From Cultural Alterity to the Habitations of Grace: The Evolving Moral Topography of Endo's Mudswamp Trope

Few readers of Shusaku Endo's novel Silence can forget the apostate Ferreira's declaration to Father Rodrigues that Japan is "a more terrible swamp than you can imagine. Whenever you plant a sapling in this swamp the roots begin to rot; the leaves grow yellow and wither. And we have planted the sapling of Christianity in this swamp"(147). Ferreira's metaphorical swamp emerges organically in this novel as the culmination of a complex pattern of vegetative imagery and, apart from its dramatic effect at this juncture in the plot, might seem to be an unexceptional trope. Nevertheless, the frequency with which Endo elsewhere invokes this metaphorical swamp suggests its singular importance in his thinking about culture and faith. Endo often used the "swamp" or "mudswamp" to signify metaphorically either his own personal identity or else a collective Japanese identity. In an oft-cited interview, Endo conceded that his Catholicism often felt "borrowed" and distinct from his "real self" This feeling, he suggested, "is the 'mudswamp' Japanese in me" (Mathy, "Shusaku Endo: Japanese Catholic Novelist" 592). The fact that he modified this swamp with "Japanese" suggests that this swamp identity represented not merely an individual identity but a shared, culturally-particular identity. In another interview, he characterized "Japan as a sort of 'marsh'" explaining the trope by noting "that Japan is a country which transforms the religions that it accepts ..." (Yamagata 497). One of Endo's earliest references to the swamp, a January 24, 1951, entry in Sakka no nikki ("The Writer's Diary") refers to the pond behind his childhood home at Nikawa, transposing the pond into a symbolic swamp: "When I think of human beings, I tend to crouch down in a vaguely dark and damp place, something which does not let light in, like a swamp. When I am gradually dragged into it, everything depends on whether I will sleep in the dark depth like an old dead leaf or discover a streak of the majestic light of grace. Upon reflection now, what connects this image of mind of 'human being' to that of a swamp may come from the old pond that was in the mountains behind my house in Nikawa. One bright summer afternoon, I was standing absentmindedly by that pond, when I saw a snake twisting across the dark surface of the water." (translated and quoted by Hagiwara 129) This identification of the swamp as a site of human consciousness turns out to be more than a merely personal symbol. Drawing on symbolic codes of cultural representation, Endo appropriates this swamp metaphor as a complex and evolving space where religion, ethics, and cultural difference meet. Early in his career, the swamp tends to perform two functions, both of which frame cultural or ethical issues as binary oppositions. First, there are the metaphorical swamps in Yellow Man, Silence, and The Golden Country, which function primarily as markers of cultural and religious alterity. In these works, the swamp signifies a peculiarly Japanese cultural ecosystem into which Christianity has been transplanted as an alien species. Second, the swamp can also symbolize a moral ennui or what Francis Mathy has called the "safe, uneventful life without purpose" ("Shusaku Endo: The Second Period" 214). A familiar character type in Endo's fiction--the passive, weak, amoral drifter who lacks initiative and moral courage--recurs in The Sea and Poison and Wonderful Fool and is associated with swamp or related water imagery. Both of the preceding uses of the swamp trope set up binary oppositions--east vs. west, strength vs. passivity and weakness, moral courage vs. cowardice--and often hint at moral censure. Denizens of these swamps inhabit what is symbolically figured as morally problematic spaces. What emerges in The Samurai (1979) is a third variant of Endo's symbolic swamps, with a redefined moral topography. The swamplands in this novel, while retaining some of the cultural iconography of weakness and passivity implicit in the previous varieties of swamp symbolism, are the actual sites of human habitation for the meek who are unlikely to inherit the earth. …