Shūsaku Endō’s *Portraits of a Mother* is a newly translated volume (Yale University Press, 2025) that gathers one rediscovered novella and five related stories, all circling his complicated, often ambivalent love for his mother and the knot of Catholic faith bound up with her.[^1][^2][^3] ## About the book - The book’s core is the previously unknown sixty‑five‑page novella *Confronting the Shadows*, discovered in Endō’s papers in 2020 at the Nagasaki museum dedicated to his work and only then published in Japan.[^2] - Around it are five stories, some newly translated and some previously available in English; all are translated by Van C. Gessel, with a foreword by novelist Caryl Phillips.[^1][^2] Set mainly in postwar Japan, the pieces are semi‑autobiographical, with narrators who resemble Endō—ailing, reflective writers revisiting childhood, illness, and the long afterlife of a difficult mother–child bond.[^1][^2] ## Central themes - **Mother as faith:** The narrator repeatedly recognises that what faith he has is inseparable from his attachment to his mother; one story puts it bluntly: “My faith, if indeed it can be called faith, is linked to my attachment to my mother.”[^1][^4] - **Guilt and doubt:** The book probes the guilt of religious doubt and the sense that failing one’s mother is also a kind of apostasy, so that guilt itself becomes a kind of substitute religion.[^5][^1] The collection also returns to classic Endō concerns: suffering, minority Catholic identity in Japan, and the tension between inner conviction and cultural conformity. Maternal love is never simple here—devoted but severe, inspiring yet wounding.[^2][^4][^1] ## How the mother is portrayed - The mothers in these pieces are stern, uncompromising figures who sacrifice comfort and sometimes their children’s emotional needs in pursuit of “something higher,” whether artistic excellence (violin practice, for example) or spiritual perfection.[^1][^2] - The narrators often idealise their mothers, likening their faces and suffering to depictions of the Virgin Mary, especially in stories that touch on hidden Christians and Catholic imagery.[^2][^1] Yet *Portraits of a Mother* deliberately complicates the old binary of saintly mother / weak father: the rediscovered novella works toward a more balanced view of two ill‑matched parents and the son caught in their conflict. The mother neglects as well as nurtures; she is a source of both moral aspiration and lifelong emotional shadow.[^1][^2] ## Notable pieces - **“Mothers”:** A writer travels south to investigate Kakure (hidden) Christians; as he contemplates their Marian devotion, he keeps returning to memories of his own mother and her suffering.[^2] - **“Spring in Galilee”:** The narrator takes the trip to Israel his devout mother always wanted but never managed, confronting his lukewarm faith and the sense that he’s failed both her and God.[^1] - **“A Six-Day Trip”:** A holiday becomes an occasion to visit people who knew his mother, triggering floods of childhood memory and revealing gaps between the boy’s idealised mother and the adult woman others recall.[^2] - **“Confronting the Shadows” (novella):** A struggling writer looks back on his parents’ separation, his grudge against his father, and his habit of casting his mother as a pure victim—only to see more clearly her flaws and the ways he resembles his father too.[^2] Together, the pieces read like an oblique, fragmented memoir of Endō’s own mother filtered through Catholic iconography and postwar dislocation.[^4][^1][^2] ## Why it matters (especially for memoir writers) - The book offers an intricate example of how to turn a single relationship (mother–son) into multiple narrative “angles”: pilgrimage, illness, childhood recollection, quasi‑historical inquiry.[^1][^2] - Formally, it shows how semi‑autobiographical fiction can hold competing truths at once—veneration and resentment, faith and doubt—without resolving them into a neat moral.[^5][^1] If you’re thinking about your own mother in memoir, this collection is a study in how to move from a one‑note portrait (“saint,” “martyr,” “monster”) toward a layered, ethically aware depiction that still honours the intensity of the bond.[^2][^1] <span style="display:none">[^6]</span> <div align="center">⁂</div> [^1]: https://asianreviewofbooks.com/portraits-of-a-mother-by-shusaku-endo/ [^2]: https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/2025/07/31/portraits-of-a-mother-by-shusaku-endo-review/ [^3]: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/216730592-portraits-of-a-mother [^4]: https://japanpastandpresent.org/en/global-events/the-japan-society-book-club-portraits-of-a-mother-by-shusaku-endo [^5]: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/editors-pick-portraits-of-a-mother [^6]: https://www.facebook.com/groups/205316262926151/posts/8703557206435305/