SOURCE: "Between Two Cultures," in The Christian Science Monitor, July 27, 1990, p. 13.

[In the following review, Baldauf discusses how Endo's Foreign Studies makes valid points about the tension between two cultures in its three stories of Japanese Christians.]

When Portuguese missionaries landed in Japan in 1549, they proclaimed the Japanese to be the most spiritual race in Asia. Peasants and noblemen converted by the hundreds of thousands.

Fearing a loss of sovereignty, Japanese warlords booted the Portuguese out in 1614, and Japanese converts were forced to recant or face torture and death. Until the arrival of Admiral Matthew Calbraith Perry's warships some 240 years later, Japan's doors were shut to the white man. Some would argue that the doors remain shut today.

The persecution of Japanese Christians has been fertile subject matter for novelists, but perhaps no one addresses it better than Shusaku Endo.

Converting to Roman Catholicism after his parents' divorce...