of Endo's Works
The Sea and Poison (Umi to Dokuyaku, 1958)
translated by Michael Galagher
Taplinger, 167 pp., $8.95
Wonderful Fool (Obaka San, 1959)
translated by Francis Mathy
Charles E. Tuttle, 750 yen (available in Japan only)
Volcano (Kazan, 1959)
translated by Richard A. Schuchert
Taplinger, 175 pp., $8.95
Silence (Chinmoku, 1966)
translated by William Johnston
Charles E. Tuttle, 306 pp., $15.00
The Golden Country (Ogon no Kuni, 1966)
translated by Francis Mathy
Charles E. Tuttle, 128 pp., $3.50
A Life of Jesus (Iesu no Shogai, 1973)
translated by Richard Schuchert
Paulist Press, 180 pp., $2.95 (paper)
When I Whistle (Kuchibue o fuku toki, 1974)
translated by Van C. Gessel
Taplinger, 273 pp., $3.95 (paper)
When eating their boiled green soybeans (eda mame), the Japanese pop beans from pod into hand or mouth with a marvelous deftness. In a crowded Tokyo bar, I asked my wife how to perform this operation. The bartender, speaking English with a French accent, said, 'I'll show you,' grabbed the pod from my hand, waved it toward his mouth, and scattered beans across the floor. I knew I had discovered The Fool, the model for Gaston Bonaparte in Shusaku Endo's 1959 novel, Wonderful Fool. When Georges Neyrand, a French priest, opened this bar last summer, the papers treated him as something of a national monument, the strange character Endo had met in France, observed in Japan, and fashioned into one of the great comic figures in modern Japanese literature.
Review, 3094 words
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