Shogun returns with a women-centric sixth episode as Mariko confronts her obligations while Ochiba amasses power. Read in Japanese.
Score: 8
Remembrance of Things Past
Cold open. Azuchi Castle, 22 years ago. We see a child Mariko brought to the court of Kuroda, Shogun’s fictional stand-in for Oda Nobunaga, the first Great Unifier of Japan whom Mariko’s father, Akechi Jinsai, later murdered for his tyranny, as Mariko recounted during the dinner in episode 5. Although she forms a friendship with the noble young girl Ruri, she quickly realizes the darkness surrounding her as one night Kuroda murders several of Akechi’s fellow vassals. “You’re only dreaming” her father tells her, as a young Toranaga restrains him from intervening.
The scene fast forwards about a decade. Now Mariko is a young woman sparring with a naginata against another noblewoman in the court of Azuchi as Ruri looks on. Also present is her future husband, Toda Buntaro, with whom Jinsai has recently contracted a marriage alliance that Mariko views as worthless. Ruri counsels her that “we have every privilege” and to ignore what they as women cannot control. As she departs, a voiceover from Jinsai reveals his inner thoughts.
“Mariko, my most cherished daughter. It pains me to see you with so many questions. You have always been an obedient child. But now I ask that you serve something greater. Your duty is what endures. There is nothing more.
Akechi Jinsai
In the present day, Mariko remembers his words as she sits lost in thought in Blackthorne’s house on an early morning filled with fog. All the while, a haunting melody like a lullaby plays.
Thy Will Be Done
It is night. Amid a torchlit ceremony, Toranaga commemorates those who died in the earthquake that struck Ajiro. He consoles his men in their grief, saying that although they may be unable to bear the weight of it, death is the end of life, and an affirmation of life itself. For his heroism in saving his lord, Toranaga promotes Blackthorne to the head of his admiralty and commander of the artillery regiment, granting him a fief near Kanagawa worth 600 koku. Despite this immense honor, which Blackthorne has no option but to accept, he remains discontent, eager to attack the Portuguese Black Ship and settle his own political objectives. Meanwhile, both Buntaro and Omi resent his new advancement.
In an audience following the vigil, Toranaga reveals himself as more sympathetic to Mariko’s plight than initially implied, rebuking Buntaro for abusing his wife and demanding they separate for a week. Meanwhile, he refuses Blackthorne’s continued request to reclaim his ship and crew to make war on the Portuguese. By now having fully intuited the nature of Blackthorne and Mariko’s relationship, Toranaga orders Blackthorne to spend a night with Kiku in the Willow World brothel while Mariko accompanies him as translator.
There is no refusing this order, and so now both parties must confront Toranaga’s demand that they move beyond their fractured relationship to remain devoted to the cause. Later, Kiku consoles the jealous Omi that her night with Blackthorne will be meaningless, but he remains discontent. This is not the only problem confronting the Kashigi. With their army in shambles and influence diminishing, Yabushige tells his vassal Takemaru, “It’s time to write another will”,
The Iron Lady
In Osaka, the situation is deteriorating rapidly. Under Ochiba no Kata’s direction, Ishido has taken the regents hostage and killed many samurai. With it now a matter of time until a fifth member is appointed and Toranaga formally sentenced to death, Toda Hiromatsu fights his way out of Osaka Castle and rides for Ajiro, leaving Toranaga’s wife and concubine behind. Meanwhile Frs. Martin Alvito and Dell’acqua consider an alliance with Toranaga in light of Lady Ochiba’s great hostility to the Catholic Church.
Later, as Lady Ochiba brushes Yaechiyo’s hair, she recalls the night she, as Ruri, fled Azuchi Castle after Kuroda, her father, was slain in Kyoto, and how Iyo no Kata, now the nun Daiyoin, groomed her to bear the impotent Taiko a son, giving her psychotropic drugs to endure painful, degrading sex with the old man. It is strongly implied that Yaechiyo is an illegitimate child fathered by another unspecified man.
At a Noh play held in the castle, the regents bicker among themselves, with Sugiyama emerging as a moral objector to Ochiba and Ishido’s hardball politics. Ishido flatters one of the actors into becoming the fifth regent, while Ochiba presses him to take more decisive action against Toranaga, seeding her demands with a whiff of sexual manipulation.
Toda Hiromatsu arrives, wounded and half unconscious, in Ajiro, and Toranaga holds council. With their political position crumbling, Toda counsels Toranaga to initiate operation Crimson Sky, a failsafe plan devised much earlier to dash for Osaka with reinforcement from Edo in an effort to depose the regents and have Toranaga assume full power as Shogun. Toranaga categorically opposes this move, but with their allies pressured to join the regency against him or be declared outlaws, he will soon be hopelessly outnumbered. He must decide quickly, or die.
The Willow World
Mariko brings Blackthorne to the Willow World brothel. There he is led to pillow with Kiku, and Toranaga’s plan in sending them is made evident. As Mariko says,
“Most come here to escape from boredom, pain, hardship or disappointment. They believe this place is about physical pleasure, which it is, but it can be more. The people she [Kiku] meets wish for a different life or circumstance. They want to be anywhere other than where they are. I offer you relief from this, and safety to create one perfect moment that you wish to inhabit completely. Settle your eyes on what you desire. My unclothed form. Just as I am. With nothing between us. I ask you into my openness. I ask you…”
And she breaks off, remembering her duty to her cause and the cause of her father to restrain the outpouring of grief she feels at losing Blackthorne. They have been sent here to forget one another. As her translation shifts from third to first person the full depth of Mariko’s pain and her desire bleeds through, and we’re left with the heartbreaking end of her and the Anjin’s all-too-brief relationship. He brushes her hand in longing as she leaves. This has been strangely called “the sexiest scene on the show” by series creator Justin Marks. He must have a fetish for despair.
Things Fall Apart
In Osaka, things fall apart. As Sugiyama emerges as the last remaining principled opposition to “Ochishido” (no they’re not a couple, but probably headed that way), Ochiba no Kata dismisses Ishido’s failure to take action. Stung by her aspersions against his manhood when she herself scratched out fate’s eyes rather than submit to disgrace after the fall of Kuroda, he strikes at last.
As Sugiyama and his household flee Osaka, Ishido ambushes them with an armed force in the woods and massacres them in cold blood. He will no longer be looked down on as a lowborn bureaucrat. With open war now unavoidable, Toranaga’s impeachment is a foregone conclusion. He will not wait to be declared an outlaw. He will march on Osaka and obliterate his enemies. Crimson Sky has begun.
Conclusion
It would be easy to infer from my score above that this is the weakest episode of Shogun so far. That’s not really the case. “The Ladies of the Willow World” excels in its flashback sequences and the eponymous brothel scene. While episodes four and five focused predominantly upon Blackthorne, this was definitely a Mariko-heavy episode and I greatly enjoyed that along with the swift emergence of Ochiba no Kata as the show’s Big Bad.
It is hard to shake the sense however in this episode, where Blackthorne has little agency and is often not present, that the show occasionally struggles to balance its three leads equally given the ensemble approach it has taken to the novel. Since episode three, we’ve seen a succession of great television hours on Shogun, but three was the clear high point at which Toranaga’s, Blackthorne’s, and Mariko’s perspectives felt equally balanced. Since then, one or two characters have tended to receive more time each episode at the expense of the third, ironically Toranaga most of all. His restoration to center stage is definitely welcome in the political scenes, as is his conversation with Mariko about duty and honor in the back half of the episode.
And it is also hard, however, to escape the sense through this hour that in seeking to avoid a Eurocentric lens, or simply because it must condense 1200 pages into ten hours of television, too much of Blackthorne’s relationship with Mariko has been fast-forwarded through or omitted. This is ultimately a shame, because while Anna Sawai and Cosmo Jarvis are each great performers and often great together, I can’t shake the feeling that the show’s basic discomfort with the stranger-in-a-strange-land dynamic has neutered their romance, which by this point is clearly the most underdeveloped subplot on the show.
As Olivia noted in her perspective on Shogun, some of this may have evolved from cultural concerns around white saviorism and the traditional emasculation of Asian men in Western media. Yet at this point, Shogun has so thoroughly refuted these tropes that to a degree its undercooked romance feels somewhat regressive and defensive in its own right, as if the writers were almost concerned about Mariko and Blackthorne liking each other too much and did not want to dwell on their relationship for fear of criticism, which makes no sense in light of Mariko’s power within the relationship (she was, after all, the one who picked up Blackthorne, so to speak).
This opinion might be polarizing to some, and perhaps I’m reading to much into it, but even as a great fan of Shogun, flaws are beginning to appear. Two episodes after Mariko declared “It is war”, there has of yet been no major battle to speak of, and even as it excels at nearly everything, Shogun seems somehow to be moving too fast and too slowly at the same time, no matter how paradoxical that might sound.
All photos are property of FX.
Benjamin Rose is a poet from Washington D.C. and the author of Elegy For My Youth (2023) and Dust Is Over All (2024). He studied English at the Catholic University of America and is the winner of the 2023 O’Hagan Poetry Prize. From 2019 he has edited The Path. Buy his books here.
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