Shōgun novel6/25/2023 Clavell was a British WWII veteran, a screenwriter and film director who discovered a gift for complex plotting and how an affinity with the East could set off torrents of prose. This is a scene from James Clavell’s Shogun, an 1152-page samurai epic published in 1975 that became a pop culture sensation, selling something like 15 million copies. Later, he rues the fact that, due to other circumstances, he had not been able to step forward, to meet his death, and to have his fellow samurai fulfill his mission, for it would have accorded both him and her a noble death, “and men and women would have told the tragic tale for generations.” A tense stand-off ensues, broken when the leader acquiesces. When a samurai moves towards her, she raises a gun, pointing it at the leader. The prisoner, just beginning to become acclimated to the convolutions of Japanese manners and the obsession with honor, refuses, hands his guns to his consort, and instructs her to relinquish them only to him. Confronting the prisoner, he demands the prisoner’s guns. A samurai and his contingent enter a house to retrieve a prisoner at the behest of his feudal lord.
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