The Japanese Graham Greene's brief encounter

George Bull remembers how he acted as a channel of communication between Endo Shusaku and Graham Greene FOR ODDLY different reasons the names of two not so long dead Catholic novelists from East and West are prominently, simultaneously, in the news. Because of two books dealing with his sexuality and the release of a quirky film based on The End of the Affair, the ambivalent nature of Graham Greene's Catholicism and his literary merits are being imaginatively argued about in Britain.
Because of his growing international reputation and his widow's dedication, Endo Shusaku's memory is being enshrined in a remarkable memorial near Nagasaki. Between these two authors, by chance, I once played the role of go-between. I find the contrast in the ways they are remembered in their respective countries ironic and sad.
Although writing squarely in the framework of postwar Japanese fiction, Endo was profoundly influenced by European Catholic novelists, especially Mauriac and Greene. He constantly re-read their novels. Given his religion, and his concern with sin and redemption, as soon as he won international recognition he was invariably characterised as the Graham Greene of Japan.
Endo, 20 years younger than Greene, shared with him attitudes and idiosyncrasies from professional purposiveness, and relentless curiosity about the sources of human goodness and evil, to a tendency to tease and mystify and a consctous theatricalism.
In his last few years, Endo, as his widow recalls, would close one of Greene's novels, muttering how much he envied him his splendid gifts as a writer. The two often tried to meet, but managed to do so, by chance, only once. The score or so of letters to me from Greene and Endo respectively trace their efforts to get together and shed a flickering light on their personalities, which had several traits, especially dry humour, in common.
Endo was always trying to arrange for Greene to visit Japan or to meet him somewhere in Asia. Endo's many friends included the Catholic novelists Shumon and Ayako Miura. But soon after ,l had interviewed him in London for The Times in April 1985, Endo wrote to me saying that he felt "rather isolated" because of the way Japanese critics regarded him, and that from Greene he had heard that "it was
not impossible for him to visit Japan". Would I be able to come with him?
In his next letter, Endo announced that both he and Greene would be lecturing in Taipei and that Greene had promised to fly to Tokyo. "My friends and I are trying to make a schedule which will be easy and not a tiring one ... I am looking forward to meeting him very much". But on April 9, Endo wrote to me that Graham Greene had sent a letter saying he would not be able to go to Taiwan. "We are wishing so much to have him in Japan one day."
The first ever letter Greene wrote to me, in April 1974, had thanked me for a review of The Honorary Consul. Several letters
on, in February 1987, knowing I would be visiting Japan. he asked me to give his "warm regards" to Endo, and in February 1988 after calling himself "an intense admirer of Endo" he added: "1 have met him once alr est by accident at the Ritz Hotel and that is all...1 have ordered a copy of Scandal but it hasn't yet arrived."
IALREADY KNEW about the meeting. Standing in the lift at the Ritz when Endo visited London in 1985 had been "a tall gentleman with blue eyes". The two then talked together happily over drinks. Endo's interpreter telephoned excitedly to let me know about this the next day. But Greene never did visit Japan. Perhaps this was just as well, as he
had a knack of arriving in distant parts just as some almost total, usually political, disaster struck.
In March 1986, Endo wrote to tell me how happy he was that Greene was receiving "an honourable award" (the OM). In January 1990, Endo told me that he felt "admiration and joy that Mr Graham Greene wrote such a wonderful novel at the age of over eighty. When you meet him or write to him, please convey that I am reading his books with great respect".
The novel was The Captain and the Enemy. Endo himself was then working on what would prove to be one of his most important novels (Deep River), and had just returned from the experience of going "deep into the unconscious" in India. He had sweated over the style and the content of a work that he feared would not be understood by Japanese readers; but in June 1994 he let me know that "it has sold over 240,000 copies and is being made into a movie ... being filmed in India right now".
Greene invariably asked me to give his regards to Endo. In August 1988 he sent through me his "admiring regards" to Endo, adding (in October) how interested he was to hear what I had told him about Endo's vivid impressions of Christianity in Korea.
Endo Shusaku's widow, Junko, recalls that after he met Greene in London he was "leaping with Joy".
"He told Greene how greatly he had been influenced by his works and that he might even not have been a novelist had he not read his novels ..." Greene told Endo that "if he was interested in a Nobel prize" he would be pleased to introduce him to a "very large and famous publisher". But Endo refused to accept his offer as he "wanted to be faithful to the other British publisher who had undertaken to get his first novel translated into English and published". Greene also said to Endo that he had just a few years to live and hoped that Endo would continue writing "Catholic" literature as if on his behalf.
In Japan, Mrs Endo speaks of Shusaku as having "spent the whole of his life weaving the warp of faith and the weft of disease". (In their married life of over 40 years he was hospitalised for over 10 years). She says that he left her with three tasks: to let people know that death is not the end of life; to make Jesus Christ appreciated properly by the Japanese; to develop the programme of reform that Endo started to make Japanese hospitals more "warm-hearted and friendly with regard to their patients, patients' families and friends". Endo's Christocentric faith was increasingly fortified by his perception of the creative nature of the suffering of the tortured Christ. Japanese Christians, he thought, might come to give the West greater appreciation of the virtues of moderation, humility benevolence.
On May 13 this year a museum to commemorate the Japanese novelist Endo Shusaku waas opened in Sotome Town, Nagasaki Prefecture, on a beautiful hill (famous for its sunset views) overlooking the East China Sea.
Sotome takes in one of the villages of "hidden Christians" who kept but curiously modified their faith during centuries of persecution. On this village, Korosaki, in his grim, spiritually disturbing novel, Silence, Endo modelled the fictitious village of Tomogi. Designed by Jiro Hirashima to symbolise Japan's cultural gifts to the West, the Endo museum will contain a reading room, an exhibition hall, Endo's manuscripts and a collection of about 7,000 books, the desk and chair he used when writing Deep River. Junko Endo would like visitors to go there to reflect in serene and beautiful surroundings by the sea on their own lives, and on the life and writings of a novelist who strove "to present to the incredulous Japanese, with their distinctly different spiritual background, a new face of the Christ and of the Christianity first introduced into Japan in the 16th century."
Graham Greene will surely be there in spirit.
George Bull is director of the Anglo-Japanese Economic Institute. He is publisher of Insight Japan and International Minds. His books include Inside the Vatican (translated into Japanese), Michelangelo: a Biography, and the Penguin Classic translation of Machiavelli's The Prince.