Shogun (2024), based on Shogun (1975), also adapted as Shogun (1980)

 

Title: Shogun

Created by: Rachel Kondo, Justin Marks

Based on: Shogun by James Clavell

Network: FX/Starz/Hulu/Disney+ it’s complicated, okay?

 

Shogun, the 1975 novel by James Clavell, is a fictionalized account of the journey of William Adams, an Englishman who visited and eventually settled in Japan in 1600.

I, the 1976 human being by Mr. and Mrs. I Senior, am a distressingly nonfictional person who visited and eventually settled in Japan in 1998.

The two events are related.

Shogun, the 1980 miniseries by NBC, first sparked my interest in Japan and led to my visit and subsequent ensettlement 18 years later.

I was thus quite interested to see

Shogun, the 2024 miniseries by FX, an adaptation of the 1975 novel

Shogun, and to compare it to my memories of the 1980 miniseries,

Shogun.

It is an ambitious failure.

It’s sporadically brilliant. Individual scenes absolutely sparkle, as joyful as a sake cup filled to the brim, as beautiful and delicate and understated as a spray of cherry blossoms, as sharp-edged and pointed as a katana. The actresses in particular, Anna Sawai (Mariko), Fumi Nikaido (Ochiba) and Moeka Hoshi (Fuji), present a master class in saying everything while saying nothing. A sidelong glance. A cup raised to cover a smile.

On the darker side, there’s also a fascinating study of an abusive relationship between an outwardly brash but inwardly sentimental man who mistakes possessiveness for love, and the woman who refuses to cave because she refuses to acknowledge him at all.

But the whole thing feels a bit muddled, and this is because

Shogun, the adaptation of the novel

Shogun, doesn’t actually want to adapt the novel at all.

The novel is nearly as old as I am, and wears its years with about as much grace, viz none whatsoever. Mr. Clavell was captured by the Japanese army during WW2 and spent years in a fairly nasty POW camp, but to his credit came out of the experience determined to understand the people who’d held him prisoner. He gives it a good college try but the book does contain a number of inaccuracies, and subscribes to some of the more offensive stereotypes about Japanese people—about the second conversation the local have about our English protagonist is to marvel at how big his penis is.

That said, it is not a “white savior” story, which much like “gaslighting” or “woke” is a term the Internet seems eager to stretch into oblivion. The protagonist John Blackthorne (as William Adams is called in Mr. Clavell’s version) spends over 1000 pages in Japan, and if you keep a carefully track of the number of people he saves over the course of this epic, at the end your tally will be: 1. He saves one guy. In an earthquake.

He, er, also loses his ship, the woman he loves gets blown to bits, and the man who controls his life ends the book by musing on the fact that Blackthorne is effectively a prisoner in the country.

Blackthorne/Adams does potter about feudal Japan, befriends the man who will one day become Shogun, Yoshii Toranaga (based on Tokugawa Ieyasu), falls in love with his translator Mariko (the historical Hosokawa Gracia), fights some ninjas, and learns about the Japanese people and culture. He is, in essence, a reader stand-in, the portal through which an audience unfamiliar with Japan could learn about it.

But that evidently still didn’t sit right with the creators of the new 10-episode limited series,

Shogun.

In this iteration, they decided to focus more on the Japanese characters than their white, Western visitor. Which, on the face of it, doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. 2024 is not 1980 and we don’t really need someone to hold our hands and explain to us what a samurai or sushi is. Japanese culture, especially animation, has gone global. It also feels a bit too Last Samurai to have yet another story set in Japan that is all about the white guy being cool and getting the best girl.

So, fair enough.

The trouble is, the creators then had to build a show that wasn’t about a white guy in Japan, based on a foundation that was about a white guy in Japan. And the cracks, my dear friends, are painfully obvious.

The story of Blackthorne/Adams is the story of a man encountering a new culture, learning about it, growing to appreciate it, and eventually assimilating into it, at least to a certain degree. He does not really do much else. If you do not want to tell a story about intercultural understanding, then do you not want to tell a story about Blackthorne/Adams. And if you do not want to tell a story about Blackthorne/Adams, there’s not much point in putting him in your story.

That’s a problem. Your story should be about whatever your story is about.

What that means is the Shogun miniseries begins, as the novel does, with the arrival slash shipwreck of Blackthorne and his crew of Dutch merchants slash pirates in a fishing village on the Izu Peninsula, where they are imprisoned, interrogated, and boiled alive (in one case), before Blackthorne is taken to meet the local warlord, Toranaga, and is introduced to a Japanese-Portuguese interpreter and noblewoman named Mariko.

Round about episode 4 the story then decides it doesn’t really want to be about Blackthorne (played by Cosmo “we have a Tom Hardy at home” Jarvis) anymore, and he sort of hangs around for the next half-dozen episodes bleating about his ship and men, before the show attempts to give us a satisfying resolution to the story by having a scene of him working alongside the local villagers.

This doesn’t satisfy as an ending, because the journey between episodes 1 and 10 hasn’t been about him assimilating into this culture at all. He’s wandered about in a befuddled haze for 9 hours or so and accomplished absolutely bugger all.

The story would rather be about Mariko (played by Anna Sawai), who let’s face it is a more interesting character. She’s not only the daughter of Akechi Jinsai (historical Akechi Mitsuhide), a famous traitor who ambushed and murdered his liege lord, but also a convert to Christianity in a country deeply ambivalent about this foreign religion, and one of the few people to speak a second language (English in the show subs for Portuguese in real history). But if it is about her, what’s this whiny white dude doing in her show? Why does he get to start and end her show? He adds nothing to her arc, does nothing to influence any of her decisions, and even the romance from the novels is largely repressed here.

It would also like to be about Toranaga (actor Hiroyuki Sanada, who seems to play the Asian elder in every Hollywood movie now that Ken Watanabe has gone back to Japan), the cold and ruthless manipulator who uses and discards people like pawns in his quest to eliminate his rival, Lord Ishido (historical Ishida Mitsunari) and become the supreme ruler of Japan. But if it is about him, why are this English fella and minor noblewoman taking up so much of his time and why does he pay them any attention when the future of the country is at stake?

In the meantime, the show goes out of its way to downplay any contribution Blackthorne might make to the plot. Does he have anything to teach the Japanese? No. Do they want to learn shipbuilding from him? No. Do they hope to use him to open trade with the Dutch? No. Do they learn anything from him at all? No. Does he learn anything from them? Not really. By the end of the show, he can speak one or two words of Japanese.

If Shogun wanted to be an outsider story, great. Very popular choice. Gives the reader a guide who can introduce them to this make-believe world as they learn about it. Hobbits in Lord of the Rings, the kids in Narnia, John Carter on Mars, all that good stuff. Ease us into the world of the story. And then: A crisis. Our outsider protagonist must use the knowledge and skills they have developed to take control of the situation. They move from passive observer to active participant in the story. They take control. Only here, Blackthorne never does. His arc stalls, he treads water, and then we’re supposed to be happy that everything somehow worked out for him.

It manages to come across as very dismissive of the historical Adams, who apparently became a valued advisor on nautical matters to the Shogun and helped promote trade with the Dutch. He married, settled, and had children. In the show, Toranaga snidely laughs him off as someone he keeps around like a jester, because “he makes me laugh.” As a white dude happily living and working in Japan, it’s disappointing that nobody has the courage or imagination to end the story exactly the way it did in real life, with Adams the white dude happily living and working in Japan.

But then, once you take out the one unique thing about this story (the first English guy in Japan) it becomes just another samurai flick, albeit with more of a political bent. I tried getting my Japanese wife to watch and she gave up after about five minutes, saying “It’s just another taiga drama” (historical drama TV shows that have aired in Japan almost every year since 1963: Nothing new, in other words).

We’ve seen this with Halo, with the Witcher, the Wheel of Time, World War Z, and if writers don’t want to adapt the original source material, I would suggest they don’t adapt the original source material. Create something new! Yes, yes, I know the name is a label slapped on the cover to attract eyeballs, but it does result in a ramshackle end product, crudely folded together like amateur origami.

A shame, because the non-Blackthorne bits of the show are often bloody brilliant.

Dune Part 2

Title: Dune Part 2

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Based on: Dune, by Frank Herbert

Visually impressive as always with Denis, but perhaps inevitably flounders on the structural reefs set up by the original source material. Denis aims to make the warnings of Paul’s story more explicit—that charismatic leaders are dangerous, for the more followers they have, the more their mistakes get amplified—but in so doing renders the central relationship of the story nonsensical.

Dune is a fucken weird book, you know. I’m not even talking about the flying bird helicopters and desert people orgies. Mutated fish people who fly FTL ships with the power of drugs. Subliminal messaging in human voices becoming a form of mind control. Genetic, ancestral memories giving you the ability to predict the future. Expecting a whoah there far-out psychedelic frenzy of a book to perfectly map onto social issues 60 years later is just…nuts.

So no, I don’t think it’s especially about “colonialism” or “oppression” or a “white savior” story. It’s waaay more fucked up than that. But Denis wants us to see that Paul is not a Good Guy and to do that he plays up the artificial nature of his messiah-dom, and sets his lover/wife Chani as the voice of reason in opposition to him. Why she remains attracted to him then is baffling (she’s not just a little concerned about him, mind you, but dead set on seeing him as an existential threat to her entire people). But eh. If you hire Zendaya and FloPu you gotta give them something to do.

Overall, it was still good. I liked the idea Paul is kind of trapped into becoming the messiah and the more he fights against it the more events conspire to force him down the same road. And the fremen going full fanatical jihad was suitably scary. Javier Bardem meanwhile, is reduced to going full Life of Brian mode in heralding a reluctant Paul as the messiah, telling his buddies “only the mahdi would say he isn’t the mahdi”—a line lifted almost straight from Monty Python.

Speaking of doing much with little material, a big shout out to the Captain of the Emperor's guard though, on the screen for less than 30 seconds but so memorable, grizzled old dude looks like he's seen some shit, could wrestle a bear and win, poses for the camera, squints with steely determination for a sec, charges into a dust storm and promptly gets obliterated. True hero.

To liven up your experience, I’d recommend sneaking in a bottle of tequila and doing shots every time the Harkonnens encounter a minor obstacle and, in a fit of reasonableness, immediately murder the fuck out of one of their own dudes. Denis’ portrayal of evil is a step up from the book’s pedo homosexuals, but not exactly deep.

I will, of course, be there to see the promised third movie on opening night.

Through a Genre Darkly

I had fun waffling about cyberpunk in the last post, so here’s another one, this time harping on another genre I like to talk about: grimdark fantasy.

Much like cyberpunk, it’s a genre that is both long-lived and has recently enjoyed something of a revival, thanks to the televisual kinomatic extravaganza that was HBO’s “Game of Thrones” (about which, I’ve pontificated about here and here).

The genre itself goes back much further, of course, with one obvious touchstone being Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone stories that started in 1961, while the word ‘grimdark’ was inspired by the 1987 tag line of tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000 “In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.” Since then we’ve had a range of authors from Stephen R Donaldson’s “Thomas Covenant” to R Scott Bakker’s “Prince of Nothing” and is there something about having the initial R that makes you a nihilist, and oh yes also Joe Abercrombie’s “First Law” series (here and here) and Steven Erickson’s numerous and ponderous Malazan books.

Grimdark fantasy is often described as the antidote to Tolkien, a gritty, dirty, messy genre for everyone who rolled their eyes every time Galadriel broke into song or Middle Earth was once again saved at the 11^th hour by the unlooked-for arrival of a flock of Very Large Birds Indeed. Grimdark is unepic fantasy, populated by angsty antiheroes, hard-faced warriors with anger management issues, villains who might have a point actually, and lots and lots of stage blood.

Iconoclasm can feel terribly clever when you are young, lord knows I was an insufferably contrarian smart-arse from age about 10 to 30 (well, probably long after that, truth be told). Realizing that, despite your parents’ admonition to tell the truth, work hard and be kind to others, it was actually quite possible and perhaps even advantageous to do none of those things and still be successful, can feel like an enormous betrayal.

Grimdark is above all an angry, hurt cry of rejection of the beautiful lies that epic fantasy tells: Life isn’t like that. Good does not always triumph. Good is boring, evil is interesting. There are no heroes, everyone is flawed. Nobody really thinks they are evil. And so on.

Hello, Kullervo

Proponents always trot out the same handful of rationalizations for the genre’s popularity. The dark times we live in, you see. As though the year of our lord two thousand and twenty were in someway harder to live through than two world wars, an influenza epidemic that killed more than the first war, the worst economic collapse of the century, the AIDS epidemic or the constant threat of nuclear annihilation.

As you can tell, I don’t think there’s anything especially new or innovative about rejecting or subverting epic fantasy tropes. Here is the most grimdark story I’ve ever read:

A boy is orphaned when his parents and family are massacred. He is brought up by his parents’ killers, rebels against them and is sold into slavery. He escapes, meets and seduces a girl who he later discovers to be his own sister (unbeknown to him, she escaped the massacre). When she realizes they have committed incest, she commits suicide. Blinded by fury, the boy returns to the family that raised him, slaughters them, and then kills himself. The end.

Pretty grim, eh?

Here’s the thing, though. That’s the story of Kullervo, a Finnish legend written down in the 19^th century, but based on a much older oral tradition. It’s also, pretty much beat for beat except with more elves and dragons, Tolkien’s story of Turin Turambar, which he first began in 1917.

To flog the dead horse a few more times: Gilgamesh is a tyrant and despot whose best friend dies, and later he fails to win either immortality or eternal youth. Achilles is a selfish arse and dies in the Iliad. Beowulf gets eaten by a dragon. King Arthur is killed by his own son. So it goes.

To my mind there’s nothing especially new or modern or even particularly anti-Tolkien about having troubled heroes who do terrible things. That is, if anything, the default to which Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a rare exception.

I'll Show You Realism

Nor do I think there is anything innately more “realistic” about letting the bad guys win. George Martin may very well be correct, for all I know might does indeed make right, but a quick glance at history and a fall back on a slightly different idiom should tell us that he who lives by the sword dies by it. For example, let’s have a look at the Roman Emperors who were murdered by their own Praetorian Guard: Caligula, Galba, Pertinax, Julianus, Elagabalus and Aurelian and that’s not even going into all the ones murdered by their own regular troops.

The dictator who rules for a lifetime is a relatively modern invention, and medieval rulers who tried to act like tyrants and despots were more likely to find themselves on the wrong end of a hot poker enema a la Edward II (yes, probably apocryphal, but still a good story to tell).

Being a ruthless bastards isn’t any more of a shortcut to success than being virtuous, generous and kind. Honestly, it’s all a bit of a crap shoot. You always hear about successful authors who got a break because someone assistant’s wife just happened to read the manuscript and insist it must be published, or showrunners whose first-ever pitch was greenlit because they have famous parents or the man who became president of the United States mainly because his father had been too, and my takeaway is that quite frankly nobody, neither good nor evil, has the slightest fucking clue what they’re doing. Evil works sometimes, sure. So does being good. That’s the only reality.

What Audiences Really Want (What They Really, Really Want)

But of course all these claims at greater realism are a decoy, a smokescreen, because we all know fiction isn’t really about reflecting reality, fantasy fiction doubly not so. I mean, the name of a genre is a bit of a dead giveaway, isn’t it: Fantasy. Not reality.

The whole point of speculative fiction, non-mimetic writing and fantasy as a literary, marketing genre is that it draws on myth and magic, legends and fairy tales, in order to present a world which is very definitely NOT our own. Sure, you could write a story that is essentially just the real world with a couple of elves in the background, but then my question becomes why (other than the commercial reasons) is this marketed as fantasy? Grimdark fantasy, like all fantasy, is not a reflection but an exaggeration, a specific attempt to highlight and twist something we find in our world. In this case: the atavistic taste for revenge, and the desire to indulge our darkest impulses.

Fans do not flock to watch “Game of Thrones” or pick up the latest god and wizards tome because they’re looking for an accurate depiction of the human condition. Grimdark is as escapist as epic fantasy, merely in the opposite direction. It indulges all the things we’d like to do in our darker moments, the co-worker we’d cheerfully strangle, the careless driver we’d like to run off the road, the rude shop clerk we’d like to stuff inside their own till. Grimdark lets you vicariously live out those fantasies in all their visceral glory.

In that sense, the genre is regressive and conservative, not iconoclastic. Nihilism and the refusal to believe in any kind of positive change, preferring instead to indulge in revenge fantasies, is inherently pro-establishment, because they’re the ones who benefit if nobody tries to change anything. Audiences want to have their caked blood and eat it too, to feel they’re doing something rebellious while engaging in the very boggiest of standard entertainment.

(This American need to be at once both the rebel underdog and the invincible champion is probably worth exploring. Maybe next time. On the same note, I make plenty of digs at America’s expense in this blog, but to be fair, most of the Americans I’ve met have been wonderful, kind people. This kind of ribbing is just what you get for being so big and famous and dominating the discourse all the time.)

It's Not All Bad Though

The only exception I’ll admit is grimdark that is satire, either of other grimdark works or of the nihilistic mindset it supports. And to be fair, the Terry Brookses and Tad Williamses and Robert Jordanses and Brandon Sorensonsons of the genre can stand to be brought down to earth every once in a while lest they get too carried away. It’s worth pointing out that for all their medievalist and poetic trappings the modern epic fantasy is still ultimately about dudes killing other dudes with swords.

Abercrombie gets this, I think, with his alcoholic princesses, dashingly brain-dead swordsmen, manipulative mentor wizards, perfectly pleasant torturers and barbarian berserkers with a heart of … if not gold, then brass maybe. I think Warhammer 40,000 also had this, until a certain cohort of fans started taking the setting at face value (you can still see traces of humor in the dimbulb orks, for example).

In line with my unwarranted American-bashing above, I note that this kind of satire seems to be a particularly British thing. I’ve seen this elsewhere too, with reams of American publications warning you not to try humor. I think the default American mode of communication is sincerity, which is why political discourse gets so overheated, nobody can look at the topic or themselves from an ironic distance. Whereas British people seem much more keyed to look for or expect life to be absurd. But I’m digressing.

I note in closing that the “Game of Thrones” fandom has more or less evaporated now that the show is over (whimper not a bang, there) and the next book nowhere in sight (next year, says Martin, and we’ve heard that before). That suggests a lack of staying power, a lack of purchase or foothold on the imagination, and thus a shallowness to the Gotcha! adolescent epiphany that life sucks. We know, dear. That ceased to feel insightful by about age 16. These days, it’s the hopeful fantasies that feel ground-breaking and innovative.