- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Foreword
- Introduction: A Voice Still Heard
- This Age of Conformity {1954}
- Review of The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett {1954}
- The Stories of Bernard Malamud {1958}
- Doris Lessing: No Compromise, No Happiness {1963}
- Life Never Let Up: Review of Call It Sleep {1964}
- New Styles in “Leftism” {1965}
- George Orwell: “As the Bones Know” {1968}
- The New York Intellectuals {1969}
- A Grave and Solitary Voice: An Appreciation of Edwin Arlington Robinson {1970}
- What's the Trouble? Social Crisis, Crisis of Civilization, or Both {1971}
- The City in Literature {1971}
- Tribune of Socialism: Norman Thomas {1976}
- Strangers {1977}
- Introduction: Twenty-five Years of Dissent {1979}
- Introduction: The Best of Sholom Aleichem, with Ruth Wisse {1979}
- Mission from Japan: Review of The Samurai {1982}
- Absalom in Israel: Review of Past Continuous {1985}
- Why Has Socialism Failed in America? {1985}
- Writing and the Holocaust {1986}
- Reaganism: The Spirit of the Times {1986}
- Two Cheers for Utopia {1993}
- The Road Leads Far Away: Review of A Surplus of Memory {1993}
- Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Woolf {1994}
- Dickens: Three Notes {1994}
- Tolstoy: Did Anna Have to Die?{1994}
- Reflection on the Death of My Father {1982}
- From the Thirties to the Rise of Neoconservatism: Interview with Stephen Lewis {1983}
- Sources
Mission from Japan: Review of The Samurai {1982}
Mission from Japan: Review of The Samurai {1982}
- Chapter:
- (p.235) Mission from Japan: Review of The Samurai {1982}
- Source:
- A Voice Still Heard
- Author(s):
Irving Howe
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
This chapter presents Irving Howe's 1982 review of The Samurai by Shusaku Endo. In his book review, Howe attempts to understand the mind of the Japanese author and the literary themes of his fiction, a story of two men who are forced to compromise their integrity for the sake of their mission. The Samurai offers an honest, unsentimental perspective on religious conversion, and the frustration of trying to bring about conversion in someone else. Howe contends that Endo fails to answer a number of questions in his novel, such as whether Jesus Christ can survive without Christianity without the very institutions, rituals, and doctrines that must often twist his word.
Keywords: book review, Irving Howe, The Samurai, Shusaku Endo, fiction, religious conversion, Jesus Christ, Christianity
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Foreword
- Introduction: A Voice Still Heard
- This Age of Conformity {1954}
- Review of The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett {1954}
- The Stories of Bernard Malamud {1958}
- Doris Lessing: No Compromise, No Happiness {1963}
- Life Never Let Up: Review of Call It Sleep {1964}
- New Styles in “Leftism” {1965}
- George Orwell: “As the Bones Know” {1968}
- The New York Intellectuals {1969}
- A Grave and Solitary Voice: An Appreciation of Edwin Arlington Robinson {1970}
- What's the Trouble? Social Crisis, Crisis of Civilization, or Both {1971}
- The City in Literature {1971}
- Tribune of Socialism: Norman Thomas {1976}
- Strangers {1977}
- Introduction: Twenty-five Years of Dissent {1979}
- Introduction: The Best of Sholom Aleichem, with Ruth Wisse {1979}
- Mission from Japan: Review of The Samurai {1982}
- Absalom in Israel: Review of Past Continuous {1985}
- Why Has Socialism Failed in America? {1985}
- Writing and the Holocaust {1986}
- Reaganism: The Spirit of the Times {1986}
- Two Cheers for Utopia {1993}
- The Road Leads Far Away: Review of A Surplus of Memory {1993}
- Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Woolf {1994}
- Dickens: Three Notes {1994}
- Tolstoy: Did Anna Have to Die?{1994}
- Reflection on the Death of My Father {1982}
- From the Thirties to the Rise of Neoconservatism: Interview with Stephen Lewis {1983}
- Sources
