Shūsaku Endō

Biography

Soon after Endō was born in Tokyo in 1923, his family moved to Dalian, part of the Kwantung Leased Territory in Manchuria. When his parents divorced in 1933, Endō's mother brought him back to Japan to live with an aunt in Kobe. Endō was baptized as a Catholic at the age of 11 or 12 in the year 1934. Some say this was brought on by his mother, who had converted to Catholicism after her divorce, while others state the aunt instigated the initiation.

Endō began studying at Keio University in 1943, but his studies were interrupted by the war; he worked in a munitions factory. Nonetheless, he contributed to literary journals during this period. In 1968, he would become chief editor of one of these, the prestigious Mita Bungaku.

His alma mater is not the only university Endō is associated with. He first attended Waseda University for the stated purpose of studying medicine. An interest in French Catholic authors precipitated a visit to the University of Lyon beginning in 1950, and he lectured at at least two Tokyo universities. In 1956, he was hired as an instructor at Sophia University, and Seijo University assigned him the role of "Lecturer on the Theory of the Novel" in 1967. He was considered a novelist not a university professor, however.

In 1954, a year after completing his studies in France, he won the Akutagawa Prize for Shiroi Hito (White Men). Endō married Okada Junko, a year later. They had one son, Ryūnosuke, born in 1956.

Throughout his life bouts of disease plagued him, and he spent two years in hospital at one point. In 1952, while studying in France, he came down with pleurisy in Paris. A return visit in 1960 prompted another case of the same disease, and he stayed in hospital (in France and Japan) for the greater part of three years. It is possible that he may have contracted tuberculosis, underwent thoracoplasty, and had a lung removed.

While Endō wrote in several genres, his oeuvre is strongly tied to Christianity if not Catholicism. Endō has been called "a novelist whose work has been dominated by a single theme... belief in Christianity." Others have said that he is "almost by default... [labeled] a 'Japanese Catholic author' struggling to 'plant the seeds of his adopted religion' in the 'mudswamp' of Japan." He often likened Japan to a swamp or fen. In the novel Silence, an official tells a priest who has apostatized, "Father, it was not by us that you were defeated, but by this mudswamp, Japan." In Endo's stage version of this story, The Golden Country, this official also says: "But the mudswamp too has its good points, if you will but give yourself up to its comfortable warmth. The teachings of Christ are like a flame. Like a flame they set a man on fire. But the tepid warmth of Japan will eventually nurture sleep." Thus, many of Endo's characters are allegories.

He may not be embraced by fellow Christians—Catholics, in particular. Some of his characters (many of whom are allegories) may reference non-Western religions. While not the main focus of his works, a few of Endō's books mention Kakure Kirishitans. Incidentally, he used the term "かくれ切支丹" instead of the more common "かくれキリシタン".

His books reflect many of his childhood experiences, including the stigma of being an outsider, the experience of being a foreigner, the life of a hospital patient, and the struggle with tuberculosis. However, his books mainly deal with the moral fabric of life.

His Catholic faith can be seen at some level in all of his books and it is often a central feature. Most of his characters struggle with complex moral dilemmas, and their choices often produce mixed or tragic results.

In The Sea and Poison, one of the narrators, a salaryman, stumbles across evidence that American prisoners of war were used as guinea pigs and then killed, but did the experimenters want anything more than this narrator, "just an ordinary bit of happiness"? Yellow Man starts with the quotation, "I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth." A character says, " A yellow man like me has absolutely no experience of anything so profound and extreme as the consciousness of sin you white men have. All we experience is fatigue, a deep fatigue—a weariness murky as the color of my skin, dank, heavily submerged." A series of essays comments on "the threefold insensitivity of the Japanese": insensitivity to God, sin, and death.

His work may often be compared to that of Graham Greene. In fact, Greene himself labeled Endō one of the finest writers alive.

While he lost out to Kenzaburō Ōe the 1994 Nobel prize for literature, he received the Order of Culture the subsequent year. Endō died shortly thereafter from complications of hepatitis at Keio University Hospital in Tokyo on September 29, 1996.

Partial list of works

Awards

Museum

The Syusaku Endo Literature Museum, in Sotome, Nagasaki, is devoted to the writer's life and works.