Kaga Otohiko is both an author of works of fiction and a professional psychiatrist. While serving as a medical officer at a Tokyo detention center, he came across many prisoners on death row. His novel The Verdict features one such prisoner as protagonist. Kaga's literature asks questions such as “What is the meaning of faith to the individual confronting death?” “Is there any room for light in such a world of darkness?” Kaga's writings depict what he observed through his protracted focus on “both the death of the body and the death of the spirit.”

Introduction

I have here a book. The title is The Day Christ Died, a study by Jim Bishop, who started out as a newspaper reporter and then began writing in the genre of documentary literature. He was also the author of The Day Kennedy Was Shot, and in these works he analyzes and conjectures what occurred on a single day of tremendous historical significance and deduces as much of the “truth” as can be known. As the title The Day Christ Died implies, Bishop traces, hour by hour, the events of the day Christ died, starting with the previous evening. The translation of this book into Japanese was supervised by the Japanese Christian author, Miura Shumon. Miura commented that translating this book became “one of my motivations for receiving baptism” (Bishop 1958, 302). Endō Shūsaku remarked that he “read the entire book in one sitting” (Bishop 1958, front cover). And the Catholic playwright Tanaka Sumie stated: “Bringing to life so vividly the true events of two thousand years ago signifies a resurrection of literature about Jesus” (Bishop 1958, front cover). The climax of Bishop's book is the scene of Jesus’ execution. Jesus, as we know, was nailed to a cross. The words of Jesus’ final prayers—“Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani? (My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?)” and “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”—weighed heavily upon the hearts of His disciples and still capture our hearts today. Even as it touches our hearts, Bishop presents Jesus’ death—His physical death, that is—to his readers in a manner as close to the truth as supposition will allow.