SOURCE: Coles, Robert. “Shusaku Endo: At the River's Edge.” Commonweal 123, no. 19 (8 November 1996): 7-8.

In the following essay, Coles eulogizes Endō.

With the recent death of Shusaku Endo, in Tokyo, at seventy-three, after a long struggle with hepatitis, Japan lost one of its foremost novelists, short-story writers, and playwrights. Endo's readers across the continents will surely feel deeply the departure of a major literary figure whose special interest and talent was to offer a repeated (and each time brilliantly original) consideration of our moral and spiritual fate as creatures of language, all too aware of the mere second of eternity granted us—at least biologically. For his Japanese compatriots, Endo was a learned interpreter of the Christian story, many of whose mysteries have not been either understood or welcomed on an island-nation determined for so long to exclude foreign influences. For us in the West, Endo has naturally been...