ENDO, Shusaku. Silence. Trans. from the Japanese and with a preface by William Johnston. London: Peter Owen. 1976. 8vo. First Commonwealth edition. Publisher’s first state black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust jacket designed by Ivor Kaplan. A near fine copy. The cloth clean and bright, the gilt just very trivially marked. The binding tight and square, the textblock top edge gently spotted, else fine with only one or two tiny marks to endpapers. The dust jacket unclipped (£4.25) and complete, slightly faded to the spine, some mild marks, but very sharp overall.
The author’s magnum opus, an internationally acclaimed novel depicting a Portuguese Jesuit missionary who faces persecution in seventeenth century Japan, a portrait of a god who ‘has chosen not to eliminate suffering, but to suffer with humanity’ (Cavanaugh). Winner of the Tanizaki Prize, one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards. This first British edition carries high praise from Graham Greene—’one of the finest novels of our time’—and this is noteworthy in itself, since Endo by the time of translation had already garnered considerable likenesses to Greene, especially his novel The Power and the Glory (1940). Basis of three films of the same name, the most recent in 2016, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, and Liam Neeson.
ENDO, Shusaku. Silence. Trans. from the Japanese and with a preface by William Johnston. London: Peter Owen. 1976. 8vo. First Commonwealth edition. Publisher’s first state black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust jacket designed by Ivor Kaplan. A near fine copy. The cloth clean and bright, the gilt just very trivially marked. The binding tight and square, the textblock top edge gently spotted, else fine with only one or two tiny marks to endpapers. The dust jacket unclipped (£4.25) and complete, slightly faded to the spine, some mild marks, but very sharp overall.
The author’s magnum opus, an internationally acclaimed novel depicting a Portuguese Jesuit missionary who faces persecution in seventeenth century Japan, a portrait of a god who ‘has chosen not to eliminate suffering, but to suffer with humanity’ (Cavanaugh). Winner of the Tanizaki Prize, one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards. This first British edition carries high praise from Graham Greene—’one of the finest novels of our time’—and this is noteworthy in itself, since Endo by the time of translation had already garnered considerable likenesses to Greene, especially his novel The Power and the Glory (1940). Basis of three films of the same name, the most recent in 2016, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, and Liam Neeson.
