SOURCE: A review of The Final Martyrs, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 241, No. 32, August 15, 1994, p. 88.

[In the following review, the critic discusses the different topics covered in Endo's short story collection The Final Martyrs.]

In a calm, delicate, unobtrusive manner, several of these 11 deceptively simple stories by Japanese novelist Endo (The Golden Country) show people wrestling with spiritual crises, extreme situations or life's central issues. In "The Last Supper," an alcoholic corporate executive confesses to a psychiatrist the source of his torment: as a starving soldier in WW II, he ate a dead comrade's flesh. In "Heading Home," a man exhumes his mother's body, buried 30 years earlier, in order to cremate her remains and place them with the ashes of his recently deceased brother. In the title story, set in the 1860s, when the Meiji government outlawed Christianity, a village coward recants his Christian faith to avoid the torture...