The Suburb and the Sword: James Clavell’s Shogun as a Guide to Manhood

A samurai and his contingent enter a house to retrieve a prisoner at the behest of his feudal lord. Confronting the prisoner, he demands the prisoner’s guns. 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. When a samurai moves towards her, she raises a gun, pointing it at the leader. A tense stand-off ensues, broken when the leader acquiesces. 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.”

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. 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. The copiously detailed novelty of feudalist Japan sent imaginations reeling in airports around the world and for a brief while in this country, made an unprecedented number of readers interested in two topics normally anathema to Americans: geography and history. Recent queries to friends and acquaintances show that few have heard of the book, some having vague recollections of the mini-series made in 1980. But for years, curled copies of the brick-like paperback were ubiquitous in suburban basements, thrift shops, and on blankets laid out by street vendors. For the length of his career as a novelist, Clavell, with his six-volume Asian Saga, was to East Asia what Stephen King was to horror.

Shogun’s plot is difficult to summarize, but the gist is that John Blackthorne, an English ship captain seeking to establish trade with Japan, is taken prisoner along with his crew. He becomes both pawn and instigator among some key players in Japanese politics, including the calculating samurai Omi, the sadistic feudal lord Yabu, and especially Tornaga, who is angling to become shogun, the supreme military commander. Essentially, it’s an epic fish out of water story, as the filthy, crude, meat-eating capitalist Blackthorne attempts to navigate the bewildering mores of feudalist Japan circa 1600, such as penchants for bathing (Europeans at the time believed that baths caused the pores to open, inviting disease), eating raw fish, ritual suicide, and a caste system that makes India’s seem flexible. Gradually, he becomes acclimated to a country in awe of its warrior class, and to the philosophy of bushido, the warrior’s code of principles, which, when defied or dishonored, tends to result in immediate decapitation.

I was my early twenties when I first read Shogun, and it coincided with a switch from one phase of my life to another. First was the tail end of that mnemonic sweet spot that we all have from the early teens to the early twenties, when the foundations of our pop consciousness are formed, when songs become inextricably linked to memory, when people, events, movie moments strike the unconscious chords that reverberate, as inspiration for self-inquiry or simply nostalgia, for the rest of our lives. And second, I was about to begin a downward slide to what I’ll call for lack of a better word a breakdown, a culmination of an undiagnosed depressive condition that had dominated my life since childhood. It was during that pivot that I read Shogun, eighteen years into my life as a karateka and twenty-three years into my life as a whatever-the-hell-was-wrong-with-me. In the thirty years since, scenes from the book stayed with me for reasons I could never really discern, but it was the aforementioned scene that I found most enduring, and troubling. At the time, I just didn’t understand the point of wanting to live through eternity. I couldn’t figure out how to live now. Which was the main reason I was reading the book in the first place.

The self-negation I’ll attribute to my Jewish gene pool, which has produced more than a few instances of suicide, mind-boggling neuroses, and martyrs to the nobility of needless suffering, but the karate was solely my father’s doing. He was born in 1944, and at age fifteen, a ne’er-do-well Brooklyn kid who spent his hours fishing coins from the sewer, saw a demonstration by Peter Urban and his students on a local TV show. He signed up for karate instruction in a landscape that is difficult to imagine in our post-Enter the Dragon, post-Karate Kid, ubiquitous strip-mall karate instruction world. In the late 1950s, Urban’s was one of only three dojos in the entire tri-state area, and karate was mostly seen as bare-knuckled brawling practiced by men in pajamas, second in weirdness only to yoga, which at the time was represented occasionally on variety shows by emaciated mystics wearing what appeared to be diapers.

By 1970, when I was five and forced to take my first class, karate had become more prevalent, a little less esoteric, and, as instructors like my father taught it, a shade less barbaric. More focus was put on kihon (the techniques specific to your belt level), kata (a choreographed series of techniques), and ippons (a systematized series of offensive and defensive maneuvers between two people), as well as kumite (sparring). All fights were controlled, blows were pulled, but you learn very quickly that even a pulled punch or kick, thrown properly, could be punishing. But at that point, I wasn’t quick to learn anything, except that I didn’t want to learn karate. My earliest memories as a warrior are of having to constantly check the L and R my mother had written on my hands so I’d know the left from right, doing leg lifts until I cried from the pain, and the intensity of my instructor, Joe Mangravito, like most of my father’s students a borough street kid whose assessment after my first class was that I needed to be “toughened up.” 

Thus the three tentpoles of my childhood: stupidity, crying, and weakness. And while I’d love to turn this into a redemptive origin story, the fact was that from ages five to twenty-three, all three only got worse. I was forced to take classes, and anyone out there thinking they can sympathize, what with those excruciating piano lessons you had to sit through or whathaveyou, I’ll just note that music lessons don’t eventually result in grown men, skilled in empty-handed combat, pummeling your vital organs. Which would have been enough to make any young boy averse, but my real problem wasn’t so much with karate as it was with the outside world entire. 

I hated karate because my shyness manifested itself in a sort of blanket anxiety and an overwhelming aversion to being looked at, which I believe are now called generalized anxiety disorder and scopophobia, but at the time was called “being afraid of your own shadow.” To give the most typical example, as a boy in Brooklyn, I had to literally be dragged by my mother to school because I didn’t want to go on the school bus, because when I did, people would look at me, and I didn’t want to go to class because when I came through the door, people would look at me, and I always cried, wailed, really, when my mother left me at school because people would look at me and then I would cry harder because people were looking at me while I was crying, and then they would look at me more because I was crying more. These were my thoughts, slightly altered based on context (going to the market, going to another kid’s birthday party, going anywhere, period) until age seven, when we moved to Marlboro, New Jersey, a commuter suburb about an hour south of Manhattan. There I began a different sort of life, one that was largely defined by me looking out windows. We had swapped our apartment for a two-story house on a half-acre plot, and I spent the bulk of my time in my room, staring out a window at my backyard and all the other backyards that met in the middle of the neighborhood’s four blocks that formed an enormous rectangle of sod, modest landscaping, and patios. At the time, the stillness stirred feelings of nothingness and dread that even now causes me severe discomfort to consider. 

So my room was essentially a neuroses petri dish and the outside world a horror vacui that I didn’t know how to fill. I had advanced enough that I could get on the school bus alone, but otherwise, there was little inspiration to be part of my community. I didn’t know how to define it at the time, but as I’ve said to more than one acquaintance over the years, if you want to know why people hate Jews, spend ten minutes in Marlboro. Growing up there, it seemed that the populace was dedicated to reinforcing Jewish stereotypes; nagging mothers, milquetoast fathers, JAPs (the boys weren’t any better), all that jewelry, and everything about money, money, money. If you were on board, great. If not, marinate in the confusion of wishing to be part of the world while being repelled by it, alone in a room during your formative years, and the cumulative belief that life was for other people who did not experience their waking hours as either a blizzard of anxiety or an utter blankness.

That’s certainly how I felt the one day a week I had to take karate class, strapped in the backseat of my mother’s car, looking out the window, wondering where all the other people were going and envying them whatever banal errands they were running, because whatever it was, they were not on their way to a karate class. I savored the limbo of the car ride the way I see convicts in movies savor the bus ride to prison. Entering the dojo, someone would look at me, which was bad enough, but following that was an hour of instruction, adjustment, and endlessly repeating techniques. If this doesn’t sound so bad, you’re obviously not the type of person that would feel terror finding a seat on a school bus, or who in middle age still needs two or three whiskeys in him before he’ll dance at a wedding. Suffice to say that I’ve seen otherwise confident men who had lived vicariously through countless hours of Kung Fu Theater on Channel 5 come into a dojo, attempt basic techniques, and be reduced to spastic monkeys, an excruciating play of emotions on their faces as they were hit with the reality of their ineptitude. And many of these guys were athletes; I was a klutz who was routinely picked last for kickball, a sport that involves kicking a ball. The best I can say about my training was that sometimes I got lucky: I’d catch an errant punch while sparring, which provided a great opportunity to resume crying, which gave me some relief from the anxiety, albeit by replacing it with humiliation.

My karate training was mostly a long, purgatorial slog, until I quit at seventeen; in a brilliant bit of negotiation, my father had agreed that I could quit when I reached black belt, then kept me stewing in the lower ranks for years longer than anyone else in the dojo, perhaps in any of the world’s dojos. Even more brilliantly, he probably knew that after twelve years, the only way to keep me in karate was by letting me go, and I did return a couple of years later. Karate was in the bone, and, what I was not consciously aware of at the time, the more intense the exercise became, the more it assuaged my anxiety, which had gone beyond social phobias and into situations like insomnia so persistent that I spent the last two years of high school sleeping through most of my classes, and an undistinguished turn at college where by senior year I had taken to flipping a coin because I simply could not concentrate enough to make decisions, let alone realize why it was important to make them. I had replaced crying with masochistic drinking, spending more and more time violently ill, with hangovers so severe that I would wrap myself in a blanket and try not to move, sometimes for entire days, worried that I was on the brink of doing something irreversible to myself.

But it was gin sickness that brought me back to the dojo. The absence of karate in my life was like the phantom limb condition, but it afflicted my entire body; the sicker I became with alcohol and isolation, the more I missed moving my body in a healthy, expressive way, the collaborations unique to dojo life, and, unable to do it for myself, the insistence from others that I strive for something like excellence. I would never have the skill set to be a proficient karateka, but after years of barely half-assed involvement, I had finally reached a point of intent that might take me beyond just alleviation.

Upon returning to the dojo, I channeled my self-annihilating compulsions into training five or six days a week, up to four hours a day, but the greatest indication of my seriousness was how much I was reading. As with many shy kids, books had been the great solace in a lonely childhood, and perhaps in the years preceding my return to the dojo, I should have known something was terribly wrong because I had mostly stopped reading; I could barely concentrate enough to read a page, let alone a book, and most of my mental activity was devoted to passive suicidal ideation and wondering when the dry heaves would stop. But back in the dojo, I was back as a reader, and I consumed the basic canon – The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Bushido, Hagakure, Mas Oyama’s The Kyokushin Way, Richard Kim’s The Classical Man, Peter Urban’s The Karate Dojo, D. T. Suzuki’s Zen Buddhism, Eugen Herrigel’s Zen and the Art of Archery, Zen in the Martial Arts, Zen Flesh Zen Bones, any other book that had the word ‘zen’ in it – and, inevitably, Shogun.

Shogun author James Clavell

From all those books, all I remember is one line from Herrigel, “The merely curious have no right to demand anything,” which I’ve broken out for decades whenever I wanted to nullify an uninformed opinion (not least my own), and, dimly, four scenes from Shogun. Given my mental state at the time, one that essentially obliterates the ability to focus on the immediacy of experience, this is an extraordinarily high retention, so much so that I recently re-read all 1152 pages of Shogun hoping to see why.

The four scenes I remember are these. In the first scene, Yabu is stranded on a rock formation just above a welling tide. Unable to escape, he assumes a meditative position, and calmly awaits his death. Then Blackthorne discovers a way to escape but is unable to shake Yabu from his meditative state. After a brief conference with his comrades, one of the samurai leaps off the cliff, screaming on the way down, to snap his master out of his meditative revery. The now-alert Yabu is saved. The screaming samurai has died on the rocks. In the second, Blackthorne, having learned something from the ceaseless frustration of Japanese social dynamics, has a request denied, says he cannot live with the shame, and decides to commit seppuku, a ritual suicide by disembowelment. He performs the ceremony, pulls the blade toward his belly, and is saved at the last moment when Omi reaches out and grabs the blade with his hand. In the third, a disrespectful ronin (masterless samurai) engages Yabu in a sword fight. The fight ends when Yabu sidesteps, cuts off his opponent’s hands at the wrists, the ronin howls at the sight of his bloody stumps, and Yabu cuts off his head. And the fourth was the scene related at the beginning, of the consort pointing the gun at the samurai.

At the time, the scenes read like fables within the novel, but even my minimal self-awareness soon negated the possibility of their resonance. Yabu on the rock? I pictured Joe Mangravito on a ledge, me at the top, looking down at the jagged rocks and roiling surf, and thought, “He’s a goner.” Mulling over Blackthorne’s seppuku, I’d lay in bed at night, insisting I could endure the pain of self-immolation, yet unable to dig a fingernail past the hair on my stomach. I did understand, fully, Yabu’s cutting off the hands. From the ronin’s perspective. Making mistakes you’re unaware of, then that moment of shock, realizing that the mistake is calamitous and irreversible? This was something I feared, and felt helpless to prevent, every day of my life.

But in the scene where the consort points the gun at the samurai I saw something I could reasonably aspire to. The consort’s name was Fujiko, the distraught widow of a dishonored samurai who had not been granted her only desire, to commit seppuku, to die honorably and be free from her shame. But despite her despondency, when the time came, she performed her duty with grace and honor, and was eventually granted her wish. She encompassed for me the idea that if the mistakes or misfortunes of a lifetime culminated with an incident of great consequence, you could comport yourself with dignity and purpose so absolute that you would be redeemed. The samurai envisioned being spoken of through eternity. Fujiko envisioned absolution. 

So, from these three overtly masculine scenarios, showcases of bravery and resolve, I identified with the mutilated idiot and the suicidal woman. The codes of masculinity, the ones I admired in feudal Japan and loathed in contemporary Marlboro, were too much for my desperately confused mind to make sensible. For anyone, a key problem of switching back and forth between a life in a dojo and a life in suburban America is that you’re constantly oscillating between two entirely different standards of behavior, attitude, and priorities, and you’d be hard-pressed to find two communities with a more diverse and persistent difference in attitudes about death, materialism, and gender. So, seeking clarity, I had read Shogun hoping to fully embrace the samurai while disparaging their opposite, Marlboro’s nouveau middle class. But I had spent too many years disengaged, and I wasn’t capable of moving past observations corrupted by frustration and shame. A bit clearer now, I see many of my old neighbors for what they were, some of the kindest, most down-to-earth, if occasionally really, really annoying, people I’ve ever known. But at twenty-three, all I could see were stereotypes, and as much as I’d love to blame Marlboro, its denizens and its culture, it was surely my inability to see beyond my own self-hatred that made me suffer whatever potential for nobility I hoped I might have in silence and solitude. 

Reading about Japanese culture didn’t strengthen my sense of purpose so much as it highlighted the irreconcilable duality of the suburban samurai and intensified my sense of disorientation. I wish the younger me had recognized some bad signs – when inspiration and dismissiveness develop proportionate to each other, when optimism for a new life doesn’t dwarf your contempt for the old one, or when reading a novel doesn’t hone your empathy for people in the real world – but also realize he wouldn’t have been able to do much about them. Maybe the best lesson Shogun gave me was the realization that I had a lot of issues to work out. Still, I’d love to see a pie chart of Clavell readers, how ample the “suburbanite” wedge is, and to wonder how many others in that undoubtedly plump slice thought at some point while reading Shogun that there had to be more purpose to life than pursuing strategies of escape from the sense that you had no purpose.

—Steve Danziger is a writer living in New York.