Bridging the Divide: The Crucifixion in Endo’s The Samurai

Abstract This article situates Shusaku Endo’s novel, The Samurai, within postwar theological developments both within his Japanese context and as a consequence of the Catholic Church’s Vatican Council II. Read against this background, The Samurai demonstrates Endo’s wager that the symbol of the crucifix is translatable across cultures. His novel depicts the core Catholic belief that the crucifixion paradoxically reveals God’s Divine Love to humanity through an image of weakness and death, but Endo decentres the Western theological tradition of atonement to reimagine the crucifixion as a manifestation of Jesus’s solidarity and accompaniment with those who are rejected and unjustly oppressed.