I was persuaded to read “Shōgun” because I’d heard it was like “Game of Thrones” but instead of Westeros, it’s set in feudal Japan and sadly without dragons. In the end, he still picks himself back up to persevere and survive. He’s confronted by a culture he doesn’t understand, a country he doesn’t know and a series of events out of his control.

From there, it picked me up and dragged me along Blackthrone’s harrowing tale of love, loss and struggle to survive in a foreign land where there are adversaries at every turn.

The novel threw me into the year 1600 with the story of English pilot John Blackthorne, whose ship and crew are marooned in Japan after being caught in a vicious storm. When I started “Shōgun,” it immediately stoked my imagination, seized my heart and put my life on autopilot for the next couple of weeks as I raced to the finish. From that, I assumed it would be lackluster in today’s context, but it wasn’t. I’d heard family members talk endlessly about how “Shōgun” captivated the minds of people in the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s with its book and miniseries. “And there’s a lot of really fun and fascinating work going on to try to balance the story out and tell it from both points of view.I cannot say I had high expectations when I picked up James Clavell’s historical fiction novel “Shōgun” (1975). “I referenced, I think, in my comments that it’s really told from multiple points of view, not just the singular Western, white male point of view, so it’s told through many Japanese points of view,” Landgraf said when asked how the show would avoid “exoticizing” feudal Japan, in comparison to the ’80s miniseries adaptation starring Richard Chamberlain. Prior to them joining, FX chief John Landgraf said the series would not be “exoticizing” Japanese culture when it was announced during a panel at the Television Critics Association press tour in August 2018. The married writers were brought on to revamp the project a few months after it was first ordered by FX in Summer 2018. Marks and his wife Kondo, who is of Japanese descent, adapted Clavell’s novel for the FX series, with Marks executive producing alongside Clavell’s daughter, Michaela Clavell, and Kondo co-executive producing. ‘Shogun’ Won’t ‘Fetishize’ Japanese Culture Through ‘Western Eyes and Male Gaze,’ FX Promises

Shōgun novel