Shusaku Endo (1923 - 1996)

At the age of ten, Endo had returned to Japan from Manchuria with his mother.
Suffering from the pain and social rejection of a divorce, his mother found solace in the devout faith of her sister, and so she converted to Catholicism. She attended early mass daily. In order to please his mother, Endo went along with the conversion and was baptized a Christian. But had he meant it? Was he, in fact, the reverse image of the Kakure, a Christian who had gone through the externals while secretly betraying Christ?

"I became a Catholic against my will," he now says. He likens his faith to an arranged marriage, a forced union with a wife chosen by his mother. He tried to leave that wife--for Marxism, for atheism, for a time even contemplating suicide - but his attempts to escape always failed. He could not live with this arranged wife; he could not live without her. Meanwhile, she kept loving him, and to his surprise, eventually he grew to love her in return.

Using another image, Endo likens his Christian pilgrimage to a young boy squirming inside a suit of clothes. He searches endlessly for a better-fitting suit, or perhaps a kimono, but cannot find one. He is constantly, he says, "re-tailoring with my own hands the Western suit my mother had put on me, and changing it into a Japanese garment that would fit my Japanese body."

~ Philip Yancey