James Clavell deserves his own thread

[LittleLebowski]

I don’t remember ever reading Shogun, guess I’ll have to fix that.
Pretty decent podcast about William Adams here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas...=1000487487861

I think it was this podcast host that was raving about the movie Silence, which I also need to check out. It’s about Jesuit monks in Japan around the same time.

Holy shit! Thank you.

[Zincwarrior]

I am rereading Shogun for the thousandth time and it has gotten better with age. Just truly splendid work. Did you know that this is (loosely) based on the life of William Adams?! Or that Clavell based King Rat upon his own experiences as a POW?

Tai Pan is s also excellent.

[Balisong]

I've always known of the book, but have never read it, nor was I aware it was part of a series. I added it to my Christmas list!

[Dennis]

I was born in Hong Kong and I learned a lot and gained much perspective from the Tai Pan series. I came to the US when I was young but I ran a lot of the themes from the book by my parents and they confirmed all of them.

Clavell actually lived in HK while writing the books and based a character in them on himself.

Dennis.



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[LittleLebowski]

I was born in Hong Kong and I learned a lot and gained much perspective from the Tai Pan series. I came to the US when I was young but I ran a lot of the themes from the book by my parents and they confirmed all of them.

Clavell actually lived in HK while writing the books and based a character in them on himself.

Dennis.



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Which character?

[Dennis]

It was a character in Noble House and King Rat, later novels in the Asian Saga series.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_House_(novel)

Peter Marlowe – a former Royal Air Force officer and pilot during World War II before he was taken prisoner and imprisoned in Changi Prison, then a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. He was also the second main character in King Rat. Marlowe is the fictional counterpart of the book's author, James Clavell. He is visiting Hong Kong with his wife, Fleur, to research and write a novel about Hong Kong's history.



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[Spartan1980]

This is weird. I posted in the last couple of days on another forum that Shogun was probably my all time favorite read.

[LHS]

Shogun is one of my all time favorites. I've loved every Clavell novel other than Whirlwind, which I just couldn't get into.

Back in college, I took an "Intro to Japanese History" class taught by a little old Japanese man. When we got to the transitional period between the Ashikaga and Tokugawa shogunates, he asked the class "How many of you have read 'Shogun'? You read that, learn right names, you know Japanese history."

[paherne]

Meh, no Jesuits, so no care.

[LittleLebowski]

Meh, no Jesuits, so no care.

Huh? Plenty of Jesuits and Jesuit history in Japan in Shogun.