SOURCE: Beverly, Elizabeth. “A Silence That Is Not Hollow: The Mindfulness of Shusaku Endo.” Commonweal 116, no. 16 (22 September 1989): 491-94.

In the following essay, Beverly provides an overview of Catholicism in Endō's life and works.

There was a time when one of our daughters loved a book that scared her. She was only four, and the book was wonderful. But it scared her. Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. She wasn't frightened when we read the book in the small West African village where we were then living and working, but when she and I traveled back to the states to visit my mother for a month, a ritual began. At bedtime Miranda would ask for Wild Things, I would read it, and later she would wake in fear.

One night, feeling that the pattern we had entered was unnecessary, I told her that I had already chosen...