Five by Endo

"Here gathered in this small volume are five of the Japanese writer Shusaku Endo's short stories exemplifying his style and his interests, presenting, as it were, Endo in a nutshell. "Unzen," the opening story, touches on the subject of Silence, Endo's most famous novel - that is the torture and martyrdom of Christians in seventeenth-century Japan. Next comes "A Fifty-year-old Man" in which Mr. Chiba takes up ballroom dancing and faces the imminent death of his brother and his dog Whitey. In "Japanese in Warsaw" a business man has a strange encounter; in "The Box" an old photo album and a few…