Shōgun

"Yes, I was 15, I think, when I read it. I couldn’t believe that no one had ever written other books like it. I remember going to my English master at school and saying “What else is like this? I want to read more books like this!” I can’t remember what he recommended, but I can remember picking them up and thinking they were nothing like Shogun . I was so entranced by the world of the 16th century he created that I’ve really had a fascination for it all my life. I never really enjoyed anything else that James Clavell wrote, but that book really stands tall. There’s so many clever ideas in there, like introducing Japanese lines so the reader flatters himself that he’s understanding a bit of Japanese as he goes through it. It’s a book that people can easily fall in love with. Yes, Will Adams of Gillingham in Kent. To think that, by the time of the death of Elizabeth I, there was an Englishman resident in Japan , really captured my imagination. Will Adams was a remarkable pilot, which doesn’t come through in the novel. He’d sought the North East passage, he’d been as far as the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, he’d been all over. He’d worked for the Barbary Company, so he had run the gauntlet of pirates in the mouth of the Mediterranean. He basically navigated around most of the known world long before he undertook that job for the Dutch sailing to the Far East. He was a very experienced man, one of the great English pilots, but of course there were so many English navigators like this, at the end of the century, because over the period from about 1540 to 1590 England just leapt ahead. Having been quite a backward nation in terms of seafaring, it suddenly became the furthest reaching and capable maritime nation. The real Will Adams did not become a samurai in quite the way Clavell describes, he doesn’t occupy anything like the position John Blackthorne occupies, but it’s based on truth. If it’s a good historical novel with something important to say, saying it is much more important than whether it’s accurate or not. There is no such thing as an accurate historical novel: they’re all all over the place. If you started to be accurate in a historical novel, you’d lose all your modern readers because you’d have to insist on so much deference, so much hierarchy, you’d have to insist on such a high level of cruelty in society. Society was fundamentally violent and fundamentally sexist – we couldn’t possibly tolerate anything that reflected that accurately. So accuracy to my mind – as long as there’s nothing stupid like having people live on after they’re dead – is much less important than having something to say. In James Clavell’s Shogun , he has this meeting of West and East so that you walk away from the book thinking “What would it really have been like to be the first Englishman in Japan?” You don’t have easy translations, there is no phrasebook you can go to, the culture is so different. It is, in some ways, a wonderland, and on the other hand, it’s a place of horror. In the novel, one of the crew is beheaded and not long after someone is boiled alive as a punishment. You have, on the one hand, the geishas and the beauty of the lords’ courts, and the poetry and, at the same time, you have the horror and you have to imagine what this world would have been like. So the fact it’s not wholly accurate in representing the real Will Adams’s experiences doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Well quite! Personal cleanliness is one of my specialist subjects from this period. One of my favourite lines on this is actually from a person who grew up in Exeter, not far from where I live, in the late 17th century. This character was kidnapped at the age of 14 by the Barbary pirates and he spent the next 20 years as a slave in North Africa. When he got home, he writes a “True Story of the Mohammedans” because he wants to put right all the stories about people living in North Africa. One of the things he emphasizes is how clean people are. If you were low status in the Western world, you didn’t have the highest standards of personal cleanliness – you couldn’t afford to. And it’s great looking at someone from the Western world describing the Middle East/North Africa, and being fascinated by these cleanliness rituals. James Clavell, unwittingly, though I’m sure he didn’t know the book I’ve been describing, does the same thing for John Blackthorne discovering the cleanliness of the Far East. So that’s another delight of the book, I quite agree with you."