End is also one of the most prolific novelists of postwar Japan. Since he began writing in 1955, he has published more than 175 books, including forty-five novels and seventeen short- story collections, in addition to scores of volumes of essays, criticism, travel reminiscences, plays, and screenplays. He served as president of the Japan P.E.N. Club, and in 1988 the Japanese government designated him as a Person of Cultural Merit. He received the Dag Hammarskjöld Prize, virtually every literary award available in Japan, and three honorary doctoral degrees from Catholic universities in the United States. His most widely read work, Chinmoku (1966; translated as Silence, 1969), is a novel that was filmed in Japan; an opera and an oratorio based on it have been performed; it has appeared as a comic book (one of the highest forms of acclaim in Japan); the Milwaukee Repertory Theater and Japan's Subaru troupe collaborated in presenting a bilingual dramatization of it in 1995; and Martin Scorsese acquired the international motion picture rights to the work.
End was born in Tokyo, but his earliest memories were not of Japan. When he was quite young his father, End Tsunehisa, a bank employee, was transferred to a branch office in Dalian, a city in occupied Chinese Manchuria, and the boy moved there with his parents and older brother.
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