SOURCE: A review of The Final Martyrs, in America, Vol. 171, No. 16, November 19, 1994, p. 28.

In the following review, Mathy describes Endo's short stories in The Final Martyrs as preliminary sketches for his novels.

The Final Martyrs is a collection of 11 stories written by the Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo between 1959 and 1985. With a writer as parsimonious with his characters, plots and themes as Endo, there is much in these pages that will be familiar to those who have read other works of his. “The Final Martyrs,” the title story, for example, reads like a testing out of themes he would later develop in his novel Silence and his play The Golden Country. The story tells of the Nagasaki Christians who had secretly preserved their faith for several generations only to be persecuted again when they revealed themselves as Christians in 1865.

Endo follows the historical record in his dramatic account of...