Shūsaku Endō

Born: March 27, 1923

Died: September 29, 1996

One of the most vivid descriptions author Shūsaku Endō uses to describe his faith was to call his Catholicism an ill-fitting suit. But Endō’s discomfort is more profound than something that looks great on the hanger that never fits exactly right. Throughout his life and in his writings he grappled with what to do when the expectations of faith do not match its lived reality.

Born in Tokyo in 1923, he spent his early childhood in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, where his father worked for the Japanese government. Endō returned to Japan before the worst atrocities of the Sino-Japanese War, but that may have been cold comfort to the 10-year-old boy whose move was prompted by his parents’ divorce.

At 11 he and his mother converted to Catholicism and joined what was, in Japan, a miniscule religious minority. He attended college during the chaos of World War II, though Endō had to interrupt his studies when he was conscripted to work in a munitions factory. In 1949 he received an opportunity to study in France.

Endō hoped that by living in a predominantly Christian society he would be spiritually at home. Yet he had no such luck. Ill-at-ease being a Christian in Japan, he was likewise out of place as a Japanese man in Christian Europe.

Endō explains in his A Life of Jesus, how profoundly sad Jesus was. Writing for a Japanese audience, who “know almost nothing of Jesus,” Endō emphasizes for his readers how Jesus understood that his simple, straightforward message about the “the God of love and the love of God” was woefully inadequate to ameliorate day-to-day suffering.

—Kathleen Manning