A Voice of Moral Reasoning : Shusaku Endo struggled with the themes of right and wrong, defiance and cowardice : THE FINAL MARTYRS, <i> By Shusaku Endo</i> . <i> Translated from the Japanese by Van C. Gessel (New Directions: $21.50; 208 pp.)</i>

In a country where the conservative Establishment remains unapologetic about the stain of naked aggression during World War II, and where a ranking cabinet minister recently denied the veracity of the Nanking Massacre, Shusaku Endo stands out as a lonely voice in a wasteland of moral reasoning. This Roman Catholic writer, often described as Japan’s Graham Greene, has been struggling with the slippery themes of right and wrong, defiance and cowardice, martyrdom and apostasy since his country emerged, psychically burned and morally bewildered, from the debacle of war.

His fiction may not translate with the brilliance of a twisted artist such as Yukio Mishima. But Endo is one of the rare living Japanese intellectuals who truly grasps the absolute moral values that the Western world has enshrined--and betrayed--for two millennium, and which the colicky collective consciousness of Japanese society has only partially digested over the last 150 years.

Endo’s journey through Japan’s post-war spiritual malaise is reflected darkly in “The Final Martyrs,” a collection of short stories originally published between 1959 and 1985, now available in translation for American readers in an edition brought out by New Directions. The reader should be warned, however: these are not short pieces of fiction in the conventional sense. Endo is less concerned with entertainment value than with his message.

Indeed, these are not short stories at all, but rather character sketches and rambling essays in the confessional zuihitsu style, a stilted genre that is unfortunately far too prevalent in contemporary Japanese literature. Copiously detailed footnotes grace one of these stories, apparently part of the original text. It should be noted that Endo made his mark as a man of letters in the genre of historical fiction. It pays to be patient with his dull, gray sincerity.

Endo’s emblematic work is the 1966 novel “Silence” (“Chinmoku”), which is perhaps his answer to Greene’s “The Power and the Glory,” exploring the psychological horror of the persecution of Christian martyrs in 17th-Century Japan. In this novel, Endo introduces his most powerful metaphor: the “swamp” of Japan, which consumes and obliterates the alien ideal that an individual has a right to stand against the crowd with a politically unpopular conviction.

The novel’s theme was foreshadowed in the title story of this collection, “The Final Martyrs,” first published in 1959. It describes the ruthless persecution of the supposedly liberated “hidden Christians” in Southern Japan, who practiced their faith in secret during the 250 years that Christianity was outlawed by feudal authorities. The story is set in the small village of Nakano, near Nagasaki, in the early Meiji era, when the new oligarchic regime felt the same urge to suppress dangerous thoughts.

Significantly, Endo suggests a continuity of social management from feudal barbarism to modern thought control, which persisted through the ugly war years and, I would argue, is alive and well beneath contemporary Japan’s veneer of liberal democracy.

Endo uses the final martyrs to show how difficult it is to embrace an absolute moral truth in the swamp of Japan. The villagers mix and muddle the absolute values of faith and devotion to Christ with the traditional, diffuse loyalties to the social group. The village ethos is clearly grafted onto the remnants of the Christian ethic, transmitted clandestinely over the generations.

A mentally disabled lad, Kisuke, is the prop demonstrating this cultural confusion. The village idiot is at first ridiculed and ostracized by his peers in the youth organization because he is mentally weak and cowardly, in a classic example of group bullying. “He has a weakness for pain, after all, and so I imagine he’d whimper in agony. Why, maybe he might even abandon the Lord Jesus and topple,” says one of Kisuke’s detractors.

But in the end Kisuke finds a reserve of courage, and he is shown true mercy by one of the final martyrs, as both face torture and death.

The last story in the collection, “The Box” (1985), is a musing essay that weaves in and out of a another parable of Christian charity. We hear a doddering Endo wonder whether talking to the plants in his study will help them grow, as he recounts the tale of an old box of pictures and postcards he once bought in the resort town of Karuizawa. The contents of the box take him on a trail of intrigue, espionage and betrayal, all involving a a half-Japanese foreign woman who was harassed by the thought police in wartime Japan.

“A dark, gloomy, at times even dismal atmosphere hung over Karuizawa during the war,” Endo writes. “Foreigners of various nations, on the pretext they were being evacuated from military targets, were assembled here, and while on the surface they led normal lives, in reality they were under surveillance by the Japanese secret police and military police.”

Endo’s didactic technique, a blend of first-person narrative with anecdotal fiction, is tolerable because his own voice is restrained and understated. The writer is not pompous, preaching from a pulpit high above his frail characters, but a humble guide to the moral conundrum of his people.

“Over the years,” Endo writes in the preface to the English edition, “I have forged intimate familial ties with (my) characters, who are a reflection and a portion of myself.”