Shūsaku Endō (1923–1996) was born in Tokyo and raised by his mother and an aunt in Kobe, where he converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of eleven. At Tokyo’s Keio University, he majored in French literature, graduating with a BA in 1949, before furthering his studies in French Catholic literature at the University of Lyon in France between 1950 and 1953. Before his death in 1996, Endō was the recipient of a number of outstanding Japanese literary awards—the Akutagawa Prize, Mainichi Cultural Prize, Shincho Prize, and Tanizaki Prize—and was widely considered the greatest Japanese novelist of his time.
