SOURCE: A review of Stained Glass Elegies, in World Literature Today, Vol. 60, No. 4, Autumn, 1986, pp. 688–89.

In the following review, Brown considers the theme of heroism in Endo's Stained Glass Elegies.

That fiction is principally autobiography in the hands of modern Japanese writers becomes evident in the eleven short stories which make up Stained Glass Elegies. At first glance, Shūsaku Endō's self-revelation takes on the quality of medical naturalism, as he describes his massive lung surgery in graphic detail. The reader is impelled to cry “Enough!” at the bloody descriptions, until he realizes that the hospital room provides the setting, as an autumnal landscape might, for reflections on heroic people, often timid or mediocre men, in times past.

A Catholic himself, Endō, like Japanese writers from Ryūnosuke Akutagawa onward, admires the Christian martyrs of the seventeenth century and finds in their commitment unto death a continuing...