# Silence

- Author: Shusaku Endo
- Translator: William Johnston
- Original title (Japanese): 沈黙
- First published: 1966
- Publisher: Picador
- This edition: 2016
- ISBN: 9781250082275
- Shelf: Tonight's Classic (one a night, from this pool); Japanese Literature in Translation

## Card

In the seventeenth century, two young priests slip secretly into Japan to learn what became of their old teacher.  
Told through letters and close narration, it stays with one man's doubts as the danger tightens around him.  
For a night of questions without easy answers.  

## About this book

Word reaches Portugal that Ferreira, a respected missionary in Japan, has renounced his faith under torture. Sebastião Rodrigues, once his student, refuses to believe it and enters the country in secret, where Christians must worship in hiding. He depends on Kichijirō, a frail and unreliable guide. What stays is the long ache of a prayer that seems to meet only silence, and the hard questions it leaves about faith and weakness.

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