Shusaku Endo and My Guilty Conscience

In making my way through a recent short-story anthology, I encountered a troubling biographical entry. The anthology’s editor, Bret Lott, describes the Japanese author Shusaku Endo as “the internationally renowned Japanese novelist, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and short story author.” This introduction leaves me feeling quite inadequate as a literature student for I had never so much as heard Endo’s name before opening Lott’s book.
In the broader view, of course, any reader must recognize that there is an almost infinite amount of worthwhile material, an almost endless phalanx of “internationally renowned” writers whom one ought to know. I’m reminded here of the elite fighters of the Persian army, the Immortals, so called because they attacked in deep ranks. When one fighter went down, another stepped up to take his place. So it is with worthwhile writings, except that once you knock down Shusaku Endo, you discover perhaps two or three or twelve others lurking behind him. This was the discovery I made several years ago when I ventured into Japanese fiction for the first time. I read Haruki Murakami, but then realized that to fully—or even marginally—understand him, I needed to read Mishima and Kawabata and Oe. To understand the fiction of Japan, I also needed to learn something of the poetry. And to understand Murakami, I found myself frequently thrown back to Europe and America in the influences of Kafka and American jazz. In moments, I could find myself overrun and trampled by the onslaught of the Immortals.
Some twenty years ago, I sat in a class for my master’s degree, listening to the professor, Linda Voits, talk about the novels of Anthony Trollope. To this day I can’t recall why she told us this, but the story sticks in my mind. “I read the Barchester novels of Trollope while on sabbatical last year as I was taking the train from Cambridge into London each day. I’d never read them all . . . in order,” she explained, quite offhand. I’m not sure that Professor Voits actually paused between “all” and “in order,” but that’s how I remember it. I recall sitting around a seminar table with a dozen other students, all of us thinking the same thing. We’d never read any of the Barchester novels, much less all of them, much less in order. We had other things to read in order to feel as if we had some claim to those letters, M.A., after our names.
To this day, I maintain what seem like appalling holes in my reading. Proust? No. Goethe? I’ve read nothing beyond The Sorrows of Young Werther. Dickens? Only a few bits here and there. Spenser? I couldn’t get past the first book of The Fairie Queene. And I’ve never even heard of Shusaku Endo!
In the end, we who would be literary, must confess to these gaps. Unless you surrender yourself to reading eighteen hours a day, you will not read everything of significance. A bit of math will confirm this truth. Let’s take Shakespeare as an example. If we accept that Shakespeare has perhaps twenty plays of significance, that gives us a starting point. After all, who reads The Two Gentlemen of Verona? If each of these plays takes an average reader some five hours, then simply getting through Shakespeare will take 100 hours. That doesn’t sound too bad, but that’s only Shakespeare. Add in Marlowe and Kyd and Jonson and Spenser and Sidney, just to get a good grounding in Renaissance England, and you’ve taken the pile up to perhaps 300 hours.
If you had a job paying you to read forty hours a week, you could dispatch the Renaissance English—or at least a healthy sample of them—in some eight weeks. However, this doesn’t give you any time to read criticism, biographies, history, philosophy, theology, or any of the other fields important to understanding Shakespeare’s world.
Furthermore, few people can land a job that allows for forty hours of reading per week. I’ve read and taught Hamlet a dozen times, but I’m unlikely in my present employment to be able to work Titus Andronicus, which I read for the first time last year, into the curriculum. I’ll almost certainly never teach Dryden or Samuel Richardson, and I’ll never get to put Shusaku Endo on the syllabus. Those of you who do not read for part of your living have even a greater constraint placed on your achievement.
In the end, the reader cannot cover the entire field of literature. Anyone who claims to have done so is either lying or named Harold Bloom. Since your name is almost certainly not Harold Bloom—because is desperately attempting to keep up with the deluge of titles necessary to keep him Harold Bloom—you must either surrender yourself to prevarication or accept a partial knowledge of human letters as an acceptable state. (I suppose you could collapse in despair, but I don’t recommend that.)
What a sick art would be literature if it were designed to be completely mastered while at the same time making that design less attainable with each new creation. Happily, literature is not intended as some sort of obsessive mental collection. Literature helps to reveal the human condition, it explores the meaning of human existence. In that way, it is somewhat akin to human friendship. Would we consider ourselves failed humans if we were not to meet all the people on earth? Obviously not. In fact, measuring our happiness by a checklist of acquaintances would be a very facile and foolish thing indeed.
The rich literary life embraces many friends in the world’s texts. Some of these friends are boon companions, while others are passing experiences. Some we meet and don’t get on with particularly well, while others come to us, late in the day, leading us to wonder how we ever existed without their companionship.
Shusaku Endo is a new friend for me. Should I feel guilty not to have crossed his path before? Certainly not. I doubt that we’ll ever be best of friends, but that’s hardly the point. Frankly, I’m not sure that this relationship will grow further, but I am pleased to have made his acquaintance. I can ask no more from a text.