Shogun

An English pilot is wrecked on the coast of Japan in 1600, survives by becoming useful, and ends up a minor piece in the succession struggle that produced the Tokugawa shogunate. Blackthorne is modelled on the real pilot William Adams and the warlord Toranaga on Tokugawa Ieyasu, though the novel is fiction and takes the liberties of one.

For a curriculum meant to form citizens its use is the reverse of the usual: it is a long exercise in watching a confident European discover that his own assumptions about honour, loyalty and truth are local.

Context: James Clavell (1924-1994) was held as a prisoner of war by the Japanese at Changi during the Second World War. Shōgun is the chronologically earliest of the six Asian Saga novels and sold in the millions.

Connections

• James Clavell — the author.
• Literature