Epic series Shogun will fill the hole left by Game of Thrones

Shōgun, the literary magnum opus of Australian-born British author James Clavell, is the story of a clash of cultures, as English navigator John Blackthorne is shipwrecked in feudal Japan and must manoeuvre between powerful daimyōs, the warlords who were vassals of the shōgun. But was it the original Game of Thrones?

It’s a complex question with no easy answer, suggests producer/writer and Keene Literature Prize finalist Rachel Kondo, who is, with her husband writer/producer Justin Marks (The Jungle Book, Top Gun: Maverick) steering the lavish new adaptation of Clavell’s book as a limited series for television.

Anna Sawai as Toda Mariko in Shōgun.Credit: Katie Yu / FX

“I have theories. I’ve heard accounts that [Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin] really enjoyed the book,” Kondo says of the visible parallels between the two novel-to-television geopolitical soap operas. “I’m sure many authors of a generation did, especially given the world-building component of what Shōgun was able to do for a Western audience.

“What made Game of Thrones as a series compelling to me as an audience member – and I hope we take aspects of that in Shōgun – is its wide character ensemble, Kondo adds. “There are 24 characters who we would consider main characters and the depth of their backgrounds was generated by Clavell and, of course, their historical counterparts.”

First, a quick pop culture history lesson. Clavell’s original novel was published in 1975, and is set in the late Sengoku period in 16th century Japan, a time of enormous social and political upheaval. The iconic 1980 television adaptation starred Richard Chamberlain as Blackthorne, along with Toshiro Mifune and Frankie Sakai as daimyōs Toranaga and Kashigi Yabu and Yoko Shimada as Lady Mariko.

The new adaptation of Shōgun stars Cosmo Jarvis, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tadanobu Asano and Anna Sawai as those characters in 10 one-hour episodes written by Kondo and Marks (with Emily Yoshida, Shannon Goss, Maegan Houang, Matt Lambert and Caillin Puente) and directed by Jonathan van Tulleken, Charlotte Brändström, Hiromi Kamata and others.

Cosmo Jarvis and Nestor Carbonell in Shōgun.Credit: Katie Yu / FX

Kondo credits Clavell’s brilliance as both a screenwriter and novelist for the endurance of the story, and also for the fact that the new adaptation lives partially in the shadow of the original.

“It’s little surprise that he was such a successful screenwriter before he became a novelist because he really is a master draftsman when it came to plotting,” Kondo says. “You find yourself in these incredibly capable hands, fully understanding where the audience is, or the reader in this case, in that journey, and where he wants to take them next. And in that sense, I do think there’s a lot of Game of Thrones there.”

In terms of the author of the original book, however, there was a complex knot of cultural and racial nuance that had to be unravelled by Marks and Kondo. Clavell was, essentially, a white man writing a Japanese story. And as a former prisoner of war, he had come to the story in the aftermath of a very violent engagement with Japanese culture.

What is critical, Marks says, is that Clavell survived his wartime experiences but still met Japanese culture with curiosity and not anger. “That spirit of engagement with another culture, by means of listening and researching and observing; we wanted to do that. We wanted to live by that same spirit,” Marks says.

Hiroyuki Sanada as Yoshii Toranaga in Shōgun.Credit: Kurt Iswarienko / FX

Kondo, who was born in Hawaii and has both American and Japanese heritage, approached Shōgun thinking she had the opportunity to re-encounter her own heritage and interpret the story as a woman of Japanese descent. “And then I realised, this is not my story. I’m Japanese American, born in Hawaii. A couple of generations and many degrees removed,” she says.

What followed, Kondo says, was a “profound process of learning to get quiet and to learn that, oh, wait, you not being the perfect person is your strength. You not being the one to tell the story, it could be a strength, in that you know that your job is to find the people who can.”

Marks draws a comparison between that point and Clavell’s use of Blackthorne in the novel, describing him as a “young man who comes to a country that belongs to him in no way, shape or form, wanting to impose some sense of agency or will or activity on it, who finds at the end of the day that every event that happens over the course of the story would’ve happened whether he showed up or not.

“And his journey is towards this acceptance of his own spiritual place in it, his smallness, his irrelevance,” Marks says. “And that’s something quite beautiful that we all go through, whether it’s about culture or not, this acceptance that we ultimately exert very little control or agency over the path of our own destiny.”

Tadanobu Asano as Kashigi Yabushige in Shōgun.Credit: Katie Yu / FX

Instead, Marks says, what we find is an understanding “that we belong to a community, whatever that community may be. And I think that’s down to the very haunting final page of the book. It’s just a very remarkable, remarkably contemporary journey for a book that was written in 1975 by someone whose first engagement with Japan as a culture was as a prisoner of war. A very beautiful journey for him to have taken.”

One of the pivotal ways the Kondo-Marks adaptation veers away from the original is its elevation of the female roles in the story. “I feel that Justin wanted to create something that wasn’t 100 per cent the novel, and the way the female characters are shown in our show, I think, may be a little different to what people will remember from the book,” New Zealand actor Anna Sawai says.

Critically, where the story emphasis shifts towards the female characters, Marks drew in female writers to lead the storytelling. “I respect Justin for delegating the female story to female writers,” Sawai says. “And that’s not because it’s 2024, it is the fact that these women had more to say, but it wasn’t shown before.”

Shōgun writer/producer Justin Marks.

The series also leans deeply into historical detail. As with Toranaga and Yabushige, who are based on the real historical figures Tokugawa Ieyasu and Honda Masanobu, Sawai’s character Toda Mariko is based on Hosokawa Gracia, the Catholic daughter of the samurai caste Akechi family.

“I read about her and I would read just before going on set because it would give me hints about who she is,” Sawai says. “Mariko is a fictional character, so they’re not exactly the same. I kind of merged them together.”

Marks describes Clavell’s original work as a near-perfect blueprint for a limited series. “The book’s fundamentals, when you strip it down to the movements, the story, the characters, the plotting, is just a masterclass in long form storytelling, especially in the long form storytelling of an ensemble,” he says.

“The biggest part of its appeal was turning those pages as you read the book, it felt like reading one of those great bestsellers from the 1970s where it’s that mix of accessibility with epic saga, in that [The Godfather author] Mario Puzo kind of way,” Marks adds. “It truly felt like this wonderful balance.”

It was important, too, Marks says, to try and understand Clavell’s original work in the context of a contemporary lens and a more culturally authentic writer’s room.

“What we were looking to do was to take the spirit of James Clavell, when it came to this spirit of curiosity, the spirit of detail, this spirit of trying to tell this well-rounded ensemble story in a foreign country, and bring it with more of a modern lens to what our standards might be today,” Marks says.

“That spoke to the way we executed the scripts with our writer’s room, bringing in a predominantly Asian-American writer’s room, predominantly Asian-American and female, to kind of speak through the tropes [and reflect] where we’ve come in the 40 years since the book was written,” Marks says.

“The cliché of the stranger in a strange land genre is ripped off directly from Shōgun, so we felt like it was time to take it all back and give it back to Shōgun,” Marks adds. “Because when you actually get to the core text, it’s actually a very intersectional, very contemporary message that speaks to how we encounter other cultures.”

Shōgun streams on Disney+ from Tuesday, February 27.

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