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“... By the Western calendar, the events chronicled in Shusaku Endo’s latest novel take place between 1613 and 1624. But of course that is an artificial way of looking at the matter. Half the book takes place in Mexico and Europe; Endo has the cosmopolitan range of a partly ‘Westernised’ figure, educated in the Catholic faith ...”

“... in dreams and fictions; sometimes it happens in life. It happens to the principal character in Shusaku Endo’s Scandal. Suguro is in his sixties, a successful man, methodical, self-disciplined, attentive to household obligations and the needs of his ailing wife, a man in the midst of life, with the taste of death on his tongue and the shapes of death ...”

“... everybody seemed to use Tanqueray in the Dry Martinis.’ He wrote to writers whom he admired. To Shusaku Endo, whose Wonderful Fool was, he wrote, ‘a marvellous book – so much better than my own Power and the Glory’. To Flann O’Brien: ‘At-Swim-Two-Birds has remained to my mind ever since it first appeared one of the best books of our ...”

“... And yet to the Westerner with intellectual aspirations it is a small pond. The Catholic novelist Shusaku Endo compared Japan to a tropical mud swamp: when living flowers are transplanted from elsewhere they grow vigorously for a while, put out lurid blooms, but eventually wither in the strange minerals of the new soil. In 150 years, foreigners in Japan ...”