Silence is Shusaku Endo's most highly acclaimed novel. It is the story of an idealistic Portuguese Jesuit priest, Father Sebastian Rodrigues, who in the 1640s sets sail for Japan determined to help the brutally oppressed Japanese Christians and to discover the truth about his former mentor, who is rumoured to have rejected 'glorious martyrdom' and apostatized. But once faced with the reality of religious persecution Rodgirues is himself forced to make an impossible choice: whether to abandon his flock or his God.