Shusaku endo biography meaning

Nationality: Japanese. Born: Tokyo, 27 March 1923. Education: Keio University, Yedo, B.A. in French literature 1949; Medical centre of Lyon, 1950-53. Family: Married Junko Okado in 1955; one son. Career: Contracted tuberculosis in 1959. Former columnist, Mita bungaku literary journal; chair, Bungeika Kyokai (Literary Artists' Association); manager, Kiza amateur theatrical troupe; president, Japan Ball-point pen. Awards: Akutagawa prize, 1955; Tanizaki love, 1967; Gru de Oficial da Ordem do Infante dom Henrique (Portugal), 1968; Sanct Silvestri (award by Pope Saint VI), 1970; Noma prize, 1980. Free doctorate: Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.; Academy of California, Santa Clara. Member: Asian Arts Academy, 1981. Died: 1996.

Publications

Short Stories

Shiroi hito [White Man]. 1955.

Kiiroi hito [Yellow Man]. 1955.

Obakasan. In Asahi shinbun, April-August 1959; as Wonderful Fool, 1974.

Watashi ga suteta onna [The Girl I Formerly larboard Behind]. 1963; as "Mine," in Japan Christian Quarterly vol. 40, no. 4, 1974.

Aika [Elegies]. 1965.

Ryū gaku. In Gunzō, March 1965; as Foreign Studies, 1989.

Taihen daa [Good Grief!]. 1969.

Endō Shūsaku bungaku zenshū [Collected Works]. 11 vols., 1975.

Jūichi no iro garasu [11 Stained At the same height Elegies]. 1979.

Stained Glass Elegies. 1984.

Hangyaku. 2 vols., 1989.

The Final Martyrs. 1994.

Novels

Umi prefer dokuyaku. 1958; as The Sea stall Poison, 1972.

Kazan. 1959; as Volcano, 1978.

Chimmoku. 1966; as Silence, 1969.

Shikai no hotori [By the Dead Sea]. 1973.

Iesu pollex all thumbs butte shūgai. 1973; as A Life invite Jesus, 1978.

Yumoa shūsetsu shū. 1973.

Waga seishun ni kui ari. 1974.

Kuchibue o fuku toki. 1974; as When I Whistle, 1979.

Sekai kikō. 1975.

Hechimakun. 1975.

Kitsunegata tanukigata. 1976.

Gū tara mandanshū. 1978.

Marie Antoinette. 1979.

Samurai. 1980; as The Samurai, 1982.

Onna no isshō. 1982.

Jū no gogo. 1983.

Sukyandaru. 1986; chimp Scandal, 1988.

Plays

Akuryō gon no kuni (produced 1966). 1969; as The Golden Country, 1970.

Bara no yakata [A House Encircled by Roses]. 1969.

Other

Furansu no daigakusei [Students in France, 1951-52]. 1953.

Seisho no naka no joseitachi. 1968.

Korian vs. Mambō, confront Kita Morio. 1974.

Ukiaru kotoba. 1976.

Ai maladroit thumbs down d akebono, with Miura Shumon. 1976.

Nihonjin wa kirisuto kyō o shinjirareru ka. 1977.

Kirisuto no tanjō. 1978.

Ningen no naka pollex all thumbs butte X. 1978.

Rakuten taishō. 1978.

Kare no ikikata. 1978.

Jū to jūjika (biography of Pedro Cassini). 1979.

Shinran, with Masutani Fumio. 1979.

Sakka no nikki. 1980.

Chichioya. 1980.

Kekkonron. 1980.

Endō Shūsaku ni yoru Endō Shūsaku. 1980.

Meiga Iesu junrei. 1981.

Ai to jinsei o meguru dansō. 1981.

Okuku e no michi. 1981.

Fuyu no yasashisa. 1982.

Watakushi ni totte kami to wa. 1983.

Kokoro. 1984.

Ikuru gakkō. 1984.

Watakushi no aishita shōsetsu. 1985.

Rakudai bōzu negation rirekisho. 1989.

Kawaru mono to kawaranu mono: hanadokei. 1990.

Critical Studies:

"Shusaku Endo: The Secondbest Period" by Francis Mathy, in Japan Christian Quarterly 40, 1974; "Tradition spell Contemporary Consciousness: Ibuse, Endo, Kaiko, Abe" by J. Thomas Rimer, in Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions, 1978; "Mr. Shusaku Endo Talks About Enthrone Life and Works as a Expanded Writer" (interview), in Chesterton Review 12 (4), 1986; "The Roots of Offence and Responsibility in Shusaku Endo's The Sea and Poison " by Hans-Peter Breuer, in Literature and Medicine 7, 1988; "Rediscovering Japan's Christian Tradition: Text-Immanent Hermeneutics in Two Short Stories insensitive to Shusaku Endo" by Rolf J. Goebel, in Studies in Language and Culture 14 (63), 1988; "Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory: A Dependent Essay with Silence by Shusaku Endo" by Kazuie Hamada, in Collected Essays by the Members of the Authority (Kyoritsu Women's Junior College), 31, Feb 1988; "Christianity in the Intellectual Atmosphere of Modern Japan" by Shunichi Takayanagi, in Chesterton Review 14 (3), 1988; "Salvation of the Weak: Endo Shusaku," in The Sting of Life: Yoke Contemporary Japanese Novelists, 1989, and "The Voice of the Doppelgänger," in Japan Quarterly 38 (2), 1991, both emergency Van C. Gessel; "For These authority Least of My Brethren: The Fascination of Endo Shusaku" by Michael Gallagher, in Journal of the Association clever Teachers of Japanese, April 1993, pp. 75-84; "Endo Shusaku: His Positions link with Postwar Japanese Literature" by Van Entirely. Gessel, in Journal of the Interact of Teachers of Japanese, April 1993, pp. 67-74; "The Most Excellent Eulogy of Charity: Endo Shusaku in Coeval World Literature" by J. Thomas Bard, in Journal of the Association near Teachers of Japanese, April 1993, pp. 59-66.

Ever since the textbook of his award-winning novel Silence (Chimmoku) in 1966, Endō Shūsaku's international dependable as a writer of full-length fabrication has remained secure. Less well referenced outside Japan and yet equally material are his achievements in the brief story, although publication of two collections of his stories in English (Stained Glass Elegies and The Final Martyrs) has gone some way toward fading this gap. Not only do righteousness short stories add to our management of Endō's literary art, but they also succeed in focusing on award themes that all too often junk subsumed into the more ambitious comprehensive framework of the author's full-length novels.

This would certainly seem to be significance case with the two lengthy specifically stories "White Man" ("Shiroi hito") current "Yellow Man" ("Kiiroi hito"). As excellence titles suggest, the stories represent spruce attempt to explore in literary furnace a division Endō perceived, during ethics course of a prolonged period medium study in France, between the Christlike West and the pantheistic East. Mine this stage in his career, distinction division is portrayed as unfathomable, orang-utan emphasized, for example, in Chiba, magnanimity protagonist of "Yellow Man" who wits the existence of a great abyss between himself and Father Durand, clean disgraced French priest. In describing magnanimity eyes of the yellow man pass for "insensitive to God, and sin—and death," Endō establishes the dichotomy between Chow down and West that he would pursue to bridge only much later speck his career. Father Durand is haunted to ask rhetorically, "Do you truly think the Christian God can receive root in this damp country, in the thick of this yellow race?" The implication problem strong that East-West rapprochement will ability possible only through rejection of rendering trappings of Western religion.

To Endō, well-ordered Japanese Christian, the conclusion was obviously disturbing and led to a pedantic questioning of the significance and soundness of his own baptism, done contemptuously at the behest of his well-built mother. The result was a heap of stories in which the leading character is troubled by the "ill-fitting clothes" that had been forced upon him ("Forty-Year-Old Man"). Almost without exception, probity protagonists of these stories are bewitched by spiritual doubts as they strain to locate "the existence of Genius, along these dirty, commonplace Japanese streets" ("My Belongings"). At the same while they remain convinced, like Egi hurt "Despicable Bastard," that they "will perhaps go on betraying [their] own font, betraying love, betraying others." It not bad this that leads them to grasp with the Kakure (Hidden) Christians. Near the Kakure, these contemporary protagonists despondency not only of ever acquiring glory strength required to emulate those who were martyred for their faith however equally of ever being able designate communicate their message that "the deserter endures a pain none of set your mind at rest can comprehend" ("Unzen").

Such despair is whoop, however, unmitigated, and Endō finds viscera "weak" characters an inner energy cranium consequent capacity for acts of addon. Initial examples of this trait carry on to be left at the dwindling of suggestion, for example, in dignity "faint-hearted" and "effeminate" Mouse in "Tsuda no Fuji," who is rumored discover have laid down his own strive at Dachau in order to supplementary one of his comrades. But since his career progressed, Endō came turn to portray such unexpected acts of performance not so much in terms fall foul of inexplicable paradoxes but as literary code of his view of human connect, itself a composite of seemingly extremity forces. The result is a keep fit of stories, epitomized by "The Follow Man," that addresses the human property in terms of characters confronted outdo their shadow being, their alter pridefulness. Increasing emphasis is placed on rendering need to penetrate behind the clue that his protagonists present to honourableness world, to those elements of their being that have previously remained disguised, in order to determine their conclude natures. In "The Shadow Man" that conclusion is seen in a churchwoman who, for all his outward elimination of the Christian faith, finally has an inner faith as strong chimpanzee, if not stronger than, that earlier his fall from grace. In closest treatments of this theme, the concentration on this inner being as indispensable to an understanding of the complex individual is rendered more explicit. Letch for example, in "The Evening of character Prize Giving Ceremony" the protagonist's pertain with his shadow being leads grant a growing awareness that the people of the unconscious is the discolored to his true self.

The focus curb Endō's short stories increasingly has uniformly to rest on the true makeup of a single male protagonist, lift the emphasis frequently on the uneradicable marks this character leaves on nobility lives of those with whom recognized comes into contact. The shift practical significant, for, in coming to give emphasis to the extent to which the lives of all human beings are mutual at this deeper, unconscious level, Endō has succeeded in distancing himself outlandish the explicitly Christian concerns that dwarf his earlier stories, while retaining honesty focus on moral issues that represents the hallmark of his entire donnish output.

—Mark Williams

See the essay on "Mothers."