The (more or less) same light but from different lamps: The post-pluralist understanding of religion from a Japanese perspective

Abstract

Among a number of Japanese novelists, Endo Shusaku (1923-1996) is perhaps the best-known outside Japan, even surpassing the recent Nobelprize laureate Oe Kenzaburo. Beginning with his early novel Silence (1966), and continuing through his last monumental work Deep River (1993), many of Endo's oeuvres have been translated into English, perhaps because they deal with the issues of Christianity set in distinctively Japanese contexts. Baptized into the Roman Catholic Church at the age of 11, Endo started his lifelong pursuit of ways to acculturate Christianity into Japanese soil throughout his literary career. His oft-quoted hope was to remake the Western-made, "ill-fitting" Christianity into a suit that the Japanese can wear more comfortably.1 Not surprisingly, Endo found John Hick's proposal of religious pluralism very appealing. The recent publication of his composition notes reveals that Endo was profoundly impressed by Hick when he began writing his last novel Deep River. When he encountered the Japanese translation of Hick's Problems of Religious Pluralism (1985) in the corner of a neighborhood bookstore, he could not take it as a mere coincidence and wrote in his diary that "it was as if my subconscious quest had drawn the book to me."2 The novel, whose title refers to the Ganges River in India, revolves around the spiritual journey of a Japanese Catholic monk who studied in France but was expelled from his religious order, allegedly because of his heretical sympathy toward other religions. Later on, while serving the low-caste people in India, the monk confesses, echoing the title of Hick's book God Has Many Names (1980), that "I think the real dialogue takes place when you believe that God has many faces, and that he exists in all religions."3