Shogun S1E5: Broken to the Fist

At the end of last week’s episode, Toranaga’s son Nagakado decides to step up in his absent father’s place and take decisive action. He uses Blackthrone’s cannon to wipe out messengers sent by his father’s rival Ishiro, and they’re brutally effective. We open this week on body parts being picked off the battlefield, as Toranaga returns to deal with the aftermath of his son’s rash action. 

But first a shock: Mariko’s husband Toda—last seen sacrificing himself to secure Toranaga’s escape from Osaka—is still alive. And his widow looks none too happy to see him. Worse, Toranaga insists that he move in with her in Blackthorne’s house, “so that you may serve them both,” little suspecting that she’s been doing more with the English sailor at night than translating. 

We also check in on the Council, made up of Toranaga’s four rivals to the throne, and the empty space he once occupied. They have the relatively simple task of replacing Toranaga, so they have the five unified votes needed to rule the country in the child Emperor’s stead. But as Toranaga predicted, without him as a common enemy, they quickly — politely — turn on each other. They can’t settle on a replacement for Toranaga. Each makes a self-serving proposal, suggesting some relative or personal ally, that the others quickly dismiss. Ishido resigned expression gets more pronounced, as he realizes he’s surrounded himself with bickering idiots.

Toranaga has much the same expression, as his son’s attack on Ishido’s men has likely started a war. War was almost certainly inevitable, but Toranaga almost certainly wanted it to come on his own terms, and he quickly sees how his son was easily manipulated by Omi, the nephew of his two-faced lieutenant Yabushige. 

While his son may be easily manipulated, Toranaga is crafty enough to keep Yabushige in line. He lays out that he’s fully aware of Yabushige and Omi’s scheming, but points out that Omi did him a favor. Toranaga doesn’t have the strength to attack Osaka, but by provoking Ishido to war, he can fortify his defenses and make his enemy face a row of canon head-on. He puts Omi in charge of the artillery unit as thanks, but also as a slight to Yabushige. Toranaga knows full well he’s disloyal, but doesn’t respect him enough to see him as a threat, and could pretty easily replace him with Omi if push came to shove.

Before war arrives, we get a smaller-scale conflict, as Blackthorne and Toda each try to establish themselves as man of the house over a tense dinner. What starts with playful insults that Mariko tactfully translates turns into a drinking contest, and then turns tense as Blackthorne questions Toda’s treatment of his wife, and Mariko revealing her tragic backstory, which gives some weight to why there’s no love lost between she and her spouse.

So what was gearing up to be an action-packed episode instead focuses on dramatic heft, as we spend a lot of time going deeper into what’s become the show’s central relationship. Blackthorne and Mariko both care for each other, but they have a fundamental disconnect. He can’t understand why she suffers abuse at the hands of her lout of a husband, and she can’t make him see why his lifestyle — yelling at everyone and doing whatever he pleases — has no appeal for her.

He also has a disconnect with his chaste consort Fuji that goes beyond the sizable language barrier. They only have a few words of common language, but beyond that, neither understands why the other does anything they do. Blackthorne may have picked up a few words of Japanese, and ingratiated himself with Toranaga, but he fundamentally doesn’t understand his adopted country, or his complicated relationships to the two women now in his life. Bridging that disconnect is more compelling than any looming war, although as the show progresses, we’ll surely have plenty of both.

Stray thoughts:
• Fuji is horrified to learn that Blackthorne wants to hang a freshly-caught pheasant up for three days before cooking it. I don’t know enough about medieval English cooking to know why you’d let a bird rot to the point that it attracts flies before preparing it, but whatever the reason, I’m squarely on Fuji’s side on this one.

• Mariko’s backstory includes a familiar arc: her father killed the cruel and corrupt emperor (the one before the one whose death sets Shogun‘s events in motion), but is scorned and forced to commit seppuku as thanks for saving the kingdom. This is essentially Jamie Lannister’s story from Game of Thrones, minus the seppuku, but the book Shogun was written decades before A Game of Thrones, so it’s likely George R.R. Martin lifted the story directly.