Shogun by James Clavell

Catch up on Shogun:

• Shogun (1980)

• Shogun Episodes I & II

• Shogun Episode III

• Shogun Episode IV

• Shogun Episode V

• Shogun Episode VI

• Shogun Episode VII

• Shogun Episode VIII

• Shogun Episode IX

• Shogun Episode X

The 2024 Shogun series won a whole bunch of awards at an award show, so I suppose it’s time for me to finally finish this series of essays about Shogun.

Last month I got around to reading James Clavell’s 1975 novel Shogun, which is the basis for the adaptations I wrote about above and it’s unsurprisingly great. If you’ve watched either adaptation but especially if you’ve watched both (like me) there’s not really anything to add, in terms of plot and characterization.

I do think Yabishige from the 2024 adaptation is the best version of this character, but that’s mostly due to Asano. But the Yabu in the novel is deliciously weird and spiteful and inspiring.

And this really is what makes the novel so good. Not just Yabu. I mean the complexity of these characters. Clavell weaves an intricate web of motivations and allegiances and relationships. Even a relationship seemingly so simple, like that between Toranaga and his half-brother Zataki, overflows with complication in the novel. For no one is ever one single thing. No one is even two things.

Rather, like in life, characters are messy, tangled yarn balls of contradictions. Mariko is a devoted and devout Christian but she’s also Japanese. More than that: she’s samurai. And she sees no contradiction between suiciding in the samurai fashion while the Church declares that suicide is a mortal sin (means you can’t go to heaven, to put it briefly). On top of that, she’s having an affair with Blackthorne, which opposes her Christian beliefs and the expectations as a samurai. For she could easily divorce her husband and take up with Blackthorne without any shame or imposition on her life. Yet she chooses, instead, infidelity.

And Mariko is one of dozens of characters. Omi, for example, is devoted to his family and clan yet he conspires against his uncle, Yabu, the head of the family and clan. In doing so, he gains everything, including a new consort.

This also keeps the novel from presenting any kind of idealized or romantic version of any of these characters. Even the heroes, the people we root for, are sometimes the worst.

The novel is really an invitation into understanding Japan, which was a much more novel notion in 1975 than it is now, fifty years and ten thousand anime later. Japan is no longer an unknown world but one of the powerhouses of modern media production. Whether you’re playing videogames made there, watching cartoons from there, or buying your car or electronics from there or even just eating ramen or sushi, Japan has swept through and over the globe.

But I think the length of this novel, along with giving us an endlessly refracting vision of these characters, goes quite a ways to opening Japan to the west, which is why that subtitle on the cover A Novel of Japan is important. I’m not going to say that it was instrumental in increasing our awareness of an ancient civilization but I think the timing of its release allowed it to become enormously popular in a way it likely would not have had it come out in 1990 or 1930.

But because I’ve watched 20 hours of adaptations of this novel and wrote over 10,000 words about those adaptations before I read the novel, I can’t really talk about this without considering the adaptations. And, really, you don’t want me to do a traditional book review.

So I’ll say it plainly: if you’ve watched either or both of the adaptations, the novel is still worthwhile. You’ll likely get even more from it, especially if you only watched one of the adaptations (probably the most recent one). If you haven’t watched either adaptation, by golly, go pick this book up! Yes, it’s insanely long, but it’s so very worth all those pages.

Strangely, I do think the novel is sort of a combination of both adaptations. In this way, it’s better than both and either. But that’s not surprising. Most books are better than their adaptations.

One of my growing complaints and critiques of the 2024 adaptation was the way it buried the romance but also the humor. The novel will bring that to the fore for you. This novel is, first and foremost, a grand love story.

I really do believe that. Yes, there’s violence and intrigue and a Dickensian sized cast of characters, but Mariko and Blackthorne rest at the center of this narrative. It’s their novel, which is why the focus is on love and romance rather than politics. Blackthorne was at most a sideshow in Toranaga’s machinations. And we see that clearly in the novel in ways we don’t entirely in either adaptation—though I think the 1980 version handles this better.

Of course, there is a lot of intrigue and politicking in the novel, which allows us to see a great deal of Toranaga from his own perspective, but also from the many Japanese perspectives given in the novel. And you could excise all the politics out of this book and set it aside to produce a pretty hefty novel about the pre-Shogunate era of Japan.

But, in many ways, Blackthorne’s narrative ends with Mariko. That’s the climax to the novel. Which, incidentally, is why the war doesn’t land upon the page.

That’s Toranaga’s story, not Blackthorne’s.

The final act of the novel is fascinating, however, and worth commenting upon on its own. For the entire novel, Toranaga attacks any notion that he wants to be Shogun. So for about 1,500 pages, we get denial.

And then in the final chapter, a long and haunting soliloquy by Toranaga, he recontextualizes the entire novel by finally revealing himself.

It’s brutal and, in some ways, terrifying, showing that all his enemies saw him clearly while many of his closest advisors and family members did not. He was the terror Ishido and others feared, but he was also the hero his followers believed.

He was both at once, all of the time.

He threw away lives. Used people—Blackthorne and Mariko included—as pawns in his game. Mariko was a knowing pawn but Blackthorne, up until the end, believed his own plans had purchase, had future, had possibility.

But we see in the final chapter how Blackthorne was nothing more than a caged monkey to Toranaga.

That doesn’t mean he had no affection for him or that they weren’t friends, just that Toranaga’s view of other people is a brutal and callous perspective. Had Blackthorne not been useful, he would have been discarded. Had he been a liability, he would have died.

We saw this often with Yabu. Yabu was a liability, but one Toranaga found useful. And we see, in his final statements, how he used and strung Yabu along and how he plans to keep Omi and many others in check.

On its own, this is just a great document. Riveting and harrowing and haunting. For all that we have lived through and witnessed with these characters, we see how they were all—ourselves included—marionettes to our grand puppeteer.

Which is to say that this novel is masterfully written. The construction and structure is sometimes bizarre and seemingly haphazard but it’s always compelling and evocative, and when we come to this final sequence of reveals from Toranaga, we understand the long journey differently.

And never in a negative way. Never did I feel like I was being lied to or misled by Clavell in order for a gotcha style payoff. Rather, Toranaga’s final chapter deepens the novel.

So, yes, unequivocally, this novel is great and you should read it if you enjoyed anything about the adaptations.

But it also solidifies my view of the adaptations. I think both have their strengths and weaknesses, but I prefer the 1980 version if only because I think it tells the actual story here better, even as it keeps the viewer in the dark about all the politics and intrigue.

The 2024 does much to shift the focus to the Japanese characters, which makes sense, since this was Disney+’s launch title to Japanese markets (I think it has almost nothing to do with the idea that it’s trying to combat the white savior narrative inherent to the story, if only because reading this story as a white savior story is such a monumental misreading—and, of course, money is usually the real answer to why creative choices differ in media). And while that added a richness to the broader world and gave western viewers a greater understanding of a fascinating inflection point in Japanese history, I do think it came at the expense of the heart of this story: which is Mariko and Blackthorne.

Even so, I can’t be disappointed with what we got with the 2024 adaptation or what that adaptation has earned. It truly is the best TV show I’ve seen in a long, long while. Much of that comes from the richness of character pulled from the novel.

They’re going to make two more seasons of Shogun which is both shocking and expected (like I said, money is usually the real answer for creatives choices in media). Shocking because what comes next cannot pull from a novel. Rather, it will pull directly from history.

Though I saw some people saying that the second season should just adapt Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa, which would be a tremendously inspired choice and almost certainly not what will happen, for the simple reason that that would mean abandoning the characters we know from Shogun to follow a man who would become the most famous samurai in history.

That novel, like Shogun, is also wildly long but also effortlessly brilliant. It begins after the battle of Sekigahara, which is where Toranaga (Tokugawa) and Ishido (Mitsunari) fought at the end of the 2024 adaptation. Miyamoto Musashi was one of the soldiers who left the battle, injured, and who went on a lifelong quest of self improvement.

It, too, involves no small amount of romance.

But, really, who can say what seasons two and three of Shogun will be. I only hope they’re done well.

All I really have to say about Shogun at this point is that it’s a great novel that has produced some of the best television I’ve seen.

And, I suppose, that justifies all these many thousands of words I’ve spent writing about it.

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