One carries it around the house, memerized by a deliciously gory Japanese power struggle and an impossible, illicit East-West love affair. With "Shogun," he has parlayed this exploration into one of those books that blots up vacations and imperils marriages, because it simply will not let the reader go. "Shogun" is the third novel of this disarmingly pleasant man who seems to write nothing but best sellers, whose interest in Asia was sparked, at least in part, by four years in a World War II Japanese prison camp and who has explored over and over in his novels the enormous gulf betweeen Asian and Occidental views of the world. Twelve hundred pages about medieval Japan, for heaven's sake who could wade through that? And the answer, with paperback sales alone now about 2.5 million, seems to be: just about everybody who picks it up. It was a forbidding-looking hunk of fiction, too. James Clavell - born in Australia, raised on the coast of England and transplanted to a screenwriter-turned-novelist life in Los Angeles and London - had embarked on a three-year obsession that produced "Shogun." The modern-day novel vanished for a while.
then I found out that you have a man called Hidiyoshi, who was the Taiko who was a peasant, who had all the girls in the realm, and then suddenly in his dotage he met this fantastically beautiful girl and he had a son by her, who died."Ĭlavell smiles."So I thought, 'Christ, that's not bad to start with.'" then I read a book on the Franciscans and found out the Jesuits were gunrunning in those days. then I got interested in Jesuits and I read a book on Jesuits. then it turned out he was called Anjin-San, and there was a street named after this fellow. then also there was a book published, one of his logs, from one of the trips from Japan to Siam.
I found five letters he wrote back to his wife, that were never delivered, to anybody's knowledge. "I found out it was Will Adams, so then I went to the library and looked up Will Adams. And I thought, well, what I'll do is I'll start reading."
"It said, 'In 1600, an Englishman went to Japan and became a Samurai,'" Clavell said. LOS ANGELES - James Clavell, his imagination awash with plans for the modern-day Asian chronicle that was to be his third novel, picked up one of his 9-year-old daughter's school books one afternoon in London, and came upon an intriguing bit of history.
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