But it's plot as complex as the Japanese personality or Japanese history. Toranaga uses his captive, Blackthorne, to maneuver himself into position to become Shōgun.
Clavell spent four years writing “Shogun.” I wondered whether it might take four years to read it.Ĭlavell's plot is as simple as a sentence. Two volumes in one, and a half million words. It's irresistible, maybe unforgettable and, finally, exhausting. It strives for epic dimension, and occasionally it approaches that elevated state. “Shogun” is history infused with fantasy. Clavell creates a world: people, customs, settings, needs and desires all become so enveloping that you forget who and where you are. The imagination is possessed by Blackthorne, Toranaga and medieval Japan. Yet it's not only something that you read-you live it. It's almost impossible not to continue to read “Shogun” once having opened it. It may be something that cannot be taught or earned.
Perhaps it was James Clavell's Hong Kong book “Tai‐Pan,” nine years ago. I can't remember when a novel has seized my mind like this one. For they bring the weapon of knowledge: information about the West, the sea and war with muskets instead of swords. Toranaga and Ishido, Governor of Osaka Castle and Commander of the Heir's Bodyguard, know that these “barbarians” will effect both their personal fortunes and the history of Japan. They get still nearer before the “Japaners” are through with them. Like a sign, or possibly a curse, and after a murderous storm and two years circling the globe, the first Englishman to pass through the Straits of Magellan, a pilot named John Blackthorne and a dozen human ruins aboard the East India Company's Erasmus of Amsterdam drift into the fishing village of Anjiro, which is controlled by one of Toranaga's fiefs. He will present his victory to the quiet gardenerEmperor and be appointed Shogun-Supreme Military Dictator. President of the Council of Regents, Toranaga has a code name for the future: Crimson Sky.
Onoshi, Kiyama, Ishido-oh serve the will in ceremony, while training armies and buying allies. His will ordered five regents to rule until his 7‐year‐old son reaches majority. Lord Protector of Japan, the peasant general who ordered 400,000 men to build Osaka Castle and ran his country like a genius chess player, has been dead a year. The age of iron and the morning of gunpowder, 12 years of peace after an epidemic of butchery.
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