Ogin and Other Kirishitan Tales

A girl stands bound to a stake beside her foster parents and gives up the faith she has kept all her life, because her unbaptized parents lie in hell and she will not enter paradise without them. A samurai’s widow walks into a Kyoto church to ask a priest to heal her dying son, and leaves in fury at what he tells her about Christ. A slow-witted servant is crucified for a creed he says a red-haired stranger taught him on a seashore before walking away over the waves, and a white lily blooms from his mouth.

These are three of the six Kirishitan tales in this volume, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s stories of Japan’s early Christians, written between 1917 and 1923. Their narrators are scholars, collectors and pastiche chroniclers, and the faith they describe is seen through an ironic, skeptical modern eye. Also here: an apostate Zen monk meets Lucifer in the garden of a Kyoto church and is told that devils are no different from men; a giant in search of the mightiest master serves an emperor, then the devil, then Christ, in a deliberately anachronistic retelling of the Saint Christopher legend; and a mock-scholarly essay follows the Wandering Jew from medieval chronicles to an imagined talk with Francis Xavier aboard a boat in Kyushu.

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