Grand in scope and scale, filled with the richness and. Shogun was my favorite book as well While I was reading it, all I could think about in my daily life is feudal Japan. Clavell provides a spellbinding depiction of a nation seething with violence and intrigue as it moves from the medieval world to the modern. Set in Japan in the year 1600, Shgun is the earliest book in James Clavells magnificent Asian Saga. In dramatizing how a Westerner, the representative man of his time, comes to be altered by his exposure to an alien culture, Mr.

It was on this experience that his bestselling novel KING RAT was based. The principal figures are John Blackthorne, whose dream it is to be the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, to wrest control of the trade between Japan and China from Portuguese, and to return home a man of wealth and position Toranaga, the most powerful feudal lord in Japan, who strives and schemes to seize ultimate power by becoming Shogun-the Supreme Military Dictator-and to unite the warring samurai fiefdoms under his own masterly and farsighted leadership and the Lady Mariko, a Catholic convert whose conflicting loyalties to the Church and her country are compounded when she falls in love with Blackthorne, the barbarian intruder. James Clavell, the son of a Royal Navy family, was educated in Portsmouth before, as a young artillery officer, he was captured by the Japanese at the Fall of Singapore.

Set in the year 1600, it tells the story of a bold English pilot whose ship was blown ashore in Japan, where he encountered two people who were to change his life: a warlord with his own quest for power, and a beautiful interpreter torn between two ways of life and two ways of love. Here is the world-famous novel of Japan that is the earliest book in James Clavell’s masterly Asian saga. Shgun tackles a variety of social issues such as xenophobia, prejudice and conceptions of racial superiority, while also discussing prominent political topics like the pitfalls of colonialism, the cloak and dagger nature of political maneuvering, and the dangers of isolationism.

Shogun james clavell book