Endō Shūsaku

Endō was baptized Catholic as a boy in Nagoya, a faith his mother adopted after her divorce and pressed onto him rather than one he chose: he later described it as an ill-fitting Western suit he could never quite take off. Studying Catholic literature in Lyon in the early 1950s, he encountered European racism and a bout of tuberculosis that put him through years of hospitalization and multiple lung surgeries.

That double estrangement (a foreign God, a foreign disease) fed Silence, in which a Portuguese missionary in persecuted seventeenth-century Japan must decide whether apostasy under torture can still be an act of faith. The novel divided Japanese Catholics on its release and became, decades later, a Martin Scorsese film.

He continued probing what he called Japan's 'mudswamp' resistance to Christianity in later novels like Deep River, and died in Tokyo in 1996.