Shogun: Book Review
I feel cheated. I thought at first this was a war story, but then it became a love story, before in the end it becomes a whole mess of loose ends.
It is a great book though and it has a great story with complex events and characters, especially more interesting as it shows a clash of cultures between the West and Japan. I ‘learned’ a lot about Japanese, and although I doubt the portrayal are typical of every one of them, I am starting to understand how certain aspects of their life came to be. For example I have seen before how the corporate culture in Japan is so hierarchical, and can imagine this came from their hundreds, if not thousands of years of social structure. There are a few other things, and if only for that, the book is already a worth read.
There’s more. It taught me roughly the geography of Japan and its history. And best of all, the story has a very interesting, albeit weird love story. Blackthorne, or known in Japanese as Anjin-san since they can’t pronounce his name, came upon Lady Toda who was translating for the great daimyo(warlord) Lord Toranaga. Over time their lives intertwined. Spoiler alert, it came to a sad end.
What’s even sadder is that the book then ends with a cliffhanger, before a big war. Imagine the whole 1000 pages were all about the manoeuvres for the war, but only to end as just the war about to start, and to be described with a one page epilogue. Ugh. I do think the writer meant to write a sequel but unfortunately he has passed away.
I was quite surprised this book was almost 50 years old. It had not aged, I guess since it was written based in the 1600s. What is also surprising that the book has a lot of typos and punctuation errors. Add to that the fact that the dialogues and monologues switched between the characters constantly, it made for a confusing read in the first few chapters. I read the Kindle version so I was surprised that this was not addressed.
Other than that, this was a great book. I look forward to reading the other books in the series (this is the third out of 5 books, but I think they are not dependent on each other).
Thank you for reading.
