Beholding the Brokenness
A Feature Review of
Portraits of a Mother: A Novella and Stories
Shūsaku Endō, Van C. Gessel (translator)
Paperback: Yale University Press, 2025
Buy Now: [ BookShop ] [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ] [ Audible ]
Reviewed by G.W. Currier
Take a clay pot. Shatter it. Using melted gold as a glue, put the broken pieces together again. Simplified, this is the Japanese art of kintsugi. The valuable part is now in those seams where the brokenness is visible. The new collection of short stories and a novella by famed Japanese Catholic writer Shūsaku Endō, detailing with great poignancy strained relationships with mothers and severed ones with fathers, is more a collection of gold-less kintsugi than it is a shimmering one. Concerned less with redemption than with revelation, Portraits of a Mother is a mature collection of work from an author certain of his theme but protective of those who inspired it. As Caryl Phillips’s introduction states, the newly discovered novella, “Confronting the Shadows,” was not published in Endō’s lifetime as a way, perhaps, of protecting those who were easily identifiable in it. From a craft perspective, these stories are content with ambiguity in a way Endō’s novels are not. They ask us readers to supply the adhesive gold as we confront the brokenness of the plots, the situations, the characters, and we walk away asking in the midst of such splintering, what might adhere.
This collection contains three stories newly translated into English bookended by stories which have appeared in previous collections. The aforementioned novella concludes the volume. I find the inclusion of “Mothers” and “Shadows” refreshing if not necessary for the work’s artistic integrity. Far from being mere amplifiers for space requirements, these stories are the potter’s wheel on which the others are thrown.
Giving shape to these themes are Endō’s narrators, most of whom are liars, either by their own admission or through our own inference. Toward the conclusion of “Confronting the Shadows,” the central character encounters a voice inside his head that says “‘Your life has all been a lie’,” Lying about his grades, he questions why he lied and explains it was to protect his mother.
“No matter who was responsible, the fact remained that in effect he would be reduced to living a life in which he would forsake his mother and gradually leave her alone and abandoned,” the very condition the kakure endure from the first story, “Mothers.”
This, of course, is the predicate to Endō’s primary concern of faith and its persistence. Of Endō’s many perpetual themes, one of the most foundational and fascinating is that of the kakure, or the “hidden Christians” surrounding the central characters. Acting as a Greek chorus might, or a secluded cloud of witnesses, the kakure in “Mothers” prepares us for the motifs of lying present in the other stories. The narrator himself says he is “interested in the kakure for only one reason—because they are the offspring of apostates. Like their ancestors, they cannot utterly abandon their faith; instead they live out their lives, consumed by remorse and dark guilt and shame.” The same can be said for all of Endō’s narrators and central characters: they are gnawed by this two-headed beast of guilt and shame, clinging to a remnant of a tenant of faith that might make sense of the shambles their life has become.
Endō consistently ties this guilt and shame to a tenuous relationship with the mother figure, also a staple of Endō’s oeuvre. In “Mothers,” which prepares us for engaging the rest of the collection, the narrator claims to know “little about psychoanalysis,” but expertly convinces us otherwise through his symbolic entanglement of his mother, the Virgin Mother, his situation, and the situation of the kakure isolated on the mountain of their ancestors.
Syncretistic, the kakure “drif[t] far from true Christianity and embrac[e] elements of Shinto, Buddhism, and local superstition.” The dogmas of Christianity are foreign to this narrator, incomprehensible and isolated, as he is from the place of his origin: his mother. In a scene almost plucked straight from a Freudian notebook, the narrator connects the pale face of his dead mother with the face of a woman from pornographic photographs he’d been viewing. This is a moment of shameful revelation, causing the narrator to weep in an understanding of his betrayal.
Living without betrayal, without drift, is impossible, Endō seems to be claiming. In “A Six-Day Trip,” the narrator’s father values ordinariness above all, equating that with happiness. Filled with spite for this man, the narrator paints him as a man “who always wanted to stay on dependable asphalt paths,” a deliberate parry to his wife’s more meandering “intensity.” Visiting his childhood home, the narrator is assaulted by how incongruous the present is with the past. In a closing scene poignantly rendered, the narrator drives past his elderly father standing on the roadside.
In “Spring in Galilee,” we get this revealing though unsurprising sentence: “My faith, if indeed it can be called faith, is linked to my attachment to my mother.” During a trip to Israel with his wife, the narrator recalls the faith of his mother while experiencing an acute crisis of faith couched squarely as he understands his own past in a more pellucid manner.
From “Confronting the Shadows,” the novella discovered in 2020 in Endō’s archives, the mother figure is almost wholly absent save in the guilt- and shame-ridden memories of Suguro. Far more present is his father, married again, whose interactions with his grandson conjures up thoughts of the narrator’s own death and the unknowability of people: Suguro reflects on how his own mother had and would never see her grandson; “inwardly, the more he idealized his memories of her, the more he felt contempt toward his father and was determined to probe […] the reasons why his mother had left her husband.” The mother, unsurprisingly, is more a mystery than the father.
There are additional stories here well worth reading. Still, those who come to Portraits of a Mother looking for something new and fresh from Endō are likely to be disappointed. This collection doesn’t cover new territory but deepens an understanding of an author for whom the relationship to the mother is central. The interweaving of this maternal complexity with the self-confessed loathing of the Father figures (with a capital “F” due to this hatred being focused on Catholic priests in addition to or replacement of progenitors) crosses at times into repetition. Most of the mothers in this collection are violinists; most of the son-narrators hate attending Mass.
There is an obsessive focus on weather and on people’s faces, described with an emotional precision that nonetheless keeps the reader at a distance. Reading these pieces, one wonders whether they contain what we traditionally think of as a denouement. These stories do not resolve; they collapse—into remorse, into revelation. A dégringolade is perhaps the more appropriate term: not resolution, but a fall, sudden and unbidden, like the flash of ecstasy where the face of God is apprehended. In such moments, the story does not end but drops away.
That drop, that distance between fall and ground, is where Endō’s broken art and theology come together. This collection operates as an icon of communion: its gold is not in the seams of fractured pottery but in the interior quiet of its broken narrators. As with icons of the Virgin and Child that draw the eye to Christ to reflect upon the Incarnation, Endō’s stories shift our focus from the self to the Mother—not just the individual woman, but all that she symbolizes: memory, origin, identity, and the Church. Suspended above time and above culture, this communion requires the contemplative gaze. This new collection from Endō invites us to sit, to stare, and to know.
G.W. Currier
G. W. Currier's fiction and poetry, inspired by the stories of his Hungarian-American family, have appeared in The Table Review, Saranac Review, Nimrod International Journal, Grand Little Things, The South Dakota Review, Waxwing, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD from Oklahoma State University and has taught at the University of Debrecen in Hungary through a Fulbright scholarship.
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
Understanding Christian Nationalism [A Reading Guide] |
 Most Anticipated Books of the Fall for Christian Readers!
|
 Hilarious One-Star Customer Reviews of Bibles |
