The Final Martyrs Book Review

Japan Book Review: The Final Martyrs

ISBN: 0-8048-1956-4
Tuttle Publishing, 1993
199 pp; paperback

Final Martyrs is a collection of 11 Shusaku Endo short stories (11 to 30 pages) written between 1959 and 1985. In this collection, Endo, best known as the author of Silence (later turned into the Martin Scorsese movie of the same name), touches on his oft-used themes such as loneliness, illness, fear of aging, spiritual doubt, divorce and the martyrdom of Christians, particularly in Japan.

As is the case in many of his books, Endo's heroes are often the weakest and most cowardly of us all. At the very least, they are usually badly flawed and living in sad, hopeless situations. However, upon final review, it turns out that the weakest among us are sometimes the strongest, no matter how wretched their lives have become.

Endo's stories often have an autobiographical nuance. He was lonely as a child of divorce living in China, was hospitalized for three years as an adult (split between France and Japan), had a lung removed as a result of tuberculosis and died at 72, which is 13 years younger than the average Japanese at death.

The titular Final Martyrs story and The Last Supper will possibly be the most emotional stories for the reader; the first is a story of Christian martyrs in Japan and the second is a brutal World War II tale.

As for his take on aging, two of the stories are about older men and their sexual yearnings. One is entitled A 50-Year-old Man (partly about a 50s man who joins a dancing studio knowing that he is completely out of place) and the other in entitled A 60-Year-old-Man (about an elderly man who is tempted by a flirtatious high school girl).

Endo sometimes uses the same character in multiple books, and he does so again in this collection. Readers who have read Sachiko (see review here) will recognize the name and story of Father Kolbe, a real-life Catholic priest who served in Japan before being killed at Auschwitz.

Like in a number of his books, the endings of these short stories can leave the reader angry, filled with hope for the world or just plain confused. Often called the Japanese Graham Greene, Endo is a master storyteller. This book will not let down Endo fans.

Review by Marshall Hughes, author of Rural Reflections.

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