Shogun

 

Author:  James Clavell

Begun: Feb 17th 2025

Finished: Feb 27th 2025

Type: Audiobook on Libby

Narrator: Ralph Lister

Rating: 8/10

Holy cow what a masterpiece.  

Set in feudal Japan around the late 1500s and loosely based on historical events, Shōgun tells the story of John Blackthorne, who is shipwrecked in Japan.  What follows is an epic story of how he survives a land so alien to him.  At the same time Toranaga (loosely based on Tokugawa Ieyasu) is in the midst of his political machinations and things get twisty.  The insight into feudal Japanese thoughts and customs is unflinching, and more often than not, infuriating.  

The book is extremely hefty.  The audiobook is the longest I have ever listened to:  60 hours.  It's so long that it's divided into parts one and two at 30 hours each.  Despite that it moves, for the most part, at a really good clip and rarely drags.  Rarely.  It does drag sometimes.  There were a couple of times in the middle of the story when I started to get bored - but then it picked up the pace again.  The last hour of listening was a chore.  It was boring and depressing. 

The story does not go the way you think it will. While I normally like that, there were authorial choices made that I didn't agree with, and which, in fact, somewhat ruined the story for me.  Once The Big Thing happened it lost me.  I was no longer invested and honestly didn't care much after that.  

Clavell kept twisting and twisting facts:  

"This is how it is".  

"Oh, that's how you thought it was?  No no, they were lying, THIS is how it really was."  

"Oh, you think that's how it really was?  Joke's on you, THIS is how it really really was." 

and on and on.  

Toranaga was meant to be this extremely wise and clever person, but at the end was just making snap decisions that made no damn sense at all, and was constantly changing his mind and immediately regretting it.  

Add that to just before The Big Thing where it got so self-aware it was irritating.  Clavell was clearly trying to write something extremely cinematic....but tried too hard and in the end it didn't really matter.  It made me laugh and took me out of the story, and from that point I wasn't convinced anymore.  

Overall, a fantastic story...but not perfect.  I was considering spending actual money to purchase the audiobook....but after it lost me I dropped that idea. 

Ralph Lister was pretty good.  He took some getting used to as he had a lot of his Japanese characters shout.  So. Much. Shouting. Oh my gosh.  He also had the habit of almost whispering the end of his sentences.  He'd start off at a shout then peter out at the end until you could barely hear him.  So odd.  OTOH, his voice acting was good enough that I could recognize the characters based on the voices.  He did female voices very well.