SOURCE: “Shusaku Endo: Martyrs and Moralists,” in Washington Post Book World, Vol. 15, No. 25, June 23, 1985, p. 10.

In the following review, Breslin discusses religious themes in Endo's Stained Glass Elegies.

God and death, the ineffable and the irrevocable, haunt these stories as they do the more well-known novels of Shusaku Endo, a Japanese Catholic novelist whose considerable oeuvre is steadily, if slowly, making its way into English. These 11 short stories represent two decades of Endo's work, from 1959 to 1977, and have been selected, the translator informs us, “with the aim of demonstrating the range of the author's talents in the short story form.” What struck this reader, however, had more to do with “depth” than “range,” for, apart from a satiric and scatological parody perched uncomfortably at the center of the volume, the stories fall easily into two categories, obliquely summarized in the translator's portmanteau title.

Endo published a collection called...