Things take a turn for the worst in Shogun’s 7th episode as Toranaga’s plans are thwarted and losses mount. Read in Japanese.
Score: 8
The Man and the Myth
Cold open. We see a corpse-strewn battlefield shrouded in haze. As a samurai decapitates the body of a fallen foe, a messenger runs through the ranks crying “The war is over! The war is over! Lord Toranaga has won!” Wait, what?! Has Shogun just fast-forwarded through Crimson Sky all the way to the victory? What the hell? We still have three more episodes! Well, no, it hasn’t, because this “war” is a flashback to 1554, 46 years before the present, when Toranaga won his first battle at 12 years old. It’s a moment of epic myth-making that will serve, for better or worse, to define his entire life. As he confronts his defeated enemy, Lord Mizoguchi, his enemy praises him bitterly:
“My compliments, Lord Toranaga. Not many men win their first battle before pillowing with their first girl. I formally surrender. Tell your scribes that Mizoguchi fought with honor. It was fate that forced me into declaring an unwinnable war.”
Mizoguchi
As Mizoguchi prepares for seppuku, he halts an approaching retainer, saying “I want it recorded that I was seconded by the boy warlord.” Toranaga obliges him, but not before he declares, “Maybe we’ll meet again in the afterlife. Maybe the one holding the sword will be me.” He plunges the wakizashi into his gut and then Toranaga finishes him. The scribes tell of this deed that Toranaga decapitated Mizoguchi that day with a single blow. But, as the Greek warrior Solon once put it, “poets tell many lies.”
Brotherly love
In the present day (1600), Toranaga and his retinue wait for the arrival of his half-brother and his forces outside Ajiro. Everyone is on edge. They haven’t spoken in years. Suddenly Saeki arrives, clad in steel grey armor and a kabuto with a big-ass headdress that puts even Yabushige’s drip to shame. He speaks of seeing Toranaga’s “decimated army” and Toranaga concedes he’s suffered dire losses in the recent earthquake. “So in your desperation, you had no choice but to summon the vast legions of your mediocre brother?” Saeki replies, in one of the best quips in the whole show. Things are not off to a promising start. But then Saeki cracks a smile and the two start trading brotherly insults. Saeki asks to see the barbarian Toranaga has “tamed”, and Blackthorne does his bit to appear respectable. Toranaga assures Saeki that the Anjin’s cannon tactics will aid their cause. But battle plans can wait for tomorrow. Tonight it’s time to get drunk.
This camaraderie is something of a front though. In the very next scene Toranaga grunts to Mariko about the “usury” of his “mongrel half-brother”, who has roped him into spending 1200 monme for a week’s services with Kiku. Although Gin, the proprietor of the Willow World, had offered to lessen her fee in return for “a stick of time” with Toranaga for a private audience, Toranaga has no time for whatever the old courtesan wants. Little does he know more distractions are on the way.
Dude, where’s my Erasmus?
Blackthorne is summoned and, being Blackthorne, is again not on the same page as his boss. Toranaga demands he wear his swords rather than pistols at the evening’s banquet and generally not cause a scene. He need not worry about this, because Blackthorne is going to cause a scene right now. Blackthorne wants his ship back (of course). Although he frames this as a plea to “take maritime command” as part of his role in Crimson Sky, Toranaga is getting exasperated with this shit. Mariko cautions him to stop pestering Toranaga, and he resigns himself to stand by Toranaga “whatever our fate may bring”. While Blackthorne clearly still has one eye on the exit and escape from Japan, this is a crucial expression of loyalty in the episode, one that will ultimately both be dashed later on and yet may inspire some sort of action on Blackthorne’s part in next week’s installment. Though everyone around Toranaga continues to believe he is master of the universe, this episode’s decision to begin at the beginning was essential. Things are about to get much worse, and it matters, I suspect, that the Anjin is finally becoming a believer, or close to one, at the exact moment when the myth of Toranaga is about to run out.
A Simpish Samurai
Meanwhile, Omi, having lost Kiku to Blackthorne, now fumes over losing her again to Saeki. Maybe don’t simp for a courtesan? Omi’s undying love for Kiku is probably not going to last.
Next, as Saeki enjoys himself at the Ajiro hot springs. Nagakado, Buntaro, and Yabu get up to a bit of samurai locker-room talk, with Naga blustering as always.
“I hope Ishido sends all of Osaka to face us. I hear that your first kill on the battlefield is better than your first woman.”
“Where did you hear that?” Buntaro says, morphing into a human eye-roll.
“Many speak of it that way” Nagakado says earnestly.
“Depends on the woman” Yabushige chuckles.
Speaking of women, it’s time to prepare the banquet, and I invite you all to bask in the understated brilliance of Moeka Hoshi, aka Fujii, who stole the entire last episode with that teacup reaction. She reunites with Toda Hiromatsu, who swings by while she’s getting the house ready and brings her her deceased family’s remains. What a nice grandpa. She resolves to join them in death after the fulfillment of her service to Toranaga as Anjin’s consort, but Hiromatsu tells her to live in commemoration of the victory they died for after Crimson Sky prevails. Fujii is not so certain there will be a victory. And her worries are well placed.
Checkmate
The dinner starts out pleasantly enough. Saeki makes his share of boorish sex and toilet jokes while Omi and Buntaro fume about Blackthorne sleeping with their women. Clearly one of them should’ve married Fujii, who so far has proved immune to Blackthorne’s “peerless part”, to use the novel’s cringy 70s term.
In a remarkable moment, Nagakado asks his uncle to tell him about what his father was like when he was young. Naga’s enthusiasm speaks volumes about how much Toranaga has failed as a parent, not through abuse but a sort of can’t-be-bothered neglect, in a manner that will have tragic consequences later. Nagakado idolizes his father, and yet despite the need to secure the clan’s legacy after his death, Toranaga, we can surmise, has totally failed to prepare him for leadership. At once too distant and too lenient, he has let Nagakado grow into an impulsive fool, jeopardizing his own legacy in the process. When Saeki obliges Nagakado with a story, he turns to the cold-open myth of how Toranaga slew his adversary with a single swing. Naga is visibly elated by this tale of his father’s exploits. Toranaga is visibly pained.
Hiromatsu, trying to change the subject, brings up the matter of the alliance, but Saeki quickly shifts to telling a deprecating story about Toranaga soiling himself as a child and spoils everyone’s mood. He then asks Nagakado whether he prefers legends or the truth, and a messenger comes running to inform Toranaga that they have been betrayed as Saeki’s army appears on the ridges above Ajiro. He has been given another offer. Saeki is now the fifth regent, chosen to replace the murdered Sugiyama, and he orders Toranaga to return to Osaka to face execution, as well as for Nagakado to commit seppuku for killing Jozen. Toranaga says he will answer the Council’s demands at sunset on the following day. Until then, him and all his vassals are the effective prisoners of the Council.
A Stick of Time
This is bad, and nobody has any idea what to do. Blackthorne reverts to his hopes of seizing the Erasmus and getting the fuck outta Dodge, but Mariko isn’t having it and anyway Ishido’s navy has blockaded the port. Yabushige receives his general Igurashi’s head (eye patch dude, previously seen at the episode 4 pity party) as a gift from Ishido via Saeki in order to repay the murder of Jozen. Toranaga spends his time flipping a coin against a Shinto archway as Hiromatsu, Nagakado, and Buntaro look on, hoping he has some kind of plan. He doesn’t, and with Izu filled with the Council’s spies, if Buntaro makes a break for Edo they’ll all be slaughtered before he can rouse the troops. As Toranaga returns from his contemplation, Nagakado asks,
“Father, what have you decided? Do we die with blood on our swords?”
Yoshii Nagakado
Toranaga sighs. “Why is it that only those who have never fought in a battle are so eager to see one?” On the way back from the hilltop they are confronted by Gin, here to collect on the “stick of time” Mariko had promised her. When Nagakado tells her to go back to counting her silver, Toranaga demurs. Let her have her audience. Who knows how many sticks of time any of them have left?
The Floating World
This begins one of the more remarkable scenes in the show so far. Gin laments the life of a courtesan as a trade spent in service to powerful men until one grows old and is discarded. She’s heard that Toranaga is building a new city from his castle in Edo and seeks to gain official sanction and protection for a sex workers union/red light district where prostitutes can work and age with dignity. Through this encounter Shogun effectively lends a mythic origin story to the founding of Yoshiwara and the formalized institution of the geisha. “Let us age with the grace we devote our youth to cultivating” she says. Toranaga is amused. Why bother? He’s been outplayed. He’ll soon be dead anyway. “My fate is written” he says.
Gin doesn’t buy it.
“Fate is like a sword. Useful only to those who can wield it…My hardships taught me ambition and guile, and made me the most successful Lady in Izu, just as your hardships made you into the cunning man you are today.”
Gin
Then, with breathtaking ballsiness, she asks him how he could’ve been led into such a trap. “Why make such a careless mistake?” For once, Toranaga blames circumstance. His army was decimated by the earthquake. He had no choice. “But what do I know?” Gin adds. “I’m just an old whore, and my stick of time is finished.”
“This Appears To Be Occurring”
Yabushige decides to vent to Blackthorne on the beach, which is of course pointless without Mariko present, then irritably tries to teach Blackthorne how to fence with a katana. This doesn’t go too well (Blackthorne holds his sword like a European saber at first), and then Buntaro shows up to be a prick again, putting his sword to the Anjin’s throat. He hesitates to kill him, and then goes and whines to Toranaga about being cuckolded. When Toranaga tells him he must kill both the Anjin and his wife if the allegations are true (knowing Buntaro will do no such thing for Mariko’s sake), Buntaro storms off.
Toranaga orders Mariko to choose between her duty to avenge her father or Blackthorne. Unable to make that choice, she begs him instead for the right to die, saying every hour she lives is like drowning in a river of anguish. Toranaga is infuriated and slaps her tanto out of her hand.
Crimson Horseshit
The day of Saeki’s ultimatum arrives. Toranaga reminisces with Hiromatsu about killing Mizoguchi and the absurdity of it all. Rather than one stroke, Toranaga made “a fucking mess” according to Hiromatsu, having to hack away at the neck nine times. “Who picks a child as a second?” They share a laugh. Fatalism hangs in the air. They are doomed unless something changes soon, and they know it. And, sure enough, when Saeki comes, Toranaga shocks them all by surrendering, saying even if there is evil in the realm, he will not tear it apart through civil war. He will go to Osaka to stand trial. Everyone protests, but it is ultimately Blackthorne who can’t control his disgust, lambasting Toranaga as the general so clever he tricked his own vassals to death.
“You are all dead” he growls in Japanese, storming off, grunting at this “Crimson fucking horseshit.” Time and again Blackthorne’s main instinct has been survival. With the cause now in ruins, it’s tempting to believe he’ll simply check out at last and wash his hands of all of them. I am certain that is his first instinct in this situation, but probably not the last. For the duration of Shogun, Anjin and Toranaga’s relationship has been based on mutual opportunism and an understated admiration for each other’s survival instinct. I don’t expect him to lead the charge in rescuing Toranaga come next week, but I deeply suspect that if Mariko prompts him a bit, the man of action will cease his moping about for the previous two episodes and get back into action. Those cannons won’t shoot themselves.
The Lonely Path
But Nagakado needs no prompting. That night, as Saeki has sex with Kiku in the Willow World, Naga and a clutch of his samurai raid the brothel in an assassination attempt. This goes swimmingly until, as Saeki crawls through the brothel pond in a desperate bid to escape, Nagakado slips on a stone, braining himself and slowly bleeding to death. Earlier, he had called death in battle beautiful, while Saeki had dismissed it as “a lonely path through the woods”. “Where’s the beauty in this?” he says with a sort of pitying disgust over the bleeding, twitching body of his nephew. As the rain falls, Naga lies still.
Conclusion
By its sixth episode, Shogun had begun to feel like a slow burn. It remains exquisitely written, but I often miss the dynamism that was such a hallmark of the first four episodes and parts of the fifth. The long stay at Ajiro has slowed the pace of the show too much, and I maintain my criticism from the previous episode: Blackthorne and Mariko’s romance is undercooked, and the ensemble approach of the show works better when the plot is moving faster. The decentering of Blackthorne has been a mixed blessing. At times in six and seven he feels totally ancillary, which has given Toranaga more time to shine but also robbed the show of Cosmo Jarvis’s Triumph-the-insult-dog charisma for quite awhile now. But why stop there? Based on my fragmented knowledge of the book, vast amounts of Yabushige’s plot have also been cut, and seriously, who doesn’t want more Yabushige?
Also, there was apparently a whole bit where they went to Edo in the book and more stuff with Rodrigues and the Black Ship. The most common criticism I’ve seen on the Shogun subreddit is that the show is running at fast forward, and this gets to my broader complaint from my episode six review that the pacing in Act 2: Ajiro has begun to feel way off. Perhaps this is partially inherent in the structure of the book itself (Shogun is even longer than The Lord of the Rings, and there’s a reason why at even 11 hours, the Extended Edition of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy is still a quite brisk adaptation. Sorry Bombadil).
In hindsight, I begin to see why Shogun is an exceptionally good show but perhaps falls short of true greatness. It has struggled with the typical pitfalls of the ensemble piece. The necessity of weaving several meticulous plots and character developments together on a limited time frame and budget means inevitably some aspects fall by the wayside. I knew from episode 3 that Nagakado was certain to die at some point. The show telegraphed him as the brash rookie from his very first scene, and he never really developed since. That made his death, shoehorned into the last two minutes of the episode, feel hollow. Even the most predictable end can be affecting if we’re made to root for the character, but Nagakado was never tragic, simply annoying. Good riddance.
Likewise, Sanada’s brilliance as Toranaga is a double-edged sword. He feels almost too regal at times, whereas the novel was more willing (as I initially thought the show would be) to portray Toranaga in a somewhat Machiavellian light. This made episode 7 Toranaga’s best episode since episode 3. It was the first real chance in awhile to deconstruct the noble lie of the all-cunning, all-virtuous general that has accrued around him.
As Aragorn is a better character in the LotR films for being less overtly noble than his Tolkien counterpart ( more taciturn, more doubtful, and forced by a series of circumstances and interpersonal conflicts rather than birthright to assume the mantle of kingship), so Sanada is at his best in scenes where he is the least dignified or reserved. He has to be the adult in the room by necessity of the plot, but his best scenes often consist of his ability to play the straight man off more eyebrow–raising characters like Gin or Yabushige, or when, as in “Tomorrow is Tomorrow” or “Broken to the Fist”, he gets a chance to be wrathful, either through combat or displays of uncontrolled anger. If he must be the “dad” of the show, dispensing wisdom to others and modeling good conduct, his callousness towards Mariko, among other flaws, is necessary to keep the character grounded.
All in all, Shogun is probably still the best thing on television, but it is no longer flawless.
All photos 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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