Endo Shusaku
(1923–1996), Japanese writer. As a boy, Tokyo-born novelist and playwright Endo Shusaku, was baptized into the Catholic Church. After majoring in French literature at Keio University, in 1950 he was selected as the first Japanese to study abroad. Endo spent two and a half years in France, reading especially French Catholic writers. Upon his return to Japan he began writing fiction, publishing in 1955 Shiroi hito (White Man), for which he won the Akutagawa Prize, followed by Kiiroi hito (Yellow Man). In these works he contrasted the Western and Japanese views of faith, guilt, and sin.
In 1958, Endo published Umi to dokuyaku (The Sea and Poison), which dealt with the vivisection of captive American soldiers. In Ryugaku (Foreign Studies, 1965) he examined the difficulties that Japanese have in absorbing the essence of Western culture, particularly Christianity. Perhaps his most well-known work is Chinmoku (Silence, 1966), concerning the martyrdom of Christians in Japan beginning in the late-sixteenth century. With Samurai (The Samurai, 1980), critics began to write of Endo as an eventual candidate for the Nobel Prize. While a devout adherent to Christian faith, to the end of his life he pursued as his subject the human psyche in its sometimes disturbing complexity.
Further Reading
Lewell, John. (1993) Modern Japanese Novelists: A Biographical Dictionary. Tokyo: Kodansha.
Williams, Mark B. (1999) Endo Shusaku: A Literature of Reconciliation. New York: Routledge.
This is the complete article, containing 226 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
