'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged.
He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants.
Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor.
The series also includes the novels Noble House (1981), Whirlwind (1986) and Gai-Jin (1993).In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Although Shogun is the first volume in Clavell's Asian series, it was published after the novels King Rat (1962) and Tai-Pan (1966). 'Yet it's not only something that you read-you live it… Shogun, set in Japan in the year 1600, follows the adventures of the fictional John Blackthorne, whom the novel presents as the first Englishman to reach Japan… In 1980 Shogun was made into a five-part television mini-series that starred Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro Mifune and was seen by 120 million viewers, the largest audience for a mini-series since Roots" (New York Times). "It's almost impossible not to continue to read Shogun once having opened it,' wrote Webster Schott in The New York Times Book Review. Boldly signed by James Clavell on the half-title page. Octavo, original half cloth, cartographic endpapers.
First edition (which precedes the British first) of the first chronological work in Clavell’s epic Asian series.
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