All the characters count
It's the secondary cast that makes Shogun great
Lord Toranaga, Mariko, and Blackthorne are not the reason why the recent FX adaptation of Shogun is great.
While the actors who played the three leads were awesome, their work alone only elevates the show to being very good.
An interesting thing happened the longer I watched Shogun:
I became less interested in what happened to Toranaga, Mariko, and Blackthorne and more interested in the character arcs of Lady Ochiba, Gin, Fuji, and Yabushige.
It’s the secondary cast who flesh out the world of 1600-era Japan and push Shogun to the next level, making it great.
Why does the secondary cast of Shogun become more interesting than its stars?
I’m going to get into plot specifics. Be warned.
Toranaga: personification of ambition
Toranaga doesn’t change.
At the start of the story, he’s a mysterious, clever, and stern warlord.
At the end of the story, he’s a mysterious, clever, and stern warlord.
His most talented vassal is gone, his best friend killed himself, and he’s lost a son.
While he shows some emotion for those he’s lost, Toranaga is unchanged. He remains focused on one goal. Those sacrifices serve his larger objective.
At the end of the show, it’s implied that Toranaga wants to be shogun, ruler of Japan.
He isn’t entirely clear about his intentions though. His secret heart remains a secret.
There’s distance between Toranaga and us, the audience.
There’s distance between Toranaga and the other characters.
That distance keeps him from being a fully realized character.
Instead, Toranaga is the personification of ambition.
Mariko: the wind that blows itself out
We get a little closer to Mariko than we do Toranaga.
There are layers to her. She’s Christian, bilingual, trapped in a unpleasant marriage, and considers herself a samurai.
She has a dark family history and a complicated relationship with Lady Ochiba.
At least three men are in love with her. People keep saying her poems are good.
But her fatalism and determination to serve Toranaga mean that Mariko remains unchanged, despite Blackthorne’s multiple attempts to offer a different perspective.
It’s unclear if she asks Blackthorne questions about England and the outside world based out of genuine interest or as a way to manipulate him.
Mariko’s the wind that blows the plot of Shogun along.
Her death is unsurprising.
She had been talking about wanting to exit this world for the entire show.
Mariko is the wind that blows itself out.
Blackthorne: forced into a corner
The English captain is our entry point into 1600-era Japan.
Compared to Toranaga and Mariko, Blackthorne does change.
He learns to speak some Japanese, wears the clothes, eats the food. We see him sitting cross legged on a circular mat, staring out at the rain from his Japanese-style house.
By the end of the show, he isn’t interested in fighting Catholics anymore.
The biggest change in Blackthorne is that he goes from thinking I’m driving the action to accepting his role as just another of Toranaga’s pawns.
Multiple times throughout Shogun, Toranaga and Blackthorne make deals. Every time, the negotiation ends up in the warlord’s favor.
Toranaga looks down on Blackthorne.
The Englishman is an amusement to him. Toranaga will put his skills to work building him a fleet of ships. He thinks Blackthorne will be in Japan forever.
By his situation, Blackthorne can’t be an active character in Shogun. He’s a foreigner in a foreign land. He doesn’t know the language well or understand the culture.
The most interesting aspect of Blackthorne is old Blackthorne. We’re given a couple flashforwards that show him as an aged, bedridden man in England.
This suggests that at some point, Blackthorne doesn’t accept a Mariko-style fatalism to just serve Toranaga. He evolves past being the warlord’s clown and errand boy.
Perhaps Blackthorne reverts to being an active character at some point, takes control of his own fate, gets out from Toranaga’s reach, and sails back to England.
Maybe Toranaga makes a deal with Blackthorne and actually follows through on it.
Or it’s possible Toranaga just gets tired of the Englishman and sends him home.
As it stands at the end of this story though, Blackthrone is not a man of action, and he has to constantly react, being forced into a corner.
Lady Ochiba: the disembodied voice
Despite that Toranaga and Mariko don’t change, and that Blackthorne goes from being a man of action to forced into a corner, Shogun is great.
Why?
It’s the secondary characters who flesh out the show and push it to the next level.
Lady Ochiba is mother to the heir and tough as a chewed boot.
However, the standout feature of Ochiba is her disembodied voice. When she talks, her eyes drift to the distance and her tone is colorless.
Watching a beautiful woman talk like this is equal parts haunting and mesmerizing.
The voice from beyond doesn’t match her appearance. It’s as if she’s channeling a demonic spirit.
Like her childhood friend Mariko, Ochiba has been through a lot.
None of the other wives were able to give her powerful husband a male heir. Ochiba was. To hear her tell it, she conceived through sheer force of will.
She sets course for war with Toranaga. In a flashforward, we’re told Ochiba will reverse course when she realizes she’s aligned with the wrong warlord.
Like Toranaga, Ochiba has a secret heart, though it’s buried deeper than his. She’s in a position of high power, but we don’t know what motivates her.
Does she want to keep her personal freedom?
Does she have a vision for her son, the heir?
Does she have old scores to settle?
Does she want peace for Japan?
The main difference between Ochiba and Toranaga is that she’s not all there.
She’s a bit off, and it’s hypnotic to see such a character in a very powerful position.
We don’t know what Ochiba will do next.
Gin: successful entrepreneur
Like Toranaga and Ochiba, the teahouse owner Gin has ambition.
Unlike the two most powerful characters in Shogun, Gin clearly lays out her goal.
She gets “a stick of time” with Toranaga and tells him exactly what she wants:
to build a large teahouse in the city of Edo
to start a courtesan guild that will protect workers in their dotage
It would be easy to dismiss Gin as an old, tricky prostitute.
She’s not.
Had Gin been born male and come from the same background as Toranaga, she might be the one on her way to becoming shogun.
Had Gin grown up like Ochiba, she might be the guiding power behind the heir.
As Gin tells Toranaga in their only meeting, she was born in a gutter.
Yet Gin has dignity. She’s built a successful business that serves the needs of men. She’s trained a beautiful, talented, and loyal apprentice.
She’s a very successful entrepreneur.
One of the most moving scenes in Shogun is watching Gin walk barefoot across an overcast mud plain in Edo, talking about all the rooms her new teahouse will contain.
Her ambition is almost realized.
Fuji: change out of view
Blackthorne’s official consort throughout most of Shogun, Fuji has the same ability to endure that Toranaga, Mariko, Blackthorne, Ochiba, and Gin have.
Her husband and infant son are killed.
Like Mariko, Fuji wants to exit this world.
Unlike Mariko, Fuji doesn’t give in to this desire.
She is further embarrassed by being made live-in spouse to a foreigner.
She perseveres, turns away from Mariko-style fatalism, and finds a new purpose.
At the end of Shogun, she puts the ashes of her deceased husband and child out to sea.
She informs Blackthorne that she will become a nun. Blackthorne tries, but there’s nothing he can do to stop her.
Fuji changes out of view, and it’s not clear what the main impetus was for her to go from pathetic widow to determined woman.
Perhaps it was seeing Blackthorne adapt and make the best of his situation.
Maybe it was the sacrificial death of her friend Mariko.
We don’t know for certain, but giving Fuji this believable arc is another reason why Shogun is a great show.
Yabushige: complicated but hilarious
The bearded samurai who oversees his fishing village and keeps a list of ways to die, Yabushige is the most complex character in Shogun.
The most interesting, too.
He’s psychotic, boiling a member of Blackthorne’s crew alive just to see how long it will take the man to die.
Then, Yabushige plays both sides of the fence throughout the story.
He goes back and forth between the pro-Toranaga and anti-Toranaga camps.
This is oddly relatable. He’s just trying to boost his own influence and save his own skin. Though not on the scale of Yabushige, we have all been in similar situations.
Yabushige is also funny.
He brings a lightness to what can be an overly dark and oppressive atmosphere.
Much of his on-screen time is hilarious. The way he squints at other actors, widens his eyes, or even lowers himself into a pool of thermal water, sighing contentedly.
These grunts, groans, and noises add some flavor to his character.
He is weary of the world, tired of his life.
The “death poem” Yabushige shares with his nephew at the end of Shogun made me laugh out loud. It’s terrible, but played dead straight, with the nephew tearing up.
Shogun is obviously a great show.
It’s a tremendous achievement to create nearly 10 hours of coherent narrative centered in Medieval Japan and told mostly through subtitles. It’s a lot of reading.
But it’s not Toranaga, Mariko, and Blackthorne that make it a great show. It’s the secondary cast of Ochiba, Gin, Fuji, and Yabushige that take Shogun to that level.
As the tale goes on, the arcs of these characters become more engaging, and they sustained my interest in what could have otherwise been a tiring marathon of story.