SOURCE: “The Tyranny of Our Incarnation,” in Commonweal, Vol. 117, No. 20, November 23, 1990, pp. 700–02.

In the following review, Beverly discusses the theme of moral struggle in Endo's Foreign Studies.

Consider this book [Foreign Studies]. The author calls it a novel even though it consists of one twenty-five-page-long, perfectly realized short story, one swift historical account in twelve pages, and a long (one-hundred-seventy-nine page) narrative that is primarily novelistic in impulse. The book was written in the mid-sixties, in Japanese; finally, in 1989, the English translation appeared. In the preface, the author likens his former authorial self, the one who penned this novel, to “a pitiful younger brother.” And the author is Shusaku Endo, the ardent and prolific Japanese Catholic whose most recently written novel Scandal concerns the subject of sexual perversion in contemporary Japan, whose masterwork Silence explores the apostasy of a seventeenth-century Portuguese missionary, and whose Life of Jesus derives...