SOURCE: “Pilgrim Between Two Worlds,” in Washington Post Book World, Vol. 20, No. 18, May 6, 1990, p. 8.

In the following review of Endo's Foreign Studies, Breslin discusses the theme of culture clash between Japan and the West.

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...