The final chapter of this profoundly moving, profoundly disturbing book [Silence] consists of excerpts from the diary of a Dutch clerk in Nagasaki in which the drama that we have been so intimately exposed to is seen from the remote perspective of a man concerned with commercial matters. The feeling is similar to viewing the action off in a corner of a Brueghel painting, or to watching a figure almost lost in the mists of a Japanese scroll….

Shusaku Endo … is described on the dust jacket as "the leading writer in Japan." On the strength of this splendid novel, he may very well be. The quotation from Graham Greene on the front cover—"In my opinion one of the finest novels of our time"—does not seem like hyperbole. (p. 5)

Ivan Gold, "The Cross and the Sword: The Anguish of Faith in 17th-Century Japan," in Book World—The...