Aiming for Japan and Getting Heaven Thrown In
Shūsaku Endō
Japanese Catholic author Shūsaku Endō’s monumental novel The Samurai, first published in 1980 and translated by Van C. Gessel into English in 1982, closely follows the real-life journey of four Japanese emissaries to Mexico and the Vatican who departed from the port of Tsukinoura on October 28, 1613. To increase their chances of securing desired trade agreements and establishing diplomatic relations, they converted to Christianity under the tutelage of a Franciscan missionary, Fr. Velasco, who also served as their travel guide. The eponymous samurai was a real historical figure, Catholic convert Rokuemon Hasekura (1571–1622), who was chosen as the lead envoy for the journey.
The Japanese emissaries’ journey, if not their experience, soon seemed to lose purpose: the Christian faith was outlawed in Japan in early 1614, almost simultaneously with the emissaries’ landing in Mexico. Unaware of the change, they completed their planned journey and prepared for return. In 1618 they were detained in the Philippines by order of the Japanese government. Their homecoming was delayed until 1620, at which point Christians in Japan were suffering gravely under persecution. Many were dying as martyrs. Only a few years later, Japan would ban all foreign trade and travel in a bid to preserve its culture against the shifting tides of European colonialism, global exploration, and all too frequent exploitation of native populations. While Japan’s resistance to these forces may seem prescient in light of what we now know about the fate of many indigenous peoples between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, imagine the feelings of the four emissaries, who had entirely upended their lives in service of a plan that was now obsolete and a faith that endangered their lives.
Hasekura Tsunenaga portrait by Claude Deruet
Sources vary, however, on the emissaries’ ultimate fates. Endō makes clear that, while the ending he envisions for the character Hasekura is speculative, it reflects Endō’s own inner spiritual conflicts. Endō, who was baptized as an eleven-year-old and struggled with his relationship to the Church for many years afterward, wrote in 1980 that “in the life of Hasekura and the manner of his death I have expressed my present state of mind.” In order to render Hasekura’s character and world with greater fidelity, Endō studied the historical record meticulously. Yet the abundant sense in the novel of “felt life” (as Henry James expresses it) arose from Endō’s own experience of an inner realignment of values after his conversion.
The resulting fiction, then, can be taken to reflect a sense of religious value arising from the author’s own encounter with the premodern values of Christianity at the beginning of the postmodern era. It can also serve as a guide for the complexities, contradictions, and shifts in both worldly and spiritual values that arose during modernity’s birth from the clash of premodern cultures.
The character who most embodies these complexities and contradictions is Fr. Velasco, the Franciscan missionary who, as the novel opens, is about to be released from prison for preaching Christianity. Velasco is an arresting figure, worldly and “impassioned.” In the self-destructive tendencies of his grandiose fantasy life he is comparable to J.F. Powers’ ill-fated Fr. Urban in Morte D’Urban and the whiskey priest of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. Like Hasekura, Velasco is also modeled on a real figure, Father Luis Sotelo (1574–1624), and Endō based his depiction of Velasco on Sotelo’s own exaggerated account of his worth and diplomatic prowess in the historical record.
Endo makes use of Velasco’s character to reveal the conflict of values in European culture between the concern with the Kingdom of Heaven—in Augustinian terms, the City of God—and the kingdom of this world, the city of humankind. From the moment we meet Velasco, who is trapped in a “musty,” stinking cell where other Christian prisoners have been held by the Japanese authorities without proper sanitation or care, the Franciscan missionary passionately articulates his purpose to convert the minds and hearts of the Japanese people. He positions himself for the reader as a saintly soul and an expert on Japanese culture: “I am not at all attached to this life,” he prays aloud, and “above all else I know the Japanese people.” At times, Endō allows Velasco to narrate his own experience in first person. At others, he zooms back into omniscient third-person narration, reporting on Velasco’s actions and the reactions of the Japanese and Mexican people. This “God’s-eye view” perspective reveals Velasco as at times enacting genuine care for the souls of others, while at other moments he seems more concerned with wealth, health, gain, and profit. If there is an authentic religious impulse to be found, it is well hidden under a carapace of pragmatism.
For this reason, the paired questions that echo chorally throughout the first half of the novel—does Velasco desire promotion for his own glory or for the greater good of others? Do the Japanese feel an interest in Christianity because it will help them in trade, or because they are really experiencing a call from Christ?—mirror each other. This mirroring, and its ultimate resolution in the plot, suggests that providence can work with whatever mixture of motives humans possess. Velasco himself articulates this idea: “God manifests His existence in the lives of each individual,” he says to Matsuki, a Japanese trader who has accused Velasco of manipulating the merchants, “play[ing] upon their greed [to] make them into Christians.” Matsuki’s voice—tough, skeptical, canny—reflects an entirely modern scale of values, a scale later reflected in the political savviness and worldly wisdom of Cardinal Borghese. Yet in a bit of Franciscan jiujitsu Velasco promptly, even cheerfully, adopts the pejorative sobriquet of “schemer” that Matsuki lays on him, adding, “perhaps God is manifesting His existence even in the life of a schemer like me.”
The typical pragmatism of the modern era finds various fictional expression in Velasco, in the Japanese merchants and authorities, and in the attitudes of Church authorities once the envoys reach Italy. Its expression in Christian European characters, particularly Cardinal Borghese, may be attributable in part to the religious conflicts raging between Protestants and Catholics at that time.
These conflicts take place largely offstage in The Samurai, but their shadow looms over the novel’s events, particularly in a late conversation between Velasco and Cardinal Borghese. The Cardinal defends the Church’s decision to withdraw missions from Japan in light of political pressure and tension between Protestant and Catholic nations: “We must do nothing to provoke further hatred of Catholic countries,” the Cardinal tells Velasco. “It would be more profitable to both España and Portugal if they avoided goading the ruler of Japan any further, and sat back and watched the situation for a time.” This canny pragmatism comes as a shock to Velasco, but it is also the logical consequence of the materialist practicality with which he himself has been setting to work as an evangelizer.
While Velasco claims to put spiritual realities first—and, self-deceived, really believes that he does this—in practice he does exactly the opposite: He attempts to force the blooming of spiritual fruitfulness out of merely material victory. Although Velasco’s crestfallenness in front of Cardinal Borghese when his plans are thwarted indicates the beginning of a reversal, it is only when the material success of his mission has been denied and martyrdom is imminent that Velasco fully recognizes the futility of his efforts and the depth of his self-deception. The arrival of his epiphanic self-understanding lands as a scene of nearly unparalleled power in the history of the Catholic novel.
Luis Sotelo, speaking with Hasekura. Sala Regia, Quirinal Palace, Rome.
This pattern of loss and gain repeats fractally throughout the novel, as parallel spiritual-and-material hopes are raised and then dashed: Hasekura’s hope of regaining his family’s estate through undergoing an instrumentalized conversion to Christianity that, Velasco claims, will help the emissaries close the trade deal between Japan and Mexico; Velasco’s hope of becoming Bishop of Japan and exercising the influence of that position for the sake of visible triumph and glory; even the Cardinal’s futile hope of expanding Catholic political influence through a policy of appeasement and caution. In all of these instances the conflation of material and spiritual goods causes characters, and even the whole Church, to run the risk of losing both. The wry warning of C.S. Lewis comes to mind: “Aim at heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’; aim at earth and you will get neither.”
Velasco realizes his error just in time to save his soul, but not in time to forestall the novel’s catastrophic conclusion. The emphasis of this ending tends to invite a reading of The Samurai as, precisely, a Catholic novel in two possible senses of the word. Endō’s imagination, capacious enough to take in both the virtues of his birth nation and those of his adopted faith, leads us to a vision of a scale of values at once ineluctably particular and generously universal. The Samurai endorses the complex humanity and essential goodness of both its European and its Japanese protagonist, Velasco and Hasekura, as it reconciles the earthly contradictions between them in the shared fate they meet in their distinctive modes. In life and in death they remain diverse in character and in perception, yet they are united beyond this world in the communion of saints.
In contrast to the skepticism and materialism of the modern era, postmodern literature and philosophy are typically associated not only with a renewed respect for the integrity of cultures and openness to spiritual sources of value but also with an indifferentism about what constitutes ultimate value. Such indifferentism is not conspicuous either in premodern Japan or in the Catholic Church in any era. The conclusion of The Samurai resists easy consolation while also refusing the passivity of indifferentism. While the novel faithfully renders two contrasting premodern systems both attempting to impose their values on modern life, it ultimately rises above these concerns as the product of a Catholic imagination deeply shaped by its own historical moment. In the parallel spiritual journeys of its characters, The Samurai reflects a typically postmodern yearning for transcendence and synthesis of values beyond the conflict of cultures.
Katy Carl is the editor in chief of Dappled Things, a quarterly journal of ideas, art, and Catholic faith. She is the Wiseblood Books 2020 writer in residence and the author of Earth and Water, a novel, due out from Wiseblood Books in 2021.
Hasekura at Prayer Sendai City Museum, Miyagi, Japan