Sono Ayako is not only one of postwar Japan's most important Christian writers, she is also one of the few still alive today. In addition to three of her novels that have been translated into English (Miracles, No Reason for Murder and Watcher from the Shore), the as yet untranslated The Empty Room enables the reader to find that Sono's Catholicism is expressed through her conviction that love triumphs over sin.

Introduction

Sono Ayako was born Machida Chizuko in the Katsushika neighborhood of Tokyo on 17 September 1931. Her father, Eijirō, was a graduate of Keio University who had joined the management of the Yamato Rubber Manufacturing Company that was run by his wife Kiwa's older brother. Because Chizuko frequently suffered from pneumonia in the damp area around Katsushika, the family moved to the suburb of Den’en Chōfu when she was three and her health improved. In 1938 she entered Sacred Heart Academy. Neither of her parents was Christian, but her mother felt that some kind of spiritual education would be good for her (Tsuruha 1979, 33). These chance events led to Chizuko's eventual conversion to Christianity. She was baptized in the school chapel in 1948, taking the name Mary Elizabeth. Mary Elizabeth Chizuko became Sono Ayako the following year when she began using that pen name when publishing pieces in Nakagawa Yoichi's La Mancha journal. She was concerned that her father would not approve of her interest in writing fiction. In 1953, Sono married Miura Shumon, one year before she graduated Sacred Heart University. In June 1954, just three months after graduating, Sono published the work that would establish her reputation as an up-and-coming writer: “Enrai no kyakutachi” (Guests from Afar) was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize in 1954 and widely praised by Japan's leading literary critics. While “Guests from Afar” is not usually considered part of Sono's Christian literature, it lays the foundation for that latter development through its treatment of the American occupation soldiers, not as superiors or inferiors, but merely as “guests from afar” (Sunami 2011, 134). Sono's ability to see the American soldiers in this light surely owed much to her Christian faith and her sense that many of these soldiers shared her faith more closely than did many of her fellow Japanese.