does anyone know Shusaku Endo's elegies (aika)?

Question

does anyone have article about Shusaku Endo's elegies (aika)?

Answer 1

The elegies you are referring to:
are they songs or poems (or films) written for Shusaku Endo as praise for him?

One site says that Martin Scorsese is filming an elegy to Sahsaku Endo in his next film. http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2005/11/but_it_will_be_.html


here is some information on Shusaku Endo's work:

http://www.baobab.or.jp/~stranger/mypage/endo.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shusaku_Endo
Shūsaku Endō (遠藤 周作 Endō Shusaku,
March 27, 1923–September 29, 1996) was a renowned 20th century Japanese author who wrote from the unique perspective of being both Japanese and Catholic.
(The population of Christians in Japan is less than 1%.)

Together with Junnosuke Yoshiyuki, Shotaro Yasuoka, Junzo Shono, Hiroyuki Agawa, Ayako Sono, and Shumon Miura, Endo is categorized as one of the "Third Generation," the third major group of writers who appeared after the Second World War.

Endo was born in Tokyo in 1923, but his parents moved shortly after to live in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. When his parents divorced in 1933, Endo returned to Japan with his mother to live in her hometown of Kobe. His mother converted to Catholicism when he was a small child and raised the young Endo as a Catholic. Endo was baptized in 1935 at the age of 12 and given the Christian name of Paul.

Endo studied French literature at the University of Lyon from 1950 to 1953.

His books reflect many of his childhood experiences. These include the stigma of being an outsider, the experience of being a foreigner, the life of a hospital patient, and the struggle with tuberculosis. However, his books mainly deal with the moral fabric of life.

His Catholic faith can be seen at some level in all of his books, and it is often a central feature. Most of his characters struggle with complex moral dilemmas, and their choices often produce mixed or tragic results. In this his work is often compared to that of Graham Greene. In fact, Greene has personally labeled Endo one of the finest writers of the 20th century.

Answer 2

Well, there are these:

"Stained Glass Elegies includes eleven short stories collected and translated from Aika (1965) and Juichi no iro garasu (1979). Critic and translator Van C. Gessel observed, “The short stories in the [Stained Glass Elegies] collection are in a sense vignettes, dessin-like sketches of the weak who must bear the burden of guilt and the throbbing of their consciences.” Throughout this volume, Endo conceptualizes Christ-like symbols of salvation, particularly in the form of maternal Christ-figures. In “My Belongings,” the character Suguro (who appears in several of Endo's stories) sees “that Man” (Christ) in the tear-stained face of his wife, whom he has never loved, but will never leave. “Mothers” concerns a community of Japanese Catholics who are the descendants of those who outwardly renounced their Christianity in the face of persecution, but continued to worship in secret, hiding statues of the Virgin Mary behind the family Buddha. When the narrator finally sees the image of the Virgin Mary, which this community worships, he is struck by the fact that it is a “clumsily drawn” picture of a local farm-woman in a kimono, nursing her child. Thus, here the Holy Mother has taken precedence in the faith of this isolated community over God the Father. The story “Unzen” is about a character, Suguru, who reads about and visits a Japanese town where in the seventeenth century Christians were tortured and put to death for their beliefs. Suguru learns that a man had chosen to publicly renounce his faith in order to save himself and his family. As Suguru identifies with this apostate figure, Endo focuses on the pain of the man who has renounced his religion. In “Fuji no Tsuda,” the main character learns of a monk who saved the life of a Jewish man in a concentration camp by choosing to take his place. The Final Martyrs (1993) contains translations of stories originally published between 1959 and 1985, many of them autobiographical, such as “A Fifty-Year-Old Man” and “A Sixty-Year-Old Man,” which are sequels to an earlier story included in Stained Glass Elegies, “A Forty-Year-Old Man.” In a review in Studies in Short Fiction, critic Francis J. Bosha noted: “Throughout The Final Martyrs there emerges a clearly autobiographical pattern of the melancholy middle-aged man, haunted by guilt and saddened by his childhood spent in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, who, because of his mother, converted to Catholicism; yet he does not always feel comfortable with this religion, which in turn causes another round of guilt.”

"The 11 stories in Endo's collection Stained Glass Elegies (1984) further explore the conundrum of Catholic faith, as the author presents us with a series of characters whose beliefs are fading and who cling precariously to inherited practices which can be easily stripped from them. Endo's "moral weaklings" continually restage the problematic encounter between Japanese and western understandings of self and God, an encounter which, as Endo's work develops, comes to be increasingly characterised by an ongoing interrogation of the word "betrayal".

By the time Endo reached the second half of his career it was clear that the defining theme of his oeuvre was the yawning chasm between the internal contradictions and pressures of Japanese life on the one hand, and the world of Christianity and Europe on the other."

and

"I've found it to be the case that short stories often make a greater impact and impression on me than novels. That is, I wasn't as captivated by these stories as I was with some of Endo's novels, but now a year or so later I can remember the events in them almost as though they happened to me myself. Please allow me to try explaining how I mean that by way of an example: when I was younger, I often had to walk several miles through the cold to get to school. I dreamed one year that I'd been given a pair of blue gloves, and for a long time afterword, on these walks, I'd sometimes wonder why I hadn't brought my gloves. The dream was so detailed, so mundane that I'd momentarily confuse it with reality. Perhaps a short story is similar in the respect that it gives us a level of detail which can't be easily sustained through a novel? At any rate, I'll ask you to take my word for it that I can recall making a war-time, school trip to a run down Japanese leper colony on a grey winter day as though it happened.

The subject matter is rather typically grim, for Endo. It mostly concerns sick, dying men, crisis of faith, the Japanese inquisition, dour war-time Japan then dour post-war Japan, etc.. Endo's talent makes this much less painful reading than it may sound. One of the author's primary plot concerns is the fate of religious apostates -does grace extend to those who believe but aren't strong enought to endure? It's a question that makes for compelling literature, but for Endo, a religious minority in an often hostile land, we may assume that this wasn't a strictly academic concern! If I could just throw my humble own opinion in, it always seemed to me that the point of Christianity was that people had utterly failed to stay to the law, thus it'd be odd if grace was denied to any but the perfect. That's what I hope anyway.

There is one very odd thing about this book (it's the reason I'm hurrying to write this review on new years eve.) A science-fiction story, set in the year 2005, is included in this collection. Not just a science-fiction story but a toilet humored (literally) science-fiction story. That Endo would write such a story is pretty remarkable in itself, that such a story can still be of an overall dour tone is truly amazing. Dissapointingly, the technology in Endo's 2005 doesn't bear much resemblance to that of the year that just ended. Personally, I'm so amazed that I lived to see the year 2000 that none of the years that followed have made much of a numerical impression on me. Anyway.. happy 2006 (and beyond) everyone! Maybe this will finally be the year that our scientists crack the riddle of the shrink ray.



As eloquent and powerful as anthing you'll ever read. July 22, 1998
9 out of 9 found this review helpful

This is a collection of short stories spanning a twenty year period from the late 50's to the late 70's, and in these stories we come across most of Endo's favourite themes - martyrs of Christianity in Japan, the stories of those who apostatized (gave up their religion for fear of torture and persecution), Endo's own prolonged illness and his fear of suffering, and his own religious uncertainty.These themes sound altogether pretty depressing, and yet when you read his writing, the crisp, clear style seems so effortless that you might think,like I did, that you could gladly read anything he wrote, on any topic no matter how turgid. His ability to contrast the depth of one person's belief with the weakness and uncertainty of another's is genuinely masterly. I think he manages to do this so well because he is able to comprehend both types perfectly, and he clearly does not favour one over the other. His message is ultimately humanist - that we are none of us perfect, n! either those who seek perfection nor those who give up, knowing perfection cannot be achieved, neither those who face fear and suffering nor those who run from it, and furthermore that the idea of sin should not be used by one person to chastise another, but rather to help guide each of us in our own lives. Endo is able to conjure up powerful emotion in only a few pages, as he does recounting his own feelings of guilt towards his mother in one story, or his joy at a reunion with some childhood friends, or the ambiguous guilt of the 'kakure' apostates on a small island off Kyushu. Though I cringe to admit it, I honestly thought on reading these stories 'If only I could write like this!' "