Shogun

Shogun is a historical novel by the British-American writer James Clavell, first published in 1975, the first published of his loosely connected Asian Saga novels though set earliest in its internal chronology. Set in Japan in the year 1600, it follows John Blackthorne, an English pilot loosely based on the historical navigator William Adams, whose Dutch trading ship runs aground on the Japanese coast, bringing him into a country almost entirely closed to outsiders and already home to rival Portuguese Jesuit missionaries and traders. Blackthorne is drawn into the court of the powerful daimyo Toranaga, a figure closely modeled on the historical Tokugawa Ieyasu, who is maneuvering during a period of civil conflict among Japan's great lords toward supreme power as shogun, and whose calculating use of Blackthorne's foreign knowledge of ships, navigation and European rivalries becomes entangled with Blackthorne's own gradual immersion in and admiration for Japanese language, customs and the samurai code of bushido, as well as his love for the Christian noblewoman and translator Toda Mariko. Combining an outsider's initiation into feudal Japanese society with the historically grounded political struggle that in reality culminated in Tokugawa Ieyasu's victory at the Battle of Sekigahara and the founding of the Tokugawa shogunate, the novel became an enormous international bestseller credited with popularizing Japanese history and culture for a mass Western readership, and its 1980 television miniseries adaptation was itself among the most watched programs of its era.