Stained glass elegies

The stories from this collection share many of the themes that are familiar to Endo's novels: the struggle to maintain Christian faith in a Japanese context, the muted drama of hospital life, the spiritual doubts that lie beneath the surface of everyday life. They draw generously on the author's experiences and, on one level, can be read as a fictional autobiography. In particular, Endo explores what it means to be a member of the "war generation", the group with perhaps the greatest sense of personal and national loss in the history of Japanese civilization.