Samurai

Description

In 1613, four low-ranking Japanese samurai, accompanied by a Spanish priest who was to act as interpreter, set sail for Mexico on an unprecedented mission to bargain for a Catholic crusade through Japan in exchange for Japanese trading rights with the west. The chief envoy Samurai, Hasekura Rokuemon, is determined to please his feudal overlords. The samurai for their part, have no choice in the matter but hope to gain favour by the success of their efforts. The priest, Father Pedro Velasco is, however, ambitious and manipulative. It is his zealous hope that he will become primate over all Japan. They arrive in Spain to be amongst the first Japanese to set foot in Europe. They travel to Rome and an audience with the Pope. They are baptised in the hope that this will gain the trust of the Europeans. But when they return to Japan they find that the shogunate policy has reverted to isolationism and rigorous persecution of Christianity. Their seven-year mission has been in vain; they are disgraced and duly sacrificed. For Hasekura, the most reluctant convert, his appalling suffering causes him to identify most truly with Christ on the cross, an effigy earlier reviled in his own spiritual journey. An ambitious and powerful examination of fate and faith, THE SAMURAI is a novel based on historical fact that reveals how people react to events and how these events impact on their personalities and beliefs - or lack of them.

'Ambitious and moving... the writing is memorable in its impact.' - Barbara Trapido, SPECTATOR 'Endo has called it [THE SAMURAI] "in some ways an autobiographical novel", and the kinds of shock experienced by the samurai can be transposed into Endo's own coming to terms with the world outside Japan. He has been called 'the Japanese Graham Greene' and indeed Greene is a great admirer. But Endo is really like no-one else.' - Anthony Thwaite, OBSERVER 'A wry and sometimes bitter meditation on the nature of cultural values... Sensational events or powerful images are pictured rather than expressed, so that they come to resemble Japanese haiku. It is because of Endo's restraint that THE SAMURAI is in the end so convincing.' - Peter Ackroyd, SUNDAY TIMES 'Entirely successful... a narrative of austere power.' - Adam Mars Jones, FINANCIAL TIMES 'Genius... This novelist has the gift of imposing on history a puzzled modern order, a questioning morality that makes the imagination take wing.' - MAIL ON SUNDAY