Silence

Shusaku Endo's Silence was published in 1966 and is set in seventeenth-century Japan, where the government is determined to stamp out Christianity and foreign influence. A young Portuguese Jesuit is smuggled into the country and finds the Christian communities there driven underground, leaving him a fugitive in a land he does not know, dependent on villagers who risk their lives to shelter him.

The novel follows two Portuguese priests, Rodrigo and Garupe, who travel to Japan to continue their mission despite the ban on the practice and promotion of Christianity, and to find their mentor, Ferreira, with whom contact was lost five years earlier. The welcome they receive from the persecuted Japanese Christians is overwhelming, and the two men travel to the village of Kichijiro, the fisherman who smuggled them into the country from China. Much of the book is carried by the young priest's own letters and by the record of the persecution closing around him, and his sense of his mission begins to come apart as he waits for an answer that does not come.

The novel was adapted into a Japanese historical drama, Silence, released in 1971 and directed by Masahiro Shinoda from a screenplay he wrote with Endo himself. Most of the film's dialogue is in Japanese, with short sequences in English.