Instead of wallowing in disappointment about the lack of dragons, I ended up finding a wonderful piece of literature addressing problems we still struggle with today. 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. I cannot say I had high expectations when I picked up James Clavell’s historical fiction novel “Shōgun” (1975).
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