Mad About Shōgun

Why the book ruined the show for me (even more than usual).

I was really enjoying Shōgun, until Shōgun ruined it for me. The new FX series on Hulu was my first encounter with the story, which utterly dominated bestseller lists when it was published in the ’70s. The show is passably entertaining, and the plot clearly has good bones. The music is great. But then I started reading the book.

And now I’m mad. As in, I am stupidly expending minutes of my precious time being actively ticked off at this streaming television program. Not just because the novel really does blow it out of the water in terms of narrative intricacy and drama. That’s par for the course. But comparing the two also makes me realize, in ways that might otherwise be invisible, how contemptuously the show-runners Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo have treated their source material.

In the name of what appears to be cultural sensitivity, they’ve actually made this story of an encounter between imperial Europe and feudal Japan less sophisticated about the complexities of both societies. It’s not that the show is “woke” in the lumbering and inept fashion of say, Netflix’s Vikings or Amazon’s Rings of Power. There’s no absurdist racial wish fulfillment and, thank the merciful Lord, no earnest cooing about acceptance.

Instead, the adaptation plays politics by omission. It consistently refuses to accept the novel’s most humane and interesting premise, which is that a scrappy English seadog and a severe Japanese warlord might have something to learn from each other.

I don’t mean “things to learn” as in military tactics or foreign languages. The show obviously has to acknowledge that European traders came east seeking silk and bringing guns. But the novel is astonishingly careful, for a pulpy adventure, to interrogate the exchange at the far deeper level of values. Clavell goes out of his way to indicate that these are two equally impressive but totally foreign civilizations—advanced not so much more or less than each other but in different ways. Throughout, the Japanese and the Europeans appear to each other by turns as barbaric and enchanting, brilliant and idiotic.

Mariko, the interpreter who shepherds the English hero Blackthorne through his journeys, is constantly surprised at her own mixture of horror at the sailor’s rough edges and admiration of his vitality. Blackthorne, in turn, reels intoxicatingly between disgust at the brutal rigors of Japan’s honor culture—“their customs are insane!”—and awe at the dignity of its noblest exponent—“Yes, she’s beautiful. And very wise.” The blisteringly sexy two-step between this pair mirrors the fraught clash between their respective nations—especially since, in a clever inversion, Mariko is a heartfelt Catholic convert while Blackthorne is a casual Protestant at best.

The show, on the other hand, repeatedly dismisses the notion that this exchange of ideas would be anything other than a one-way street, from the wise Japanese to the rude Western barbarians. In the book, Blackthorne charms the women taking care of him over a fusion dish of too much Japanese sake and a little European pheasant. This is replaced with an episode in which the women snigger at him while he foolishly volunteers to choke down natto, a notoriously pungent Japanese dish of fermented beans.

At pivotal moments in the novel, Blackthorne’s cunning and flexibility enable him to conceive and enact plans that would be unthinkably shameful for a samurai—as when he lets an enemy soldier piss on him, choosing to bide his time and wait for revenge. Onscreen these moments are re-conceived as totally outside Blackthorne’s control, brought on by his impetuous pride—as Kelly Pau puts it in Salon with evident glee, “a running theme and punchline in the series is his humiliation.”

And without spoiling anything, I can say that an utterly pivotal moment in the novel’s plot, where Blackthorne simultaneously wins the respect of his hosts and realizes the profundity of their ideals, is simply missing from where it should be in episode 4. All this presumably to avoid “essentializing” or indulging in what Pau calls the “white savior narrative,” which would be an amazingly boneheaded way of characterizing any complex storyline—but especially this sensitive and carefully plotted drama.

Does James Clavell “center the white perspective?” Sure, I guess: he’s a white guy, which at the time of writing was not a crime. Does he get everything right? No: even I with my rudimentary Japanese found myself thinking, “you couldn’t get a native speaker to check this?” But if he sometimes misunderstands things, it would be wildly unfair to accuse him of doing so because he didn’t care enough about Japan or thought of his characters as beneath him. This was a man who, despite being imprisoned by the Japanese in World War II, had enough respect for his captors to learn from them: “[The internment camp of] Changi became my university instead of my prison,” he once told the New York Times.

It’s actually astonishing that Clavell, after three years of being fed a quarter-pound of rice per day, could emerge with the understanding required to write a book like Shōgun. It demonstrates a capaciousness of soul and mind that his modern critics, with their nasty little barbs and their narrow little prejudices, can hardly comprehend. What could be more insulting to Clavell, or dehumanizing to the feudal Japanese, than to transform the sophisticated moral shading of this historical portrait into an abject morality tale about how pure and irreproachable Japan was, before the unwashed white man came?

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

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