Book Review: PORTRAITS OF A MOTHER by Shusaku Endo

Portraits of a Mother: A Novella and Stories by Shūsaku Endō
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"With one single exception, there had been no mistakes or corrections in his father's life. What could possibly be the point for such a man to write anything?"

Reading this newly translated novella and 5 stories (the latest to be added to the list of books by the great Catholic writer Shusaku Endo) is an intimacy of an almost sacred kind. We peer through a glass darkly and find different poses and faces of Endo's remarkable mother, who emerges as the complicated, flawed, yet cherished heroine all throughout the autobiographical tales.

Like a theme with variations, the violin-playing independent woman who shapes the future novelist into being comes across as a force of nature, a gale whipping the pages into life.

"There is something higher, much, much higher... an asphalt-paved road is safe, so anyone can walk along it. There's no danger... but if a person turns and looks behind them, not a single one of their footsteps has been left on that safe road. A sandy beach by the ocean is difficult to walk along... but when you look behind you, every single one of your footsteps remains there...Please, whatever you do, don't live a worthless life by walking on an asphalt road."

For Endo, his mother is intricately tied up with his identity as a Catholic (not an easy religion to belong to, in wartime Japan). It's very poignant how he remembers his mother and his childhood priest in various points of his adult life.

But even if the reader were not Catholic, there is still much to relate to, in the universal struggle to form an independent self from a strong parental figure; in the burning quest to fulfill parental expectations after a parent's death.

And again, we see Endo at his excoriating best. For him, writing is his confessional, where he analyzes "the major rivers that have given shape to my life." He analyzes his weak deeds and thoughts, and in so doing, the book reflects the reader's own faults back to her.

Yet these faults are not irredeemable, as Endo constantly writes. And I suppose this is what makes Endo "Catholic," as he continues to find God in all things, even in the most wretched of men, even in the vilest and darkest night of the soul.

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