METANOIA IN SHUSAKU ENDO'S FICTION
BY FATHER BENEDICT AUER, O.S.B.

Why did Jesus speak in parables and metaphor? A simple question, yet so seldom we, as practicing Christians, think about it. Isaac Bashevis Singer, in his short story, "Alone," posed a problem which might give us a clue when he wrote:
Many times in the past I have wished the impossible to happen - and then it happened. But though my wish came true, it was in such a topsy-turvy way that it appeared the Hidden Powers were trying to show me I didn't understand my own needs.

A surprise! A total and complete breathless experience! Life is a paradoxical experience. or as Singer writes in another short story:

The world is full of puzzles. It is impossible that not even Elijah will be able to answer all our questions when the Messiah comes.

Yes, the world is full of puzzles! Life is an unexpected GIFT! And that is why Jesus spoke in parables, and why often our lives are metaphorical tales seeming without real meaning except with hindsight or a look into what Gerard Manley Hopkins called our "inscape." How else can one capture the essence of mystery except through story-telling or parable.

In the Benedictine Order, all monks take five vows, along with the regular evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience, each monks takes a vow of stability and conversion of ways or life. It is the only order that requires of its members "metanoia" or repentance. Such a vow seems presumptuous to many, but at the heart of this presumption is the fact that without metanoia or on-going conversion one cannot truly change, and finally convert this change into action in the world. As a monk I often seek fiction or story-telling that speaks to the heart of this vow - conversion of life. Jean Sulivan, the French priest who died in 1980, put it quite well when he wrote:

There are some men and women who have a hobo in them, just below the surface. They are people whom a mere nothing, can make happy whether a blackbird in the grass, lichens on the wall, or a patch of sunlight on a tree. They live the instant completely. It's for them that I write.
[Sulivan, 151]


I believe that Endo, a Japanese Catholic author, writes for that parabolic moment, that Sulivan has made reference to, in his novels and short stories. I believe that anyone wishing to comprehend the concept of on-going conversion or metanoia might do well to read the fiction of this insightful author.

Shusaku Endo was received into the Roman Catholic Church as a child and given the baptismal name of Paul. In the Japan of today, there are fewer than a million Christians. Yet he is the most popular and best read novelist in the country. As Julian Monynahan writes "Endo has had his work cut out for him in carrying out the vocation of a Catholic novelist on Japanese soil..." [Wonderful Fool , p. 71]. He was born in 1923, and suffered much because of World War II. Although he was baptized as a youngster, he witnessed a war that devasted his country, and a prosperity after the war that caused a moral bankrupcy for the Japnese people. He was deeply influenced by Mauriac, Claudel, and Bernanos during studies in France. His characters are from all levels of society, but often are broken and beaten by war, or society, or even the colonial Church.

Christianity does not "fit" Japan. The Edo Emperors of Japan in the 17th Century knew that. Endo tackled this problem in Silence (1969) and again in The Samurai (1982) when he tried to show the paradox of Japan and Christianity. But Endo turns this conclusion that they don't fit on its head, showing us that after all Christianity and Christ fit nowhere - yet everywhere - inasmuch as they dramatize and respond to man's homelessness in the world, his loneliness, his forlorn hope of finding recompense for the pain of life somewhere out of this world if at all. Of course, Endo often tries to make a fit between Christianity and Japanese culture, as when in Wonderful Fool , he links the mysterious disappearance from the muddy lake shore outside of Yamagata of Gaston Bonaparte, the French title character in this novel, to the flight of a single white egret toward a patch of blue in the clouded sky, and to an old Japanese tale about a moon maiden who returned to the sky after visiting earth on a resue mission.

I have read all of Endo's Novels including his latest one Deep River . I believe though that one of his books exemplies his work better than any other, although it is little known. Wonderful Fool is a strange story set in Japan in the late 1950's. Just twelve years after World War II, and Japan was already on the road to recovery and change. It was no where near the high-tech and video wonders of today's Japan, but it was a recovering world loosing many of its traditional values or at least seriously questioning these values. Into this world comes Gaston, a Frenchman whose simplicity is overwhelming.

Gaston wanders into a world which is evil and often totally mystifying. Like all of Endo's novels, Wonderful Fool is very simple (quite Japanese or even Zen) and very subtle at the same time. Many of the characters are double-natured, as they might be in a New Testament parable , and certainly in the eye of the Creator. The characters are complex at times in their simplcity. Takamori and Tomoe are typical young people of modern Japan, and they are touched deeply by the major character in his Christ-like simplicity. But of course the most richly thematic character is Gaston Bonaparte, a direct descendent of Napoleon, who has not an aggressive bone in his body. Gaston represents the religious hero as saintly fool. I thought of the beggar saint of Rome, St. Benedict Joseph Labre (1748-1783). Gaston is what R.W.B. Lewis calls a "picaresque saint." He is a Christian missionary to Japan without ordination. Not only is he innocent; he is in the end a great and wonderful success at accomplishing the goal he set for himself. The cost of that success , however, is more than anyone but a saint would care to pay. He like Charles de Foucauld, the French desert ascetic, pays with his life.

Christ is a beggar wandering our streets. Gaston is the Hound of Heaven, and often linked with a mongrel dog. He is a man who blends two myths, two cultures, into one simple yet insightful novel. Endo creates through fiction and parable, a story of how two cultures may be able to come together or may not. Endo uses his characters as a mirror against which we can hold up ourselves. It is often a horrifying reflection.

Endo also uses the image of a fool to convey a mirror refraction against society's stance - secularization and indifference. He says "But to be a saint or a man of too good a nature in today's world, with every one out to get the other fellow, was equivalent to be being a fool, wasn't it?" [p. 1721. Yes and no. But an answer slowly dawns on one of the characters when she discovers the answer:
For the first time in her life Tomoe came to the realization that there are fools and fools. A man who loves others with an open-hearted simplicity, who trusts others, no matter who they are, even if he is deceived or even be betrayed - such a man in the present-day world is bound to be written off as a fool. And so he is. But not just an ordinary fool. He is wonderful fool. He is a wonderful fool who will never allow the little light which he sheds along man's way to go out.

[p. 180]

Endo then says "It was the first time this thought had occurred to her." [p. 180]. Conversion was taking place. Gaston's witness was shedding light on those around him, not through words but action. Conversion leads to self awareness and then to action. This is the chain of events for Endo. It is the chain which he uses in Volcano and When the Whistle Blew , and even in his latest novel, Deep River . Each delves into the souls of people confronted with the world, their unconverted hearts, and then their conversions so as to act upon their worlds with the fullness of their beings. In Scandal (1989), he takes himself, a Japanese Christian novelist, and creates a character based on his mirror who is again duplicated in a look-alike that is totally evil. It is provocative and semi-autobiographical. The novelist tells his conversion conflict in fiction, but fiction rooted in truth. It is isn't easy to be a Christian and face the world as such, failing often, succeeding periodically, relying on grace.

In his latest novel, Deep River , Endo writes "There is a lot about life that's beyond comprehension." (p. 113) Most Japanese, and probably most of us, would agree, non-Christian and Christian alike. Endo writes with understanding about the conflict Japanese Christians have with their culture when a character after failing to be accept for ordination for the priesthood questions his own beliefs:

At the seminary they were most critical of what they saw as a pantheistic sentiment lurking in my unconscious mind. As a Japanese, I can't bear those who ignore the great life force that exists in Nature. However lucid and logical it may be, in European Christianity there is a rank ordering of all living things.They'll never be able to understand the import of a verse like Basho's haiku:

when I look closely
beneath the hedge, mother's-heart
flowers have blossomed

Endo captures that a Japanese Christian remains Japanese, with all that that infers culturally and traditionally. Conversion is not to a religion, but of the heart. It is truly metanoia. A few years ago, two Japanese students joined our Campus Ministry RCIA program and both students eventually received the sacraments, but it was difficult because their questions were often quite different from our regular students. They were much more considered with the inner life than with externals (although they wanted to do everything correctly, a Japanese concern for customs and traditions). But often their questions concerned prayer, the mystical life, and the stance of a disciple at odds with the world (which they would certainly be when they returned to Japan).

Finally I believe that Endo succeeds as a novelist commenting on his world because he doesn't absolutize. In Wonderful Fool , Endo never mentions God or Jesus or even Christianty, only vague references to Sophia University and the Jesuit Church of St. Ignatius as landmarks in a pagan country. Yet the novel is Christian, and his writing has influenced many Japanese to see Christianity in a new light. Last year, Endo was godfather at the baptism of Ibuse, the novelist, in Tokyo. This was the 13th Japanese intellectual who has converted to Christianty because of Endo's work. At least the 13th we know of, and such action in the world is not physical, but that of the pen.

Jon Sobrino in Spirituality of Liberation uses a term which he calls caminandolor "moving along" with God. [p. 40]. Sobrino says, "The jigsaw-puzzle mosaic that is the church lies in pieces. It must be reassembled." Endo writes his novels to change the minds of his fellow Japanese, and point out in this ridiculous and absurd world that Jesus does make sense. He sees what Sobrino points out: "God is passing through our history today, and it is the task of theology to help us respond and correspond to God." [p. 731]. Endo's pen speaks theology, and corresponds to God. He uses the tools of his trade, pen and paper, to touch his world with the presence of God through fiction more real than newsprint. The world is touched, changed, and even sanctified or "converted" through his writing. Each of us also can find in the writings of this Japanese author insights into the conversion process - it just doesn't happen, but takes place over a life time. Or as the French-American writer, Julian Green writes in his novel, Midnight , "Within ourselves is not very far and yet it is so far that one's whole life is not always long enough to get there." [p. 281]








BIBLIOGRAPHY
Endo, Shusaku. Scandal .
New York: Harper and Row, 1988.
Silence .
Rutland, Vermont: Charles Tuttle Company, 1969.
Wonderful Fool .
New York: Harper and Row, 1974.
Deep River .
New York: Harper and Row, 1995.

Green, Julien. Midnight .
London: Quartet Books, 1992.

Sobrino, Jon. Spirituality of Liberation: Toward Political
Holiness . Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1988.

Sulivan, Jean. Morning Light .
New York: Paulist Press, 1989.