When an unpublished novella by Shūsaku Endō was discovered in a box of papers, it was front-page news across Japan.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.

Portraits of a Mother is comprised of excellent translations by Endō scholar Van C. Gessel of the newly discovered novella Confronting the Shadows, alongside several previously published short stories. While distinct and self-contained, the novella and stories blend into each other. The same figures seem to appear in each story, only with different names: the troubled mother who practices the violin until her chin bleeds, the happy-go-lucky father who can’t abide the mother’s strenuous way of life, the child caught miserably between them. There are moments where the book feels like one continuous novel, evidence of how well curated the stories in the book are.

The stories center on fathers and mothers, presenting portraits of these figures which are at best ambivalent and at worst damning. An abiding antagonism toward the paternal spreads its dye across all the pages of this collection: from the father whose passivity condemns his wife to a life of poverty and manipulates his son into a lifetime of guilt, to the priest who violates his vows, and perhaps most poignantly to the pseudo-autobiographical writer who resents his wife’s attempts to bring happiness and calm to his disquieted life. Mothers in this book are mistreated and underappreciated, destined either to disappear in submission to capricious whims of the men in their lives, or to die in terrible conditions because they refuse to comply. The fraught relationship between mothers and fathers offers itself as a multilayered commentary on chauvinism in mid-century Japanese life, Endō’s own troubled parental relationship, and even the broken relationships between the sexes foreshadowed in the early pages of Genesis.

But for Endō, these failures, however intractable, do not stand in the way of grace. The activity of grace asserts itself as an uncomfortable but incontrovertible reality, a rock on which unbelief stubs its toe. He portrays grace in fleeting moments of luminosity: the fallen priest crossing himself when he thinks no one is looking, a flicker of true pity for the resented father, a recitation of the Beatitudes, a moment of acceptance and forgiveness. And so, though this collection is unrelenting in its portrayal of how deeply parental wounds – paternal or maternal – may affect a person, its vision is hopeful. Through it we glimpse how, seeing and forgiving the parents who fail us, we may experience the loving parenthood of God.