Shusaku Endo’s “A Summer in
A Tragicomedy of Virtues Unhad and Goods Ungained
Introduction
Western
interest in Shusaku Endo’s works has grown steadily since the appearance of Silence
in its English translation in 1969.[1] That novel established Endo as a writer of
great religious insight, someone with noteworthy views about redemption, mercy,
and the problem of evil. The Samurai
(J 1980, E 1984) and Stained Glass Elegies (E 1985) confirmed this
reputation. Endo’s works have also been
recognized as lively commentaries on the deep differences between Japanese and
European ways of thinking. Silence
and the novella And You, Too (J 1965, E 1989) are powerful psychological
portraits of characters whose eventual grasp of a foreign culture is as destructive
of their personalities as it is enlightening.
Other works, such as The Samurai, White Man, Yellow Man (J 1955, E 2004), Volcano (J 1959, E 1988), and The Sea and
Poison (J 1958, E 1972), dramatize the cultural differences as Endo sees
them. What critics have not recognized,
however, is the remarkable contribution that Endo’s works make to the field of
ethics. The Sea and Poison, for
instance, is a masterpiece of moral psychology, exploring the social and
psychological processes by which people acquire the power of conscience, or in
this case, fail to acquire it. Volcano
vividly paints a world of petty vices and illuminates the psychology of
self-deception. Another gem of ethical
insight is the short story “A Summer in
“A
Summer in
“A
Summer in
Before we can see what Endo’s contribution is, however, we need to articulate an ambiguity in the thesis that virtue contributes to one’s good (I’ll call this thesis “the virtue-good thesis”), an ambiguity stemming from the different senses of the word “contribute.” Some thinkers hold that the exercise of virtue contributes to one’s good extrinsically. If virtue contributes to one’s good only extrinsically, then simply having or exercising virtue does not constitute one’s good. Instead, virtue will serve as a condition for attaining one’s good or as an instrument that is useful or even necessary for attaining it.[5] Other thinkers, in contrast, hold that virtue or its exercise is intrinsically connected to one’s good. In this case, virtue will be the sole or at any rate the largest constituent of one’s good.[6] An example might help to illustrate this contrast. When one plans a car trip, both consulting a map and driving the first leg of the journey contribute to the trip, but in different ways. Consulting the map makes an extrinsic contribution: It’s a precondition for taking the trip, but it is not a constituent of the trip itself. Driving the first leg of the trip makes an intrinsic contribution: In driving that leg, one is thereby taking the trip. Likewise, a virtue such as courage might contribute to one’s good extrinsically (for instance, if one can’t bring oneself to face the difficulties one needs to overcome to attain one’s good) or intrinsically (for instance, if the very exercise of courage is part of a flourishing human life).
“A
Summer in
What is ingenious about Endo’s narrative is not that it depicts both versions of the virtue-good thesis; after all, any apt example in a piece of academic philosophical writing could do as much. What is ingenious is the way the tale depicts them, underscoring in a way standard academic philosophical prose cannot the difference in value between the goods extrinsically connected to virtue and those intrinsically connected to it. The story leads readers to realize that the goals the characters seek have little value, and in fact we find it fitting that they will fail to achieve them—a point highlighted above all by the story’s comic elements. However, to laugh when someone loses something of great value—even if that loss is deserved—would be reprehensible. It would make a mockery of human life itself. For this reason, Endo does not treat the characters’ loss of all goods in a comic way. He depicts with sobriety Kudo’s ever worsening inner turmoil, turmoil resulting from his servility and loss of identity, leading him to the point of explosion. This treatment leads readers to see that Kudo’s self-respect and identity are not goods fitting for him to lose and that when he does lose them, this is not comic but tragic.
Goods Extrinsically Connected to Virtue
The French. Virtue bears an extrinsic relation to certain
goods, in particular, to the goals of the projects one chooses for one’s
life. In other words, these goods do not
consist in the mere possession or exercise of the virtue, nor is its possession
or exercise a sufficient condition for attaining those goods. Rather, people who are virtuous tend, at
least in normal communities and normal circumstances, to attain these
goods. This should come as no surprise:
Virtuous people are prudent, intelligent deliberators, and persevering. They are neither overly cautious, nor are
they excessively bold. They are
self-controlled. Moreover, they form
solid friendships and inspire trust in others by virtue of their justice,
truthfulness, respectfulness, and generosity.
People with these traits often deserve to have their goals
furthered, and their friends and fellow citizens want to see them
furthered. It is likewise easy to see
why the lack of any one of these traits might hamper one’s ability to attain
one’s goals. The despairing or cowardly
person will give up even if all is not lost; the imprudent will take the wrong
path; and the self-indulgent will waste energy and resources that should be
devoted to attaining one’s ends in life.
Failures in justice, truthfulness, respectfulness, and generosity are
destructive of community and impediments to friendship. However, there are some vices that seem well
suited to aid their possessors in attaining their goals, vices such as
manipulativeness and deceitfulness, which are the vices marking the French
characters in “A Summer in
The
French lay the foundation of their failure long before Kudo’s arrival in
This
conviction undoubtedly has many and complex roots. Some of the most complex are simultaneously
historical, social, and religious.[7] At the time the story takes place, the
Catholic Church recognized no way to salvation apart from the Church’s
ministry; those outside the one true faith were not simply benighted, but
wretched, for they were on the path to perdition. Hence, the divine injunction, “Go ye
therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and
of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 28:19), turns out to be of
paramount importance, a call to benevolence on the part of Christians. Historically, however, many Christians
responded with pride rather than pure benevolence, and it is easy to see
why.
Inattentiveness
is the vice opposed to the virtue of attentiveness, the tendency to give to
things—works of art, mathematical calculations, literary texts, or persons—the
attention due them. When one misreads a
text or applies the wrong rules for the calculation one is trying to solve,
then one is not paying due attention: Instead of letting hermeneutical norms or
the rules of math govern what one does, one instead imposes rules of one’s own
making on the text or problem. In
effect, one is attempting to make the world bend to one’s own conceptions
rather than allowing the way the world is to govern what one thinks and
does. We can likewise fail to attend to
persons. When we jump to conclusions
about what a person is like on the basis of our own interests, prejudices,
preconceptions, or self-comforting myths, we attempt to bend the world’s
inhabitants to our way of thinking rather than letting them, as they are,
determine what we think. Inattentiveness
is, then, often an expression of pride, as it is with the citizens of
Although
he paints a portrait of multiple vices, Endo treats his subject with levity and
sometimes hilarity. Let me first discuss
some of the relevant episodes, both to bring out the humor in them and to
illustrate the vices I have attributed to the citizens of
Nearly
every French character in the story suffers from inattentiveness. Anne, for instance, treats Kudo as if he were
a child, tidying up his clothes for him before his talk, “oblivious to his
thoughts” (35). When M. Vealeaux asks
whether in fact the Japanese sleep on the floor, Kudo attempts to explain that
they actually sleep on woven tatami mats.
But Anne breaks in with the assumption that Japanese sleeping practices
resemble camping out in a barn, ne c’est pas (25)? When the priest finds fault with Kudo’s
reading the anti-Catholic Gide, Anne comes to his defense as if he were a child
who had stumbled on the wrong sort of book.
He doesn’t know anything about Gide; how can a foreigner be expected to
know that this is the wrong sort of text, ne c’est pas (28)? Likewise, when Madame Vealeaux discovers that
Kudo’s baptismal name is Paul—the name of her deceased son, who wanted to
become a missionary to Japan—she tells him that from now on she will call him
“Paul” because “[t]hat way, we can feel much closer. I suppose you feel the same way?” (19). The remark makes one cringe: It is as blackly
ironic as it is comic. In fact, whenever
they call him “Paul,” he feels ashamed.
The priest, too, shows inattentiveness, in particular during Kudo’s
presentation on
The
French, of course, want Kudo to contribute to the effort to increase the
Christian population of
An exceptionally great source of pressure on Kudo are the gifts of money, housing, and education offered by the French. In fact, he conceptualizes these gifts in two different ways, each way bringing its own pressure to bear upon him. On the one hand, Kudo sees their offerings of home, money, and education are freely given gifts. When he detects in himself the readiness to think their offerings are anything other than expressions of pure generosity, he despises himself for the thought (27). When he is tempted to protest against the pressure he feels from the desires and expectations of the French, the thought of their good will soon leads him to abandon the idea (33, 38). Of course, genuine gifts do not create debts.[10] The gift giver may hope for something from the recipient, such as friendship or respect. Hence, the French in this story may hope that Kudo will think well of them, their way of life, their religion, but their giving creates in him no debt to act in any way. What it does, rather, is to illuminate the French as beneficent, charitable people, people one would not want for all the world to disappoint. So, even when he sees their gifts as pure generosity and not as debt-creating, Kudo still feels the pressure to play the role the French prescribe for him.
All
this would be different, of course, if the French offerings of money, food, and
housing were not genuine gifts, but rather goods supplied in fulfillment of
their side of a contract, with Kudo’s future missionary effort as the
fulfillment of his side. Kudo has made
no such contract; yet the French sometimes carry on as if he had, as when the
elderly priest speaks of the “expectations” of the French
Christians—expectations they have no warrant to hold in the absence of just
such a contract. For this reason, Kudo
wishes he could pay; he does not want to be under obligation to the
French. Upon entering a tobacconist’s
shop, the clerk asks him a few routine questions about how he likes
The manipulation of Kudo is dramatized most vividly in the actions of the middle-aged priest. Upon meeting Kudo, this robust and muscular man, who looks as if he should be a soldier rather than a cleric, looks him up and down as they greet each other outside the Vealeaux house. When they enter, as he introduces Kudo, he lays his brawny hand on Kudo’s shoulder. Since the Japanese do not have the same conventions of touching as the French, we can expect Kudo to find this moment peculiar if not uncomfortable; but what taxes him is not the unaccustomed touch, but rather the weight of the French people’s intentions for him. As the priest expresses the hope that Kudo’s studies will work toward the conversion of the Japanese,
Kudo sensed an increasing heaviness in the hand placed on his shoulder. . . . No, not just on his shoulder: the priest’s hand weighed heavily on his whole being. It was like a heavy stone on his heart. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he wiped the sweat from his brow. (23)
Later, after exchanging a few pleasantries, during which the priest once again lays a hand on Kudo’s shoulder and Kudo once again offers his ritual answer to the question of how he likes Rouen,
The priest literally dragged him to the corner of the room. On the wall in that corner hung ‘the picture’. It portrayed the nervous face of a young man, with narrow eyes gazing out from behind his glasses.
‘This
is Madame Vealeaux’s son . . . the one who died. I knew him when he was just a lad. Even as a young boy, he was always respectful
of his parents. He was a good student too. When we heard that we was going to go to the
seminary, we were both surprised and happy.
He wanted to go to
The priest glanced over at Madame Vealeaux, who appeared to be exhausted and had sat down in the corner of the room listening to her friends’ conversation.
‘I expect you’ve already been told, but it was as a result of her son’s death that her heart grew weak. She’s now living entirely on that memory. You’d do well to remember that.’ ( 24)
This is a moment of exceptionally
grim humor. Having come to
Kudo.
Endo treats Kudo’s frustrations humorously too—as long as the goods beyond
his reach are extrinsically connected to the virtues he lacks. Early in the story we learn of Kudo’s
disingenuousness: Like the French, he tries to manipulate the application
process to serve his own goals. He
declares his intention to study French Christian literature, when in fact he
has no commitment either to Christian studies or to Christianity. Kudo is glad he was baptized as a child only
because it now furthers his opportunity to study abroad (16). The only book we see him read is by the forbidden
Gide, not by Christians such as Bernanos or Mauriac. What really entices him to
It
is partly because of his initial dishonesty that Kudo steps into his
predicament, but it is his weakness that keeps him mired in it. At every point, Kudo is eager to please his
French hosts for reasons that turn out to be complex. Some of his motives are quite typical and
unassailable: a desire to respect his
hosts and his host country, a feeling of dependence on them, a counterbalancing
effort to make up for his ineptitude in French.
But alongside these, Kudo recognizes in himself an “innate moral
cowardice” (33). He feels stifled in
Of
course, Kudo will not contribute to the missionary effort in
Goods Intrinsically Connected to Virtue
The French, as we’ve seen, manipulate Kudo. More surprising is Kudo’s own participation in that manipulation, a participation that erodes whatever self-respect he may have. By “self-respect” I do not mean self-admiration or complacency in whatever one happens to be, but rather an attitude or disposition of respect directed toward oneself in virtue of one’s intrinsic worth.[12] What gives us our worth is, at least in large part, that we are rational, autonomous agents; and the self-respecting person both recognizes and acts in view of this fact. To lose self-respect, then, is to think of oneself, or treat oneself, in a demeaning way—and this is just what Kudo does. He adopts a servile posture, follows their instructions, and indulges them even at the expense of his own autonomy, violating his own human dignity in the process. What demeans Kudo is not simply that he complies with the desires of the French. After all, if he had done so merely to keep the peace so that he would not be despised by his hosts and the other residents of this town halfway around the world from his home, in a country with no diplomatic relations with his, then we might say he was merely choosing the lesser of two evils. Similarly, if he had adopted an ironic or mocking attitude in his compliance, he might have been able to maintain his dignity while seeming to indulge his hosts. But Kudo acts so as to humor the French in a genuine effort to please them, to win and keep their approval; and his humoring goes so far as to allow them to dictate his behavior, his activities, and even his name. He surrenders his independence in all these respects.[13]
Kudo
also surrenders his identity. As he
looks in the mirror, the Kudo once reflected there can no longer be seen. The character who now returns his glance is
the nervous, subservient, sweaty Paul—so much like the Paul Vealeaux who used
to inhabit the same room not so long ago.
If Kudo had acquired the virtues, he would have been able to resist the
disintegration of his character.
Virtues, after all, are relatively permanent dispositions to certain
ways of conceptualizing, judging, feeling, and acting,[14]
even to such behavior as the way one carries oneself or the manner in which one
answers questions.[15] Virtue, then, affords one a stable character,
an identity that is not easily warped.
This is not to say that the virtuous person is hidebound, inflexible,
and predictable. In order to negotiate
new and unfamiliar circumstances, the virtuous person must be ready to act and
feel in unaccustomed ways if reason demands it.
So, the inflexibility of the denizens of
Kudo, however, sees his moral situation as fraught with insuperable complications. He recognizes that the vice of weakness is a source of his servility and disintegration, but he also has the impression that a virtuous impulse is equally their source. He is, after all, the beneficiary of the good will of the French, and he refuses to betray that good will (33). The problem, as he sees it, stems from his inability to summon up the precise French expressions to communicate his gratitude and at the same time maintain his self-respect. In his judgment, he is caught in a dilemma. One horn of the dilemma is that he comply with the wishes of the French and seek to please them, an option that renders him servile and leads to the disintegration of his character. The other is that he refuse to comply, an option that would offend his hosts and betray their generosity.
The
dilemma is mirrored dramatically by the behavior of the two Moroccan
students—another “project” of the priest’s—whom Kudo sees in the company of the
priest and the local women (31-33). One,
Paulin (whose name is a variant of “Paul”), mats down his hair and parts it
forcibly in imitation of French style.
He sings a Moroccan song in a shrill voice, beating time with his hands,
with movements so exaggerated the audience is embarrassed to watch him. As Kudo looks on in sympathy, he feels what
he takes Paulin to be feeling. Paulin
realizes this audience will find his song unappealing and silly, but also that
that is just as they want to find it.
After all, if it had been stately, haunting, or fascinating, the French
could not so easily maintain the illusion that they are offering culture to the
barbarians. So, he humors them and sings
in just the way he knows they want him to.
The other Moroccan, Maguillot, who had looked on from the corner, then
argues heatedly with Paulin in their native tongue, breaking in the end into
French so that everyone can understand that he is fed up. He bursts through the door and returns to
A moment ago I noted that Kudo finds himself in a moral dilemma, but now I need to qualify that claim. Just as there are two Moroccans, there are, in a way, two Kudos, and only one of them perceives his situation as a dilemma. At night, as he looks in the mirror at what he has become, Kudo splits himself by imagination into two. This is, in part, an imaginative device to facilitate debate over what he should do and how he should feel. But it is also a technique for clarifying his moral vision, since sometimes the alter ego he creates though imagination is an impartial spectator of Kudo the agent, a spectator Kudo removed from the social pressures, the unrelenting heat, the turmoil of emotion.[16] In an early episode, the spectator Kudo looks from his vantage point inside the mirror at the agent Kudo and accuses him of hypocrisy and dishonesty. The agent Kudo protests that failing to indulge the French would result in offending their good will. The spectator replies by merely pointing out the flaws of the French, flaws that the agent Kudo refuses to acknowledge (27). Later, the agent Kudo comes to admit their egotism, but once again their evident good will trumps any recognition of egotism in his decision about how to conduct himself. The spectator Kudo, in effect, is trying to dispel the agent Kudo’s dilemma by pointing out that the French do not deserve the tribute the agent Kudo means to show them and that, in any case, his motive for offering that tribute is his weakness more than genuine gratitude. Gratitude is not complaisance. Kudo’s conception of his situation as a moral dilemma, it turns out, is not an accurate vision, but is itself a product of his own weakness, an attempt to excuse his own servile behavior. If it is not a dilemma, then, a virtuous person should be able to find a way to negotiate the moral difficulties without the loss of such goods as self-respect and identity.[17]
Even though Kudo does not face a dilemma after all, it is still incumbent on him to assert his self-respect without treating the French with ingratitude. He must not, for instance, follow Maguillot’s example and burst out of their lives in anger. No doubt, this would be a difficult task for anyone, in particular someone whose French is limited. But Kudo is an intelligent man, a student of literature, and so someone with a well trained imagination. Moreover, his French improves over the course of the story; by the end, he responds much more readily to the queries and cavils of the French. In the long night hours he spends before the mirror, could he not have found the time to craft a response to the French demands on him which would preserve his dignity and integrity and which nevertheless recognized the good will of the French?
What
prevents his finding such a response is not, in the end, his limited French but
his own weakness. However, even if he
could not have crafted any such response, there is yet another good he might
have attained from the process of self-reflection: a more accurate moral vision
of himself and the French. For Kudo,
“A
Summer in
As
the story nears its end, we find that Kudo comes tantalizingly close to the
self-understanding he seeks and needs.
After all, he is an imaginative and self-reflective man, and his
nighttime division of himself into agent and spectator to facilitate his
self-reflection is a powerful method for self-criticism. Moreover, the need for a new vision of
himself and the French, one that will enable him to recover his self-respect
and identity, becomes more and more urgent, as the story’s setting reflects.
The oppressive summertime heat causes fires to break out daily. Kudo, too, is in danger of explosion, but he
worries that his explosion will be more devastating than Maguillot’s. A film Kudo has seen recently continues to
haunt him: The film’s protagonist, unable to endure his bedridden wife’s
suffering, kills her out of his own weakness, bringing destruction on
himself. Recalling that film one
oppressively hot morning, Kudo wonders what horrible deed he might do if he had
to live in
[1] The Japanese original was published in 1966. In what follows, I will include both Japanese and English publication dates in parentheses. Stained Glass Elegies is an English language collection of short stories published in various venues in Japanese.
[2] Foreign
Studies, Mark Williams, tr. (New York: Linden Press, 1989). All citations from “A Summer in
[3] Socrates’ view can be found at Crito 47b-48d, and Plato’s at Republic 588b-592b. For Aristotle, see Nicomachean Ethics 1098a; for the stoic view, see Diogenes Laertius VII 97. Hursthouse articulates her account in On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
[4] It might at first strike readers as odd that a piece of Japanese fiction can or should be used to illustrate this thesis of Western philosophy. A careful consideration of Endo’s aims in writing fiction should dispel any such sense of oddity, however. First, discussions of virtue are common to both Western and Eastern thought (and so we find in Scandal, for instance, reflections on the differences between Buddhist and Christian mercy). Endo’s works, with their moral and theological emphases, are dramas in which courage, honesty, perseverance, integrity, and humility (or their contrary vices) play roles. Second, due in part to his childhood conversion to Catholicism and to his period as an exchange student in France, Endo steeped himself in both Western and Japanese learning. The result is that his moral and theological thought is eclectic. In fact, he sometimes criticizes both Japanese and Western ways of thinking (in The Sea and Poison, for instance, Endo is deeply critical of both his Japanese characters’ moral reasoning and also the German Hilda’s moral reasoning; the novel itself offers what Endo takes to be an entirely different model of moral reasoning). It should not surprise us, then, if this eclectic thinker sometimes advocates Western theses.
[5] The most notable advocate of this view is Plotinus. See Enneads I.2.1-I.2.3 and I.2.6.
[6] Plato and Aristotle, for instance, held this view. Aquinas argues that virtue has both an intrinsic and an extrinsic connection to one’s good. A secondary sort of happiness available to human beings in this life consists, for the most part, in the good exercise of the practical intellect (Summa theologiae I-II Q.3 A.5 Reply), which for Aquinas includes the exercise of virtue, since virtue is the imprint of practical reason on the sensory appetites (On the Virtues in General Q.9 Reply). However, the exercise of virtue is instrumentally necessary to merit the perfect happiness of heavenly bliss in the next life. That’s because we need virtue if we are to aim at the right ends (Summa theologiae I-II Q.65 A.1 Reply), and this rectitude is a necessary precondition of eternal bliss (Summa theologiae I-II Q.4 A.4 Reply).
[7] I offer a sketch of these issues because they are important considerations; but the sketch is very brief because these considerations lie outside the main concern of this essay. Whatever the social, historical, or religious roots of the attitudes the characters do have, my goal is to articulate Endo’s thought about attitudes the characters should have. Endo treats the social, historical, and religious background in more detail in other works. For instance, in both Silence and The Samurai, the European protagonists Rodrigues and Velasco suffer from pride due in part to the reasons sketched here. Their pride prevents them from seeing either themselves or the Japanese accurately and so serves to foster the vice of inattentiveness in them. I do not even touch here on economic motives, which are perhaps equally important.
[8] Whether there is such a thing as collective or corporate agency is a matter of controversy. If there is, then that adds a further complexity to this picture. The expressions of pride and inattentiveness on the part of various European social groups, governmental, or religious bodies would then not be reducible to the attitudes of pride and inattentiveness of their biological constituents.
[9] This
account of attention is found in the works of Simone Weil, in particular in “On
the Right Use of School Studies,” in Waiting for God (
[10] Contemporary Western and Japanese thought may diverge on this point. However, since what is at issue here is Kudo’s treatment by the French, who have had little opportunity to learn Japanese mores, it is to Western views on the morality of giving that we must turn to determine if the French are manipulative in offering money, housing, and education to Kudo. For a short but illuminating discussion of the typical Western view on whether gifts create obligations, see Jane English, “What Do Grown Children Owe their Parents?” in Having Children, Onora O’Neill and William Ruddick, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). For a similarly illuminating discussion of the typical Japanese view, see Matthews Masayuki Hamabata, Crested Kimono: Power and Love in the Japanese Business Family (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 18-24.
[11] The notion that some things are indifferent in
themselves and good only when wielded by a virtuous person, see Plato, Meno 88b-d and Euthydemus 281a-e, Aristotle Eudemian Ethics viii.3; see also Kant’s contention
that traits of character, intelligence, goods of fortune, and even happiness
can be bad if they bear no suitable connection to the good will (Grounding
for the Metaphysics of Morals 393-4). Jennifer Whiting offers a fine discussion of
the Eudemian Ethics text in her “Self-Love and Authoritative Virtue:
Prolegomenon to a Kantian Reading of Eudemian Ethics viii 3,” in Aristotle,
Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty, Stephen Engstrom and
Jennifer Whiting, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
[12] My understanding of self-respect as a virtue is shaped by Thomas Hill, Jr., “Servility and Self-Respect,” in The Monist 57 (1973): 87-104. The virtue of self-respect is closely connected to other virtues, such as charity (which dictates proper self love), hope (which dictates that even when we face difficult but surmountable obstacles to our good we should not give up its pursuit), and courage (which dictates that we make the effort to regulate our emotions of fear and confidence to aid us in pursuit of our good).
[13] Contemporary Western ethical thought values autonomy of this sort more than contemporary Eastern ethical thought. Eastern moral thought typically emphasizes performing one’s social and filial duties (see, for instance, Analects 1.1.2). One is permitted to protest one’s parents’ will, but one must do so gently (see Analects 4.18). In any case, even on Confucian thought, Kudo does not have the sort of debt to the French that he has to his parents and Japanese society. For a brief but illuminating discussion of debts to parents that owes a great deal to Confucian thought, see Lin Yutang’s essay “On Growing Old Gracefully,” in The Importance of Living (New York: William Morrow, 1937), 190-200.
The
difference between dominant Japanese values and Western values may help to
explain Kudo’s behavior, but it is not directly relevant to the thesis that
autonomy of some sort is genuinely valuable.
Endo’s endorsement of the value of autonomy is moderately clear in “A
Summer in
[14] See, for instance, Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II Q.49 A.2 Reply to Obj. 3.
[15] The Characters of Theophrastus is a fascinating illustration of the ways in which character reveals itself not just through the ways one acts, but through how one walks, what one wears, etc.
[16] The moral necessity to split oneself into two, agent and spectator, is a constant theme in Endo’s fiction. For instance, in The Sea and Poison Endo links the ability to make this split with the ability to develop a conscience. In Scandal (J 1986, E 1988), the protagonist, Suguro, is quite literally split into two and comes to understand himself only by becoming the spectator of his doppelganger. Endo’s thought on this issue bears a striking resemblance to the theory of conscience proposed by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, from whom I have borrowed the terms “agent” and “spectator.” See in particular Part III Chapters 1-3.
[17] In Silence,
published in