White Man/Yellow Man: Two Novellas

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Two novellas set during World War II, one in France and one in Japan, examining the collision between Eastern and Western identities under the pressure of wartime. In White Man, a Japanese student in occupied France confronts the racial hierarchies that his education taught him to admire. In Yellow Man, the mirror image: a story about faith, betrayal, and the cost of trying to reconcile two civilizations inside a single person. Endo, a Catholic writing about the gap between Japan and the West, brings his lifelong preoccupation to its sharpest expression in these paired stories. Each novella illuminates the other, and together they form a single argument about the impossibility — and necessity — of cultural translation. Two stories about the same wound — viewed from opposite sides.