KAGAWA TOYOHIKO (1888–1960) was a Japanese Christian novelist, social worker, statesman, and evangelist. He alerted a whole generation of Japanese to the need for a practical expression of Christian ethics and symbolized to non-Japanese the power of faith in action.

Both of Kagawa's parents died before the boy entered school. As a middle-school student he was befriended by American missionaries who converted him to Christianity and treated him like a son. Extremely gifted mentally but weak physically, he spent four months in the hospital and then nine months alone in a hut recuperating shortly after he had entered a theological seminary. His close encounter with death became the basis of his later novel Shisen o koete (translated as both Across the Death Line and Before the Dawn). For the rest of his life, glaucoma and tuberculosis threatened his many activities.

Back in the seminary, Kagawa concurrently started...