SOURCE: A review of Foreign Studies, in World Literature Today, Vol. 64, No. 1, Winter, 1990, pp. 196–97.

In the following review, Ryan discusses Endo's treatment of the experiences of Japanese in Europe as a means of expressing broader concerns about the human condition.

In three tragic stories of varying size and dimension [in Foreign Studies] Shusaku Endo conveys with striking intensity the experience of the Japanese in Europe. It is clear from his introductory remarks that Endo is drawing on the memory of his own life in France, a life that must have been filled with profound psychological and physical pain.

In the first selection [“A Summer in Rouen”] a young Japanese has used his protestations of Catholicism to gain a summer abroad in Rouen just after World War II. He finds himself living with a devout bourgeois family which tries to use him to replace a deceased son once destined...