Foreign Studies

About

Three linked narratives explore the collision between East and West through the lens of Japanese travelers in France. A student in 1950s Rouen discovers that cultural exchange may be an illusion. A seventeenth-century Japanese envoy encounters Christianity in a Europe that regards him as a curiosity. Shusaku Endo draws from his own deeply alienating experience as an exchange student in Paris to create fiction suffused with the conviction that some distances cannot be bridged. Endo returned from France with tuberculosis, incomplete studies, and a worldview forever shaped by failure. These stories transform that failure into art — each protagonist confronting the same question: can a Japanese soul truly inhabit a Western framework, whether religious, intellectual, or emotional? A book about the loneliness of standing between cultures — and the hard-won wisdom that comes from admitting you belong to neither.