Hasekura was a real person and many of the events described in the book are documented, though Endō takes some liberties with the historical record, especially in filling gaps. The samurai of the title is Rokuemon Hasekura, a low-ranking samurai (described with the rank “lance corporal” in translation). The pressures and conflicts facing the book’s two protagonists are very different, however. As with many of Endō’s works, The Samurai focuses on the internal struggles of its protagonists to live a Christian life in circumstances of extreme external and internal pressure and conflict.
The Samurai focuses on events two decades prior, when Christianity was only partially suppressed, and the Shogunate still somewhat open to contacts with Europe. The backdrop of Silence is the aftermath of the Shimabara Rebellion, a peasant rebellion crushed in 1638, which erupted in reaction to the vicious suppression of Christianity under the Tokugawa Shogunate, part of the turn of Japan inward. The Japanese author Shūsaku Endō is known primarily for his 1966 masterwork, Silence, about the persecution of Christians in mid-seventeenth-century Japan.
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