When I Whistle
Shūsaku Endō's 1974 novel cuts between two timelines: a middle-aged doctor in contemporary Japan and his memories of Ozu, a brilliant school friend who died of tuberculosis during the militarist 1930s. The book is preoccupied with failure, compromise, and the question of whether postwar prosperity was worth the moral flattening it required. Endō is sometimes called the Japanese Graham Greene, which undersells how specific his melancholy is and how quietly he indicts both eras for their accommodations.Tuttle's edition, translated by Van C. Gessel, presents the novel in a modest paperback format. The novel suggests that survival often looks, from a distance, like betrayal. It is a serious book that knows better than to call attention to itself, best suited to readers drawn to novels that grieve in a lower register.
