SOURCE: “Deep Endo,” in Commonweal, Vol. 112, No. 10, May 19, 1995, pp. 34–5.

In the following excerpt, O'Connell describes Endo's short fiction as either “intriguing or exasperating.”

In two newly translated volumes, a novel and a story collection, Japanese Catholic Shusaku Endo reiterates and sometimes expands upon his major theme—the frustration of trying to fuse Western Christianity and Eastern culture. …

Familiar themes also resonate throughout his second story collection. In the title story of The Final Martyrs, Endo again reveals his fascination with apostasy. In “Shadows,” an epistolary piece, we see a grown man writing to a priest, now separated from the church, who loomed large in the man's childhood after his parents had split up and his mother had arranged for herself and her son to convert to Catholicism (which his father refers to as “one of those ‘Amen’ churches”). Two stories here, “A Fifty-year-old Man” and “A Sixty-year-old Man...