Feast of All Souls

The Feast of All Souls, the Catholic day of prayer for the dead observed on November 2, appears in Silence not as a narrated event but as a memory and a point of comparison. For Sebastian Rodrigues, now living as the apostate Okada San'emon in Nagasaki, the recollection of the feast in Lisbon serves as a measure of his irrevocable separation from his former life and faith.

Memory and Comparison

Leaning against the window of his house in Sotouramachi, Rodrigues watches the Japanese children play and hears the old woman who brings his food scold them. The sight prompts him to think of the Feast of All Souls in Lisbon, reflecting on its resemblance to the bon festival — the Buddhist Urabon — "that feast when the windows of the houses in Lisbon displayed lighted candles." The parallel is one of form only: the Portuguese celebration, with its candles in windows, is a communal act of Christian piety, while the Japanese festival, with its lanterns hung from eaves and offerings of peaches and jujubes on shelves for the spirits of the dead, is a ceremony to console returning ancestral spirits. Rodrigues recognizes the similarity but feels only the distance. He has a vague remembrance of looking up the Japanese festival in the Dutch dictionary given him by Christovao Ferreira, finding the translation "hetsterffest." The intellectual act of comparison cannot bridge the gulf between the two worlds.

The Swamp and the Sapling

The Feast of All Souls, like every other element of the Christianity Rodrigues brought to Japan, is a sapling planted in a swamp. Inoue, the Lord of Chikugo, tells Rodrigues that the God worshipped by the crypto-Christians of Goto and Ikitsuki "has gradually changed so as to be no longer like the Christian God at all." The roots have been cut; the sapling withers. The feast that in Lisbon was a living tradition, a candle-lit connection between the living and the dead, has no counterpart in Japan that can sustain its original meaning. The Japanese peasants, as Ferreira argued, "twisted God to their own way of thinking in a way we can never imagine." The Feast of All Souls, if it were ever celebrated in secret, would undergo the same transformation, becoming something the Church would no longer recognize.

The Absence of Ritual

Rodrigues never celebrates the Feast of All Souls in Japan. He has no altar, no wine, no bread for Mass. The only ritual he can perform is the one that has been forced upon him: the annual trampling of the fumie, which takes place on January 4, not on any Christian holy day. The calendar of the Church — Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, the Feast of All Souls — has been replaced by the calendar of the magistrate's office. The secret Christian organization in Tomogi, with its Jiisama and Tossama, had kept the feasts alive by reciting prayers before a holy picture, but Rodrigues himself is now cut off from that practice. The memory of the Lisbon feast is a ghost, a reminder of a liturgical life that no longer exists for him.

The Significance of the Memory

That Rodrigues recalls the Feast of All Souls at all, in the midst of his apostasy and his enforced Japanese life, reveals the persistence of his identity as a priest. He cannot celebrate the feast, but he remembers it. The memory is a form of fidelity, a silent act of love that the magistrate's office cannot police. It is the same love that leads him to hear Kichijiro's confession, despite knowing that his fellow priests would condemn the act as sacrilege. "Even now I am the last priest in this land," he reflects. "But Our Lord was not silent. Even if he had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of him." The Feast of All Souls, remembered but not observed, becomes part of that silent testimony.