Together with Junnosuke Yoshiyuki, Shōtarō Yasuoka, Junzo Shono, Hiroyuki Agawa, Ayako Sono (also Catholic), and Shumon Miura, Endō is categorized as part of the "Third Generation" (that is, the third major group of Japanese writers to appear after World War II).

Soon after Endō was born in Tokyo in 1923, his family moved to Dairen, then part of the Kwantung Leased Territory in Manchuria.

[7] His studies at the University of Lyon over the 1950–1953 period deepened his interest in and knowledge of modern French Catholic authors, who were to become a major influence on his own writing.

In 1954, a year after completing his studies in France, he won the Akutagawa Prize for Shiroi Hito (White Men).

[3] A return visit in 1960 prompted another case of the same disease, and he stayed in hospital (in France and Japan) for the greater part of three years.

[8] While he lost the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature to Kenzaburō Ōe,[5] he received the Order of Culture the subsequent year.

[6] Endō died shortly thereafter from complications of hepatitis at Keio University Hospital in Tokyo on September 29, 1996.

In Endō's stage version of this story, The Golden Country, this official also says: "But the mudswamp too has its good points, if you will but give yourself up to its comfortable warmth.