Reclaiming the Universal: Intercultural Subjectivity in the Life and Work of Endo Shusaku

In an attempt to question the ascendency of today’s relativism, this essay asks two different but interrelated questions: (1) Does the celebration of cultural differences guarantee the disappearance of ethnocentric universalism? (2) Is it possible to envision a universalism that is not ethnocentric? Answering the first question negatively and the second question affirmatively, this essay analyzes the life and work of the Japanese Catholic writer Endo Shusaku 遠藤周作 (1923–96), with particular attention to his Chinmoku 沈黙 (Silence), a novel that explores intercultural subjectivity in the context of Japan’s encounter with the Christian West in the seventeenth century. It further elaborates the notion of the “common,” whereby people of various backgrounds enter into a commonality that enables them to communicate and act together from the shared perspective of the oppressed even as they articulate and maintain their differences.