Historical Fiction Book Review
"Shōgun"
James Clavell
4/5 stars
"An extremely lengthy exposition of a bizarre mode of existence; Karma"

*******
Of the book:
62 chapters, 1152 pages of prose
≈18.6 pages/chapter
≈22 hours of reading time
23 days of my (leisure) reading time.
*******

The number one take away lesson that I get from this book is that regular, ORDERLY changes of government really is the easiest choice.

If Japanese people had figured that out at any point during the shogunate period, a lot of lives would have been spared, and transfer of power--for a government that may last one year or two-- would not have turned into a game of four dimensional chess. (And this book would never have been written).

The #1 unanswered question is: just because a large number of people believe something for a long time, does that necessarily mean it is "good"? The Africans have been practicing female circumcision from many thousands of years.

And so, it has longevity in order to recommend it.

The Japanese of this period lived the way that they did for a LONG time. Mostly illiterate. Poor. Without the wheel (p.760) Under EXTREMELY frangible governments.

-(p.597) At the time of this writing, there were 264 daimyo whose loyalty could fracture at any moment and for any reason.

But, in other ways, they were a lot more advanced than the most of the Europeans. (Carrier pigeons. Excellent swordcraft. It's interesting to me that English people at that time only bathed once or twice a year -- and even back then the Japanese in this book bathed, like, four times a day.)

Of the book:

It's okay for what it is, but it is just wwwaaayyy tttooo lllooonnnggg: given that all of this happened over the space of less than 10 years, 500 pages would have been more than enough. (James Michener's books are as long as this one, but they cover time periods of hundreds of years.)

It's easy enough to read (I doubled my page quota just in the first day of reading this book), but the plot is SO convoluted that I don't think a reader is able to go back and synopsize the series of steps after 400 pages. (And with a book as long as this one: going back and rereading is not an option. I estimate that this is about 22 hours of reading time.)

It may be that the book is meant to be (as is often the case of books this length) more impressionistic and to give a general overview of the way that things were at that time in Japan-- but, with the added strengthener of a narrative arc.

A bit of being overwrought with detail, I'm willing to allow Clavell because he had so much to show and tell us of Japan of that era that he needed and elaborate plot to bring it all across.

The biggest letdown is that the entire climax that the book was building up for 1,152 pages was resolved in the last two paragraphs of the book; exactly six sentences.

Quite a bit of more obscure naval vocabulary requires a lot of dictionary usage.

Nonetheless, I can almost see why this book has sold so many millions of copies.

Book One (pps 1-175, chs 1-9):

The beginning of this book is about 5 centuries ago--so far back in time that the earlier versions of the future nation-states-to-be-born doesn't seem to be real.

Japan was under the rule of a shogunate and they were just about at the midpoint of their centuries long Warring States Period.

At this time, Holland was still a (soon to be ex-) Spanish colony (p.52) and Portugal and Spain were United under one Crown.

The vehicle for narrative arc is a shipwrecked Dutch ship captained by an Englishman and landed on feudal Japan. It happens that the seafaring Portuguese were middlemen for Chinese silk to make its way into Japan. (There was a blockade on silk because of some Sino-Japanese war.)

There was the hereditary caste system of Japan, with samurai at the top and assigning themselves the right to kill any non-samurai for any reason.

Book Two (pps. 179-442, chs 10-29):

Here's a deeper look into some of the endless complications of the shogunate, which seemed to be a series of infinitely shifting alliances that were all subject to collapse at any moment.

The Japanese lived under a shogunate for 700 years. (The setting of this is just several decades before the Tokugawa restoration and the purging of Christianity from Japan.) And, their brutal behavior in World War I/ II did not come out of nowhere--it's just that they repurposed fighting each other to fighting foreign barbarians.

A lot of work was done by the Jesuits, but conversion was only part of their work. The other was acting as translators because they alone could speak Japanese and Portuguese (p.293--Portugal was actually a respectable naval power in some respects).

Book Three (pps 445-792, chs 30-46)

Gunpowder. At this point, Clavell is setting us up to see which of these various samurai warlords ("daimyo") is going to discover gun power so that he can get the upper hand. (Up until this point, it was considered filthy / treacherous / barbaric to shoot someone because you were killing a person that you did not know, and at an impersonal distance.)

It appears that the idea of wanting to conquer China was very old (up until that point, they had thought that that they and Korea were the only other countries in the world), and it shows up *again* in Book Five (p.990).

Book Four (p. 795-912 , chs. 47-51)

At this point, finally the Protagonist Pilot catches up with his filthy crew (It seems like this was a device to underline how filthy and squalid Europeans of the time were; the Japanese put them to live in a village with Eta-hinin.), And Blackthorne got his ship back. The EXTREMELY extended machinations of Toranaga are clarified.

Book Five (p. 915-1070, chs. 52-60)

Mariko does not make it out of this alive, and toronaga is absent for the entirety of this chapter. STILL MORE machinations and shifting alliances about who will be Shogun/Kwampachu. Who will control the Kwanto. (If you are lost at this point, then you are like any normal human being.)

Book Six (p.1073-1152, chs. 61,62)

This is an extended dénouement they really could have come 500 pages ago. Yabu gets his come up as, and we have the beginnings of shipbuilding in Japan. (In spite of being an island, they had never been a seafaring nation.)

Second order thoughts:

1. The fatality rates of these Sailors of Fortune was massive. On the order of 80%. I wonder how much this process accelerated human natural selection. Also, to be a Japanese samurai was to be liable to death at any second. There were so many scenes of seppuku in this book, that it seems like entrails on the ground in Japan would be visible from plane height.

2. It seems like Japan is the way that it always has been....... Clean. Polite. Sadistic. (No, it did not start with the rape of Nanking.) Suicidal. Determined.

3. There are so many lost migratory souls in the world and it has been this way since the beginning of time. It's a piece of cake to get some men to sign up for a war that has nothing to do with them. (Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan.) Same way it was a piece of cake even back then to get young man to sign up for sea expeditions that they knew they only had a 20% chance of surviving.

4. Who knew? When Japanese wanted to seal a deal at that time, they did it by urinating together. (I guess nothing says trust like mixing your peepee stream with another man's.)

5. All communication was conducted by carrier pigeons and messenger carried signed scrolls. And both became part of the game to see who could intercept whose carrier pigeons / messengers.

6. Lots of domain dependence. It seems that the Japanese had no problem ritually disemboweling themselves or beheading another person in order to make the ritual disemboweling less painful. But people vomited/ fainted when Blackthorne/Anjin-san gutted a single rabbit for dinner. So much spoken politeness, but no problem defecating in mid sentence.

7. --What is the problem with slaughtering meat? The hated Burakim/Eta-hinin were despised because their job was to slaughter meat and tan leather and handle dead bodies.

--What is the problem with merchants? I know the historically merchants were not well thought of in china, and I don't find a single positive reference to them (through Japanese eyes) in this 1152 page book.

8. (p.629). It seems like it's an accident of history that Japan did not convert to Christianity. The author makes us believe that the daimyos would not accept it because of the the disallowal of divorce. But for that one dispensation, it might have all been different.

9. (p.665) Even though England/Continental Europe were not the subject of this book, European filth was absolutely appalling: monthly baths / semi-annual clothes washing/lice and vermin everywhere. I know that population growth was very low at that time, but I don't think that it's only because of disease: how many people could be intimate with a woman who had not bathed in a month? (I could imagine some woman shedding her underwear and all of the plants in the room dying.) And the thing is.... Even if you took them to a place where people bathed semi regularly and used toilets far away from their food source, they would not catch on (p. 825). It took A LOT of work to get us to current hygiene standards.

10. Geishas are not quite what Western people imagine that they are. They were put up as nonsexual providers of male entertainment, in contrast to women that worked at tea houses who entertained AND provided sexual services. The sexual Services of a geisha were a one-time thing and auctioned all at once. ("Memoirs of a Geisha," by Arthur Golden is a generally BRILLIANT book that includes the The Mizuno auction as a subset of wonderful information about geisha.)

11. It seems like there are at least a thousand and one different euphemisms for sex acts/organs. One on every page. (p.774. "Pellucid Pestle"). "Far Field"?

12. I have read a couple of books in which historians and statecraftsmen talk about their extreme perplexity in negotiating with Japanese. After reading this book, I have to conclude that turning everything into a game of four dimensional chess + Nōh theater it's just one of their cultural idiosyncrasies and that nothing malicious is intended by it.

13. What was the mechanism of action that made it such that suicide was the national pastime among Japanese people? Was it the belief in reincarnation? Was it the general precariousness of living under the danger of earthquakes or typhoons? Was it away to emphasize the joy of life, by living at the edge of death?

14. So many arrangementsspontaneously generate in many civilizations,

a. An entire country run for the benefit of a small minority of people may in fact be quite a stable arrangement. (It is estimated that the samurai class was 8% of Japan. Viewed in that way, the governments of North Korea and China are not anomalous.)

b. There's never any shortage of young men to throw away their lives for even a remote chance to live at the top: to be a Toranaga or a Yabu with multiple wives and consorts and children and power.

One always runs the risk to be poisoned by his cook that was planted by a rival (p.1109) or killed in a mercenary ninja attack (Book 5). But, it will be nice work if you can actually get it.

15. It is amazing the power of the written/spoken word: The Jesuits occupied a central position for some extended period of time in Japan because they were interpreters and facilitators of trade. (The same way that the Catholic Church was unassailable for many centuries because all literate men were clerics.)

16. Weird Japanese conceptual space: if somebody gets to be a thorn in your calculations, just order them to commit suicide. If there's something that you don't want to deal with, just ask for permission to commit suicide.

Verdict: Recommended

Quotes:
1. (p.210): "How beautiful is life and how sad! How fleeting, with no past and no future, only a limitless now."
2. (p.979): "Only by living at the edge of death can you understand the indescribable Joy Of Life."

New vocabulary:

rutter (ocean voyage ledger/ map)
tops'ls (like foc's'le)
binnacle
bilges
bosun
flagon
Jack Tar
corsair voyage
halliard/ halyard (by p.19)
aft riding light
comber
lathe door
gunwale
hawser(s)
wog (by p.39)
daimyo
haft (of a spear)
bushido
Spanish doubloons
gloaming
ri (Japanese distance)
koku (rice volume measurement)
kami shrine
stick (time measurement)
poxy (swear word)
scull
shoji
samisen
Shimoda/ Nihongami hair style
"conn a ship"
oar-master
escarpment
rampart
parapet
battlement
letter of marque
overmantel
ronin
stoat
viceregal
crusados
rapier
filigree
hornpipe (dance)
parry (a blow)
frigate
spars
bosun
hardtack
scupper
stanchion
doxie
brazier
astern
galley
sally (sortie)
thong jesses
ceres (ornithological sense)
short-wing hawk/falcon

eyrie
careen
embrasure
Pellucid Pestle
lorcha
sloop-rigged
pannier
char
kinjiru (forbidden)
rutting
unctuous
harigata (dildo)
bracken
tabi (ugly Japanese samurai/ ninja shoes)
ninja (the more correct meaning)
haversack
shuriken
caltrop
fettle
prate