SOURCE: "Shusaku Endo; Japanese Novelist, Humorist," in Los Angeles Times, September 30, 1996, p. A22.

[In the following essay, Efron gives a brief overview of Endo's life and career.]

Shusaku Endo, the Roman Catholic novelist who has been called the Japanese Graham Greene, died Sunday after a long illness. He was 73.

Endo was one of Japan's most acclaimed novelists and had a wide international following. He won nearly every major Japanese literary award, had at least nine books translated into English and other languages, and was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize for literature.

Endo was both a novelist and a humorist. The book for which he is best known in the West—Chinmoku, published under the English title Silence in 1969—deals with Japanese Christians in 17th century Nagasaki, and the problems of faith and apostasy.

The book, which seemed to argue that Christianity would have to change radically...