I was slow to warm up to Shogun, owing mostly to having read Lonesome Dove immediately before. It suffered a bit by comparison, especially given their parallels as sweeping historical epics with broad ensemble casts. This isn’t a slight on Shogun, but rather a testament to Lonesome Dove’s singular narrative power. Shogun felt like commercial fiction; Lonesome Dove felt like literature.
This is not to denigrate commercial fiction (I’d describe my own work the same way), and as I got deeper into Shogun I became absorbed in the rich world it created, full of evocative period details and exploration of feudal Japanese culture. The book’s hero, pilot John Blackthorne, is an accomplished sailor seeking to be the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe. He becomes shipwrecked on the insular island of Japan, and is quickly pulled into their politics, where an uneasy peace following the death of the Taiko has left the feuding kingdoms teetering on the brink of war. He becomes a vassal to Lord Toranaga, one of the five regents ruling the fractious empire and the man the others see as the greatest threat. Toranaga is a shrewd strategist, and much of the story concerns his machinations to become shogun, or undisputed military ruler of Japan.
It reminded me a bit of the works of Ken Follett, only without the clear dichotomy between heroes and villains. This might be because the characters were largely based on real historical figures, or simply because Clavell felt that the difference in cultures made clear moral judgement difficult. Even a detestable character like Yabu can be at times admirable, and demonstrates honour in line with his values as a samurai.
Clavell’s style is clear and unadorned, and his characters are engaging, though the broad cast can make it easy to confuse people, and I often forgot who people were or mistook one character for another until context proved me wrong (this is a challenge for me with any story where the characters have non-European names; even Russian novels give me no end of trouble). Though I was slow to warm to it, I enjoyed the book and by the end was open to picking up the next in the series.