(In one of Endō’s novellas, which is at least partly autobiographical, the protagonist is a Japanese scholar of French literature, who is both grappling with faith and studying the Marquis de Sade, for whom sadism is named.) Andrew Garfield prays in Silence. For Endō, there are no easy routes to salvation a person’s body - its ethnicity, its weaknesses, its susceptibility to pain and desire - is as much his link to the life and sufferings of Christ as a person’s soul. His outlook was further shaped by insights about the links between soul and body he likely gleaned from years of suffering and hospitalization due to recurring bouts of disease in his lungs (at one point, he spent two years in the hospital). He was deeply acquainted with the experience of being the Other, and informed the way he understood most everything. Shūsaku Endō’s writing was filtered through his experience as the OtherĮndō was Japanese and a Catholic, which meant that no matter where he went, he was an outsider: His Buddhist countrymen viewed him with suspicion for his religion, while the Europeans among whom he lived for years in France considered him a stranger because of his nationality. But how can he imagine such a thing? And what would it mean for him - a priest, sworn to serve Christ - to choose to do such a thing? As he sees Japanese Christians being tortured, he calls out for answers. But the priests are betrayed by Kichijiro (who is a Judas figure in the story), separated, and brought under Inoue’s scrutiny.įrom there the perspective is largely Rodrigues’s, as he witnesses Christians being tortured and is told that if he apostatizes, if he steps on the fumie and repudiates his faith, the others will be spared. They feel compassion for the people, who live difficult lives of oppression and starvation. Rodrigues and Garrpe live in secret, ministering to the villagers and others nearby. Those who refuse are tortured and killed. Inoue’s preferred method of ferreting out believers is to force them to trample on a fumie, a simple carved image of Christ. On the island to which Kichijiro brings the priests, a group of Kakure Kirishitan (“hidden Christians”) live, practicing their faith in secret to avoid scrutiny from the government - especially Inquisitor Inoue ( Issei Ogata), who will torture them until they recant. The persecution of Christians was partly a way to quash the uprising. Those factors included the influx of Europeans into the country, which the government viewed as a security threat, as well as the Shimabara Rebellion, a revolt of starving peasants against their lords.
The Japanese government’s opposition to Christianity, and the subsequent movement of worshippers to practicing their faith underground, was the result of a complicated set of political factors. They meet a fisherman named Kichijiro ( Yôsuke Kubozuka), who agrees to sneak them onto an island near Nagasaki. Unable to believe such a thing of Ferreira, Rodrigues and Garrpe beg and eventually are permitted by the church to travel to Japan, where they arrive in 1639 amid a government ban on Christianity. The rumor is that he’s now living with his wife among the Japanese. They learn from their superior ( Ciarán Hinds) that their mentor and former confessor Father Ferreira ( Liam Neeson), who had gone to Japan as a missionary, is reported to have apostatized - that is, repudiated his faith. Silence is the story of two young Portuguese Catholic priests, Father Rodrigues ( Andrew Garfield) and Father Garrpe ( Adam Driver). Silence is a story of persecution in a Japan seeking to expel foreigners The answers in Scorsese’s film, as in Endō’s novel, are found not in words, but in the spaces between them. The struggle for faith in a world marked by suffering and God’s silence is present in every frame of Silence.
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