Japanese novelist — the major Catholic writer in a country where Christians number less than one percent, and among the great religious-existentialist novelists of the 20th century. Endō was baptized at twelve by a family decision he did not understand, and spent his life reckoning with what it meant to be both Japanese and Christian when his Jesuit teachers, and he himself, often felt that the faith was a borrowed suit that would not fit the Japanese body. "I wanted to remake [the Christian faith] into my kind of Japanese Christianity," he wrote; his novels are the record of that remaking.
Silence (Chinmoku, 1966), the book for which he is known outside Japan, follows the Portuguese Jesuit Sebastião Rodrigues into 17th-century Japan under the shogunate's persecution of Christians. Rodrigues's question — why is God silent when his believers are tortured? — becomes Endō's question; the answer the novel discovers (the apostasy that is perhaps the truer faith; the face of Christ that says "trample, trample") belongs to the highest religious fiction. Martin Scorsese's 2016 film adaptation brought the book to Western audiences it had long deserved.
The Sea and Poison (1958, on wartime medical vivisection of American POWs), The Samurai (1980, on a 17th-century Japanese embassy to Mexico and Rome), and Deep River (1993, set in India among pilgrims to the Ganges) trace the same preoccupations across different registers. He is often compared to Graham Greene, whom he admired and who admired him in return.