SOURCE: "Pilgrim between Two Worlds," in Book World—The Washington Post, May 6, 1990.

[In the following review, Breslin discusses the relationship between East and West as seen in Endo's Silence and Foreign Studies.]

I had just finished teaching Shusaku Endo's novel Silence in an undergraduate course on Catholic fiction when Foreign Studies arrived for review. As always, Silence provoked a variety of responses among the students who found its hero, the 16th century Portuguese Jesuit Sebastian Rodrigues, alternately an arrogant Westerner intent on winning glory as a missionary or martyr, and a sympathetic victim of a cruel religious persecution and a culture he little understood. In the end. Rodrigues accepted the judgment that Christianity could not flourish in the "mud swamp" of Japan—a judgment enunciated by his canny inquisitor, Inoue, but clearly shared by the novel's author.

Foreign Studies was originally published in Japan in 1965, a couple of...