I’ve discovered about shogun recently when the new film trailer dropped, I instantly was interested as I’m hooked on Japanese culture and learning actively Japanese.
The book was a fire, intense, stressful to read, dramatic and tragic but also partially satisfying with a dry aftertaste.
It’s so strange that I didn’t know that there was a book based on William Adam’s life although a lot of fiction in shogun still it highlights a lot William’s life, what I found satisfying is that in reality William Aka Anjin-san didn’t loose his lover as ( spoiler alert) he did loose Mariko in the book, that was a shocking twist, and the twist of toronaga who had burnt Erasmus in order to keep the barbarian in Japan, I’ve rarely cried over a book, but I’ve been crying for quite a long time on this boon.
Now I’m filled with sadness as such a wonderful book came to it’s end.
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Fuck I loved Shogun so much.
Thanks for saying spoiler alert in the middle of your spoiler, That way I only read the first half of the spoiler! Please use the spoiler tags that will block it out instead of leaving it visible
Anyway, another good similar book you may enjoy is The African Samurai, about a slave given to the shogunate by Portuguese Jesuits
If you enjoyed Shogun, you may also want to check out the book Harpoon, which had a vaguely similar vibe: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1685562
Disclaimer - I read Harpoon this summer, but Shogun over a decade ago.
I tried reading this and as much as I enjoyed what I did read, I just can’t remember all the characters. It felt like there were so many. Do people make notes?
It might help but eventually I got everyone squared away as I read. Having names not your native tongue makes it a fair bit harder to remember them all.
The TV show is coming out !
My favourite book ever, I didn’t realise a film was coming out??
What do you guys think about the prose? I heard it was quite bad?
I love Shogun, and the rest of the Asian saga.
A more modern book that is also about cultural displacement and being a foreigner is the Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
You should check out Taiko by Eiji Yoshikawa. It takes place before the events of Shogun and you get to meet some of the characters from Shogun when they were young, like Toranaga.
One of my favorite books. At the time it was released it was considered one of the most comprehensive texts on feudal Japan.
I love Shogun! It’s one of my favorite books, though it’s been a long time since I read it. I am LIVING for that trailer and I can’t wait for the series!
I clicked trying to find out what it was that you missed the most in books that Shogun gave you but you don’t seem to say
I would also recommend Samurai William, by Giles Milton - it is in part about the adventures of William Adams, the English sailor who ended up marooned in Japan and became an advisor to Tokugawa. In other words, the actual historical figure the novel Shogun was based on.
Obviously, the novel is highly fictionalized, particularly in the love story - the historical Adams married a Japanese lady, without the tragic love interest - in fact ending up with two wives, one in Japan and one in England.
However, the actual story of Adams, and his relations with the Dutch and English East India companies, Tokugawa, etc. is bizarre, adventurous and interesting enough.
One anecdote from the book: one European sea captain who ventured to Japan was heavily into pornography, and hoped to make a fortune selling European porn to the Japanese. This venture did not turn out so good for him; for one, the Japanese had their own culturally-specific taste in erotica. They did not find his porn attractive.
Some Japanese, in fact, did not even recognize his porn as porn.
In one truly bizarre episode, the captain enticed a Japanese lady to come into his cabin, for sex. He hoped to seduce her with a large oil painting of a nude woman pleasuring herself.
However, the Japanese lady had totally misinterpreted his intentions. She was a secret Christian, and thought the captain wanted to show her ‘forbidden’ religious icons. When she saw the painting, she thought it represented Mary (as she was familiar with oil paintings of European looking women being representative of Mary). So, much to the captain’s discomfort, she went on her knees to pray, sobbing in religious fervour. His attempt at seduction a failure.
TLDR: The book has NINJAS
70s television mini-series with Richard Chamberlin was awesome. They didn’t use subtitles or dubbing. Anjin-san spent the first half just wondering what everyone was saying, until he got a translator.