Imperial Liberalism Lost: Endō Shūsaku, “Mothers,” (Japan, 1969) [PREVIEW]

The Kingless Generation

The author of Silence, the famous novel of Japan’s early-modern persecution of Christianity recently adapted to the screen by Martin Scorsese (and actually drawing in revealing ways on Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory), bares his soul and reveals some of the sources of his obsession with the late-medieval Japanese Christians in a short story that switches between scenes of him, the famous Japanese Christian author, visiting some of the last remaining hidden Christians who refused to (re)join the Catholic church in the modern period and cling to their idiosyncratic but perhaps somehow authentically Japanese version of the faith—and, on the other hand, his own childhood which was troubled by his parents’ divorce, his mother’s various obsessions, and his secret discovery of violent male sexuality. We discuss the unspoken colonial and imperial background to the story, Endō’s prominent placement in the Cold War pantheon of “Christian Democratic” writers, his mysterious trip to France to “study the works of the Marquis de Sade,” etc.

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