SOURCE: “Sad in Japan,” in New Statesman and Society, Vol. 6, No. 250, April 30, 1993, p. 44.

In the review below, Binding explores Endo's attraction to Catholicism and the autobiographical elements in the collection The Final Martyrs.

“Dogs and little birds still appear frequently in my fiction,” says the novelist-narrator of the story “Shadows” [in The Final Martyrs], “but they are no mere decorations … Even today, the moist grieving eyes of dogs somehow remind me of the eyes of Christ. This Christ I speak of is, of course, not the Christ filled with assurance of his own way of life. It is the weary Christ, trampled upon by men and looking up at them from beneath their feet.”

These lines are of Endo's very essence; the attraction, in a Japanese middle-class milieu, to the Catholic Christianity bequeathed by his mother is precisely in its moral and spiritual elevation of the confused, the...