Endō Shūsaku, (born March 27, 1923, Tokyo, Japan—died Sept. 29, 1996, Tokyo), Japanese novelist noted for his examination of the relationship between East and West through a Christian perspective.
Endō became a Roman Catholic at age 11 with the encouragement of his mother and an aunt. At Keio University he majored in French literature (B.A., 1949), a subject he studied from 1950 to 1953 at the University of Lyon in France. His first collections of fiction, Shiroi hito and Kiiroi hito (both 1955; “White Man” and “Yellow Man”), indicate the direction of most of his later fiction: they contrast Japanese and Western experience and perspectives. In Umi to dokuyaku (1957; The Sea and Poison), he examines the Japanese sense of morality in a war story about Japanese doctors performing a vivisection on a downed American pilot. One of Endō’s most powerful novels, Chimmoku (1966; Silence), is a fictionalized account of Portuguese priests who traveled to Japan and the subsequent s...
