The Samurai
Book Review (Shusaku Endo)
In 1613, A low-ranking samurai is chosen to join a delegation travelling by ship from Japan to Mexico, to open up trade and concede access to Christian missionaries. An ambitious and proud catholic missionary serves as their translator…
Shusaku Endo is most famous for Silence, a novel set a few decades later than this one, about persecution, apostasy, and the silence of God. I’ve read Silence a couple of times, and had the film adaptation sitting unwatched on my shelf for a couple of years, but The Samurai has likewise been sitting on my shelf, “to be read”, for a while. Until recently when it made its way into my summer-reading pile, and here we are.
I’m probably going to spoil the book, so if you want to read it unhindered, save my review and go grab a copy for yourself now.
The novel is, I suppose, that strange beast of ‘historical fiction’. Such an expedition really did take place, but our knowledge of it is sparse, and the titular character here, Hasekura Rokuemon, almost unknown. The priest, likewise, is based on a real-life character.
Endo’s story weaves between the two, with first-person narration for Fr. Velasco, and third-person narration for Hasekura. The samurai is plucked from obscurity, and with 3 other low-ranking samurai, the Japanese construct an ocean-going vessel, fill it with Japanese sailors and merchants, along with marooned Spainards, and send it off to Nueva España (Mexico). The lords are willing to open up trade, and concede some permissions for Christian (Catholic) proselytising.
So begins a journey both literal and metaphorical. Fr. Velasco is scheming, manipulative, caught up in grandiose visions of being bishop of Japan, beating those pesky Jesuits, and conquering the islands for God. The samurai are just trying to fulfil their mission. They cross the Pacific, land in a strange country where they are hardly welcome, are told that the authorities there don’t have enough power, and so set sail again to Spain, across the Atlantic. In Spain, their reception is cool, Velasco faces opposition, and defeat is snatched out of the jaws of victory. Three of the samurai envoys receive baptism as Christians, believing Velasco that it will aid their mission. For Velasco this is a triumph, for the samurai it is a necessary deception. Their long journey finally brings them to Rome, and a charade meeting with the Pope. Then follows their long voyage home.
For while in Spain, and Rome, messages have arrived and the political situation has changed. Persecution of Christians has intensified, the powers that sent them on their mission have fallen from authority, and their whole mission is pointless and futile. After seven long years they finally reach home again, where they are an embarrasment, treated with suspicion for their fake-conversions, and assigned to obscurity.
What’s the point? That’s where I want to start some reflections. Both the Samurai, Hasekura, and Velasco, are bound to futility. Velasco sees all his dreams, all his delusions even, of what he thinks is God’s will, but is really his own projections, come to utter and total frustration and ruination. Japan shuts down, drives out the foreigners, and persecutes its hidden believers. He himself gets his desire - he attempts to sneakily return to Japan only to be arrested immediately and then martyred.
Hasekura, on the other hand, was set up to fail from the start. As another samurai says early on - why did they only send low ranking nobodies? Because they were expendable and deniable. He is lifted out of obscurity because nobody cares what happens to him, he travels to the ends of the earth to achieve nothing, and returns home to reap the whirlwind.
Along the way, too, there are the traces of other Japanese. Child-envoys who had gone to Spain before them. A renegade Christian monk now living among the native peoples of Mexico. He, in particular, is a foil to them. For he proclaims that he no longer believes in the Christ of the cathedrals and the priests and the colonizers, but in the Christ found in the suffering, in the forsaken, in the poor. And it is this Christ who seems to finally haunt and catch up with Hasekura.
Hasekura himself is sentenced to death right near the end of the book. His obscurity isn’t enough for the powers-that-be, he needs to be executed. Unlike Velasco, this happens off-stage.
But in it all, I think we are left to take a journey with Hasekura, not so much across the seas, but to wrestle with God. Which Christ is the Christ? Is he found among the glittering cathedrals and the halls of power? Or is he found among the wretched? Has God forsaken Japan? Does he ever forsake us? What do we do when the silence is so long?
And what do we do with the futility of human life? Almost everything humans do for work and toil and striving, amounts to nothing. You are unlikely to change the world, unlikely to be remembered more than 3 generations. Like most people, you are probably going to sink into obscurity. To have lasting fame as a human being, requires astronomical ‘luck’ and egregious achievements (and its easier to be famous forever for doing evil than good).
If facing mortality is one of my own recurrent themes here, then facing infinity and our own futility, is the existential flipside of the same. We are but dust, and we may spend 7 years on a journey nowhere, for nothing. And yet it is the incarnate Christ, the suffering Servant, who speaks to us in our futility. He, who holds our hand, wipes our brow, treats our wounds, and closes our eyes in death.
