做為一個生長在日本精神文化環境中的天主教作家，遠藤周作（1923-1996）努力找出適合他「將基督信仰翻譯成日本文化也能清楚理解的形式」目標的文學風格。他選定偵探小說作為他接近「我自身的耶穌」的畢生旅程的文學表現。如同私人偵探追查那些被遺留的線索一樣，藉由他的寫作，遠藤努力去細查他自身生命中那些能將他的人生標示為基督徒與小說家的思想與事件的痕跡。這篇文章闡明了遠藤運用偵探小說的方式來創造他的小說，這是在先前的研究裡還未曾被探究過的。

As a Catholic writer brought up in the spiritual climate of Japan, Shūsaku Endō (1923-1996) struggled to find a literary style suited to his aim of translating Christianity into terms intelligible to the Japanese mind. He settled on the detective story as a way of giving literary expression to his lifelong journey towards “a Jesus of my own.” Like a private investigator tracking down clues that have been left behind, through his writings, Endō strove to examine his own life for traces of the ideas and events that marked his life as a Christian and a novelist. This article clarifies that Endō used the detective story style to create his novels, which was not yet studied in previous researches.