How do you approach the challenge of adapting a story from one medium to a different? There are tons of of answers, but two extremes are clear: being as faithful to the source material as possible—think No Country for Old Men—or, on the other end of the spectrum, completely revamping the original, like Seo-kyeong Jeong’s remarkable 2022 retelling of Little Women. The FX historical drama Shōgun, now streaming on Hulu and Disney+ after six years in development, falls somewhere in the middle. The latest adaptation of James Clavell’s 1975 book of the same name is a real feat. What makes Shōgun the limited series so exceptional is the way it transforms a novel laden with lazy stereotypes and Orientalism right into a sweeping saga for a contemporary, global audience, while remaining faithful to the text.
The story beats in each are almost equivalent. Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) sits on a council of regents left behind by the late Taikō, led by Lord Ishido Kazunari (Takehiro Hira). Outwardly loyal to this dynamic, Toranaga harbors an ambition to assume power as shōgun, and, like his real-world counterpart Tokugawa Ieyasu, must outmaneuver his fellow regents in the hope of reunifying Japan. Into this political mess sails John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), an English pilot and privateer who has been sent to disrupt Catholic interests in Japan and open the country to English influence. Marooned in Kantō, he enters Toranaga’s service and, swept up in the culture shock, struggles to regulate to his latest world until he falls into the orbit of Lady Mariko Toda (Anna Sawai).
Clavell’s Shōgun is a primo dad book. It’s a historical novel led by a burly white dude upon whom men can project themselves, over whom women fawn, and who ultimately lands a complete babe. Granted, this white dude relies on an actual figure—William Adams, also generally known as Miura Anjin, who became a Western samurai and advisor to Tokugawa Ieyasu—but beyond the bare bones of the historical events, Clavell made the tale his own. That’s a pleasant way of claiming he wrapped the story in enough overt racism to make a certain type of man feel each superior (because they’d never say that type of thing, honest!) and yet seen (because they absolutely would—and do). Japanese characters stutter through European names—something Clavell appeared to get a kick out of, given how often he styled Blackthorne as some uncomfortable variation of “B’rack’forn” in a phonetic mockery of Japanese people’s accented English. That’s not to say the book’s fascination with Blackthorne’s enormous white penis (really), just one in all many strange ways in which the novel reduces Japanese women to exotic, wanton dolls who apparently don’t have any word for “love.”
Shōgun reads, like a lot historical fiction of the 20th century, as 1,000 pages of wish achievement for individuals who sincerely imagine the past was higher and that, given the probability, they’d have thrived there. Of course, at the time it was published, the book would have appeared almost progressive to Western readers with no other frame of reference, save for the atrocities of World War II still fresh of their minds. And, to present Clavell some credit, his hero Blackthorne does grow more sensitive to Japan and the Japanese as the novel progresses—perhaps a mirrored image of Clavell’s own relationship with the Japanese following his internment as a prisoner of war. Yet, even then, Shōgun stays not a product of its time, but a product of the biases and baggage Clavell and his readers bring to it. It is, in some ways, paying homage to the film Lost in Translation in that, whilst it immerses itself in Japanese culture—no less than as perceived by its white creator—it is barely ever concerned with the differences between East and West.
The query of how one can adapt all of that for the modern viewer is a difficult one which FX’s Shōgun navigates with remarkable finesse. By subverting Clavell’s novel without compromising what made it compelling, Shōgun becomes more accessible and more engaging for a more discerning audience that understands and appreciates cultural nuances. Less concerned with what separates East and West in a more globalized world, creators Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo shift focus to what we share. Blackthorne remains to be a rough galoot, and cultural antagonism stays, but Blackthorne is quicker to return to terms together with his latest surroundings and understand the people around him as just that: people. In this adaptation, the Japanese and their culture aren’t any longer mere props in Clavell’s Eurocentric play, but real human beings with the same motivations, flaws, and desires as Blackthorne’s bumbling Englishman.
In fact, so comprehensive is the shift in perspective that it might be remiss of me to center Blackthorne on this discussion. Clavell’s protagonist, together with the noblewoman Mariko, is ushered to the wings on this rendition, with Sanada’s Toranaga getting into the role of most important character. Blackthorne and Mariko’s romance, so central to the book, is thankfully sidelined; as an alternative, the presence of each characters as pieces on Toranaga’s elaborate chessboard is played up, and his machinations take center stage. FX’s adaptation plays more like a political thriller bundled under the facade of a lavish historical epic, to great effect.
Language also plays a pivotal role on this recentering of the Japanese perspective. The Japanese language in Clavell’s novel is, like his grasp of history, clumsy at best. FX’s Shōgun, in contrast, takes place almost exclusively in Japanese, spoken by an overwhelmingly Japanese forged. For all its Western pomp and big-budget production value—the series was filmed in Vancouver—it’s, at its heart, a Japanese series. It’s a dramatic shift, one which feels almost like a reclamation of a story that was only ever Eurocentric in the writer’s narrow-minded considering. All of this coalesces right into a story that’s each historically and artistically more authentic in time and place than its source material—and even, I might hazard to say, any previous depiction of Japan in Western cinema and tv.
Will fans of the book be unhappy? Perhaps—in spite of everything, the racism, misogyny, and jingoism that made up a lot of the novel are gone. But the story stays the same, and far improved by the shift in perspective. FX’s Shōgun is daring and affecting in ways in which Clavell’s novel never was, something it achieves by understanding that trying to the past for material doesn’t limit creativity or authenticity. In so doing, it points the way for future adaptations when coping with problematic material—and perhaps tricks some Clavell-pilled dads into watching a subtitled series, for once.
Credit : slate.com
