When an unpublished novella by Shūsaku Endō was discovered in a box of papers, it was front-page news across Japan. Best known in the West for his novel Silence (1966), which was adapted to film in 2016 by Martin Scorsese, Shūsako Endō was a prolific and beloved Japanese author, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994. His work is characterized by an interest in Japanese Christianity and his own sense of being an outsider: in his youth, less than one percent of Japan’s population shared Endō’s Roman Catholic faith.

Joy Marie Clarkson reviews Shūsaku Endō’s Portraits of a Mother: A Novella and Stories.