Silence and Beauty

Starred review from March 14, 2016
Fujimura (Culture Care), director of Fuller Seminary’s Brehm Center and recipient of the American Academy of Religion’s 2014 Religion and the Arts Award, unearths universal implications about faith, suffering, and art in this focused literary study of one novel, Shusaku Endo’s Silence. Much as post-WWII Nagasaki inspired Endo’s book about the persecution of Christians and apostate Portuguese Jesuit priests in shogunate-era Japan, the experience of surviving the 9/11 terrorist attacks compels Fujimura “to communicate about the mystery of Christ working in our Ground Zero journeys.” Endo and Fujimura, both Christians, experienced powerful encounters with fumi-e, beautiful 17th-century bronze or wooden images of Jesus on which Christians were ordered to walk, repeatedly, or suffer terrible torture and death. Stating “that all art responds to what is holy,” Fujimura analyzes Japan’s fumi-e culture, calling it “a culture of lament,” and asserts that “faith can include our failures, even multiple failures.” Stories of historical figures on which Endo based Silence, scriptural analysis, and a wide range of literary and artistic references from both Japanese and Western culture (including Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film adaptation of Silence) add rich, refracted layers to this carefully crafted, masterful book.

May 1, 2016
Can silence and hiddenness reveal beauty? The role of faith in art (or art in faith) and Japanese cultural identity meld seamlessly into a work that traces the author's spiritual journey. This is no simple testimonial, however, but rather a meditation on Shusaku Endo's seminal novel Silence (1980) the story of a Portuguese priest on a mission in Japan during a time when the country was closed to outsiders and Christians were heavily persecuted. Readers will benefit from being familiar with Silence before reading this book, though the author has included a helpful summary. Silence often refers back to the sacred images, fumi-e, believers were asked to trample on to prove they recanted their faith. Fumi-e, for Fujimura, encapsulate the soul and struggle of modern Japan. The author paints a vivid portrait of Japanese cultural identity, especially Japanese concepts of beauty exemplified by hiddenness and silence. The story does not end there, though, for, as the author points out, what was revealed to him in Endo's worknamely, that God is in the silence.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)