Volcano

First edition in English. 12mo. 175pp. Black cloth boards, silver lettering to spine. Jacket design by Keith Cunningham. Glossary. Translated from the Japanese Kazan (1959), and with an Introduction by Richard A. Schuchert.

Price-clipped, with new price sticker to inner flap, else Fine.

Author's third novel. A powerful narrative of clashing ideas and ideals, championed each by an ailing volcanologist and a defrocked French Catholic priest, in the shadow of Akadaké volcano of Japan's central region. By the author of Silence, which was described by Graham Greene as "one of the finest novels of our time". The admiration being mutual, Endō would re-read Greene's 1951 novel The End of the Affair before beginning a new work of his own. A rare Catholic in Shinto Japan, Endō has been called "a novelist whose work has been dominated by a single theme... belief in Christianity," a charge also made towards Greene.