Is your faith strong enough to withstand repeated beatings, starvation, torture and all the myriad of methods, one human being can devise to hurt and scar another?What if, they came for your family, friends, or even your neighbours?
Now what if come this moment, this brutal challenge to your beliefs, you are offered a way out, (no questions asked), just renounce your god, stomp on some old relics of your faith and walk away.

You've survived, your free....But then what? There was your family & friends whose faith remained unquestioned, whose beliefs took the kicking but stood up, again and again, till they could no longer stand...
But you've survived, your free. Now what ?, after the initial relief has faded and your heart has returned to its pedestrian beat.

What of your conscience
Now what of your faith?

This represents just one of the ideas in this collection of 11 short stories, by Shusaku Endo. It mainly consists of works previously published in Japan, as Aika (Elegies), which appeared in 1965 and Juichi no iro garasu (11 stained - glass segments) published in 1979, making this - Stained Glass Elegies, a composite of the two. In this compilation, Endo, introduces us to characters who are trying to come to terms with their relationship (past & present) to the Christian faith, in a society, that when it's not antagonistic towards it, is just indifferent.

This book could easily be described as Autobiographical Fiction, and in that role, the author's dialogue through the characters in these stories, could be seen as an attempt to comprehend his own relationship to the faith he was raised in and also the image & role that Christ, plays in that relationship.
These tales are dour*, but beautifully written, there are tales set in hospitals, with individuals with serious health problems (mirroring the author's own life). We have people trying come to terms with the war, with their own survival, stories dealing with a lack of faith, with guilt & dishonour.
Then, there's - The Incredible Voyage, at face, a parody of a 1966 American film "Fantastic Voyage", without a spoiler alert,all I will say is this is a Quote from it.

"I shall cut a hole in my sister's stool with the surgical scalpel. A hole just big enough for our ship to pass through."

Whether it's through the use of humour or straight narrative, what comes across, is Endo's philosophy "That the actions of a human being is never self contained" they creates ripples that permeate, far beyond the initial thought or deed & with this idea, comes the need for a sense of personal responsibility, of accounting for ones actions. ( )

Stained Glass Elegies is a compilation of 11 short stories that Shusaku Endo wrote between 1959 and 1977, which were largely taken from his earlier short story collections Aika (Elegies) and Juichi no iro garasu (Eleven Stained-Glass Segments). Most of the stories touch on Endo's main themes: chronic illness and death; the indifference and paternalism that patients in the modern hospital are afforded; the effect of barbarism and imperialism on Catholics in feudal and wartime Japan; and the internal struggles of Japanese Catholics, who attempt to reconcile Western religious beliefs in a cultural tradition that is seemingly at odds with it.

Many of the stories, unfortunately, are uneven, repetitive and inferior to the two Endo novels I've read so far, The Sea and Poison and Volcano. The main character of several of the stories was Suguro, which also made subsequent stories more difficult (is this the same Suguro as the one two stories past?). The best stories are A Forty-Year-Old Man (1964), in which (you guessed it) Suguro is a hospitalized invalid with tuberculosis, who faces his own mortality and irrelevance as he undergoes a third major operation which may claim his life; Incredible Voyage (1968), a science fiction tale based on the 1960s American television series Fantastic Voyage, which concerns a newly minted doctor and a team of surgeons, who board a submarine that is shrunken to the size of a flea, in order to perform a life saving operation on a beautiful young woman; and Unzen (1965), in which a tourist from Tokyo visits the site where thousands of Christians were tortured and killed during the 17th century Shimbara Rebellion, which centers on Kichijiro, one of the main characters of Endo's most famous and highly regarded novel Silence.

Although Stained Glass Elegies could be considered a good introduction, I would not recommend it to the reader who has not read Endo before. Those who wish to focus on Endo's works, such as the members of this year's Author Theme Reads group, may wish to purchase it, but I suspect that those readers, and novices to Endo, will be better served by reading his translated novels instead. ( )

The stories in this collection are typical of Shūsako Endō. Many of the stories share a protagonist, a Catholic Japanese writer named Suguro. He is an obvious stand-in for the author, and in each story confronts Endō's most prominent themes: weak faith, being out of place in one's own society, shame in the face of one's own unprincipled behavior. Other major themes here are World War Two, cancer, hospital life, and the discovery of messy truths hidden behind societal niceties.

Since this is a translation from a language I don't know, I can't say much about the quality of the prose. But the translation is very good, and I can only assume that reflects the quality of the source. ( )