The Challenge of Orthodoxy

When he was a boy, Japanese author Sh?saku End? (1923–1996) converted to Roman Catholicism. He attended Tokyo's Keio University after the Second World War, having served in a munitions factory. He went on to pursue graduate studies at the University of Lyon, in France. He returned to Japan, married, and found work as a university lecturer. By 1954, when Shiroi Hito (White Men) won the Akutagawa Prize, he had earned widespread recognition as a novelist. His fiction embittered some of his fellow Catholics, particularly in Japan.