Professor Mark Williams interviewed on Radio 4

Professor of Japanese, Mark Williams, speaks on BBC Radio 4 about Martin Scorsese's new film 'Silence'.

Professor Mark Williams was interviewed by Mariella Frostrup on the BBC Radio 4 programme, 'Open Book' (11/12/16) on the occasion of the launch of Martin Scorsese's film version of the Japanese author Endo Shusaku's 1966 novel Silence. Scorsese had promised Endo in the early 1990s that he would make a film of the novel, and the film has now been released to 5-star reviews.

Professor Williams, who has published extensively on Endo's work, discussed the significance of Endo's original novel and speculated on the reasons for its ongoing popularity, both in Japan and overseas. The novel is about Portuguese missionaries in Japan at the time of the persecution of 'hidden Christians' in the seventeenth century.