["Silence"] is a remarkable work, a sombre, delicate, and startlingly empathetic study of a young Portuguese missionary during the relentless persecution of the Japanese Christians in the early seventeenth century. (p. 94)

One can only marvel at the unobtrusive, persuasive effort of imagination that enables a modern Japanese to take up a viewpoint from which Japan is at the outer limit of the world. (p. 97)

Endo has conceived a narrative more orthodox, in texture and thought, than most novels by twentieth-century Christians…. [The] Japanese author brings to his Pascalian themes, and even to his descriptions of torture and execution, a tact as inexorable and hypnotic as his steady gray murderous sea, a tact that glazes his dark story lustrously. (p. 98)

"When I Whistle" bears little resemblance to "Silence," except in its unruffled simplicity of style and in the recurrence of an image that evidently haunts the author, of a...