End Shusaku is a study in contrasts: one of the most influential and popular writers in postwar Japan, but an author whose major works have focused upon Christian themes foreign to most of his readers; an internationally recognized novelist whose countrymen are uncertain about whether to embrace him as a serious or as a comic writer; a dedicated, serious thinker about the cultural gaps separating Japan from the West, as well as a man who has formed the largest--and most inept--amateur acting troupe in Japan. While End's extraliterary exploits have clouded his reputation among readers in Japan, he stood virtually alone among Japanese writers in exploring moral responsibility and religious devotion; in charitably depicting the weak, the unsuccessful, the apostate, and the socially downtrodden; and in constructing narratives that intertwine and juxtapose past and present, belief and doubt, East and West in ways that illuminate both sides of...