Shogun

James Clavell's Shogun was published in 1975 and is set in feudal Japan at the beginning of the seventeenth century. John Blackthorne, an English navigator, is lost at sea and comes ashore in a country closed to most of the outside world. He has to learn a language and a set of customs he knows nothing about, in a society in which the line between life and death is thin and in which he cannot rely on his own assumptions about obligation, truth or freedom.

Blackthorne's knowledge of ships and guns makes him valuable, and he becomes a piece in the struggle between the Japanese lords who want what he knows and the Portuguese and Spanish missionaries whose position in the country depends on keeping it. As the internal political strife sharpens, the collision between the world he came from and the one he is living in produces a conflict that the novel treats as unavoidable.

Shogun appeared in 1975 and belongs with Clavell's other novels about Asia and the Europeans who came to it. It is set at a point in Japanese history when the office of shogun, the military ruler nominally appointed by the emperor, held the real power in the country, which is the political world Blackthorne has to find his way inside.