In literature, evil can appear in a broad spectrum of shapes, images and motifs. For Endō Shūsaku, the problem of evil is central to the reality of human existence, and it has to be accepted as such. In Hermeneutics of Evil in the Works of Endō Shūsaku. Between Reading and Writing (Peter Lang, 2016), Justyna Weronika Kasza starts from the assumption that the notion of evil informs many of Shūsaku’s most renowned novels; on the other hand, she argues that Shūsaku’s body of work should be treated and analyzed as a whole, as his essays and critical texts are in fact complementary to his works of fiction.
Kasza’s book is, on the one hand, an attempt to trace Shūsaku’s line of thinking and, on the other hand, to apply certain categories of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics to literary studies in order to better understand his body of work. Kasza concludes that evil as a problem was, for Shūsaku, closely intertwined with the Christian faith and with Western culture, which represented for him an “otherness” that manifested itself in multiple forms. The book also includes the first English translation of five of Endō Shūsaku’s critical texts.