September is going to go down in infamy this year as being the month where I read the least amount of books, but perhaps the most amount of pages. All due to the ambitious project this book has been. I started reading it on September 2nd, and it took me twenty days to finish, longer than any other book this year. But clocking in at a mere 1152 pages, this was not an easy undertaking. Book 75 for the year is James Clavell's Shogun.
In the year 1600, an English pilot, John Blackthorne, accidentally steers his Dutch ship into a storm, and the crew is wrecked upon the cost of Japan. They are taken prisoner in a strange land, where the speech is alien, men lose their heads for simply disrespecting their betters, and there is no greater sin than that of shame. Through a streak of luck, Blackthorne finds himself at the hands of the warlord Toronaga, whose interest in the English "barbarian" drives him to instruct Blackthorne to learn Japanese through the tutelage of the beautiful Lady Mariko. But Japan is divided by two warlords, Toronaga and Ishido, during the minority of the future Emperor of Japan, and only one of them can win the top prize and become Shogun, supreme military dictator of Japan. Blackthorne finds himself and his ship are pawns on the formidable chess game between two feudal lords, where only one can win.
I was first introduced to Shogun when I was a young teenager, through the miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain as John Blackthorne and Toshiro Mifune as Toronaga. It is a haunting, sad story about a man completely marooned in a foreign land, unable to speak the language or understand the culture, yet finding himself of vital importance to the political situation at hand. Blackthorne is a pitiable character in the beginning of the novel -- he suffers as he is humiliated before the Japanese samurai, and he is terrified to discover that Japan is overrun by Spanish Catholic priests (Blackthorne, being a Protestant, is a natural enemy of the Spanish Catholics, the story taking place during the time of the Spanish Inquisition). In his tenuous position, Blackthorne clings to the only person he feels he can trust -- the beautiful Mariko Toda, the Christian wife of a Japanese samurai, who acts as his translator.
The love story between Mariko and Blackthorne is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking. It is difficult to read because you, the reader, know that tales of forbidden love almost never turn out well. The only part of the love story I found corny was when they chose to speak in Latin to each other. Mariko and Blackthorne both speak both Portuguese and Latin, and during times when they do not want anyone to understand them, they choose Latin, which turns into a bunch of "thee", "thou", "I love thee". Gag. It's the only time in the book that the relationship seems forced.
The book deviates from the miniseries in one important area. In the miniseries, we see and hear everything only from Blackthorne's point of view. We understand what is translated to him. We never know the motives or the minds of the other individuals. In the novel, Clavell frequently writes from the points of view of all characters, major and minor, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese. My favorite character in the book has to be the warlord Toronaga. He is the antithesis of a xenophobe, unlike most of his countrymen, and he is a very practiced dissembler. One does not really know the extent of his plans until the very end of the novel, and it is only in the moments when he finally lets his guard down and explains what he is thinking that the reader understands exactly how much of the game he has been playing all along.
This is a stunning book, a real tour de force, as it has been described. But I won't be reading it again any time soon. It is simply too long for light reading.
Rating: ****
