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Here is the world-famous novel of Japan that is the earliest book in James Clavell's masterly Asian saga. 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.The principal figures are John Blackthorne, whose dream its is to be the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, to wrest control of the trade between Japan and China from the 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. They are brought together in a mighty saga of a time and place aflame with conflict, passion, ambition, lust, and the struggle for power.In dramatizing how a Westerner, the representative man of his time, comes to be altered by his exposure to an alien and exotic culture, Mr. Clavell provides a spellbinding depiction of a nation seething with violence and intrigue as it moves from the medieval world to the modern.

"Clavell offers a wide-ranging view of feudal Japan at a time of crisis... "Scene after scene is given, conversation after conversation reported, with the point not merely of advancing the narrative (which does somehow grind inexorably forward), but also of imparting to us the peculiar flavor of life in feudal Japan and the unique code of conduct (bushido) which dominated life there and then."

Bruce Cook, Washington Post Book World

"...one of those books that blots up vacations and imperils marriages, because it simply will not let the reader go."

Cynthia Gorney, Washington Post

Shogun: The Epic Novel of Japan: Search Results