Japanese · 1923–1996
Endō was baptised Catholic at eleven because his mother converted after a divorce, and spent the rest of his life describing the fit as a borrowed suit of clothes that never fitted. He studied French literature in Lyon in 1950, one of the first Japanese students sent abroad after the war, fell ill with tuberculosis, and came home to write novels about the question that ate at him: whether a religion born in the Mediterranean can grow in what he called the mudswamp of Japan. Silence, published in 1966, drew fury from Catholics who thought it apologised for apostasy and from nationalists who thought it apologised for missionaries. He wrote more than thirty books, from historical novels to comic fiction he called his entertainments, won every major Japanese literary prize, and was proposed for the Nobel several times. Graham Greene called him the finest Christian novelist of the century. Martin Scorsese carried Silence for twenty-eight years before filming it.