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Title: A horror story about the "Culture of Death"
Review: When the sanctity of life is not honored, no one is safe, as the characters keep saying -- "Today everybody's on the way out. ... What's the point,then, of pitying ... ." As Endo implies, everybody is ALWAYS on some point of the continuum from birth to death so we are all in jeopardy when the Modernist utilitarian philosophy is applied. It is only a matter of changing the definition of who is no longer "qualified" to live. People steeped in such a system have no defense, no final moral keep or fortress from which to defy a system based on such principles and say "No." All social interaction and politics becomes mere maneuvering to control the decision-making machinery to avoid being politcally or legally "defined" out of humanity. After reading Gitta Sereny's "Into That Darkness (a biography of Treblinka Commandant Franz Stangl), Endo's fiction rings out as basic human truth.
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