Fascinating issues of translation, reception, and our own historical memory are raised by the body of Christian narrative literature produced in Japanese by the Jesuit mission of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scholarly attention has thus far focused on explicitly ideological texts like manuals of doctrine or apologetic treatises, whereas works of narrative literature have been studied if at all for their linguistic features and conspicuously excluded from the canon of Japanese narrative literature. Here, we explore the genre of saints’ lives through the Life of Alexius, a Syriac Christian ascetic who lived in fifth-century Edessa (modern ?anl?urfa, Turkey) at the western end of the Silk Road. The medieval Japanese Life of Alexius is extant in three versions: in Roman script we have one version handwritten and one printed, both from 1591, and then there is a kana-script chapbook copied in 1614 by the shogunal authorities. This paper examines these texts, their Iberian sources, and finally the eyewitness accounts in the vast and largely-unexplored archive of Jesuit Japan Letters.
