Endo Shusaku Literary Museum

Endo Shusaku (1923-1996) set his most celebrated novel, Silence, in the Sotome region of Nagasaki, where Portuguese missionaries faced brutal persecution of their Japanese Christian converts in the 17th century. The book is a landmark of Japanese Catholic literature, and the museum opened here in 2000 partly because of Endo's widow and son, who supported placing it in the landscape he wrote about. The permanent collection includes a recreation of Endo's Tokyo study, photographs, and manuscripts. The building sits between the hills of Sotome and the Sumonada Sea, looking toward the Goto Islands, the same view Endo carried when he imagined this coastline as the setting for spiritual crisis.