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James Clavell
This summer marks the 25
th anniversary of the completion of James Clavell's epic Asian Saga-six novels, totaling 6,240 pages in paperback, published between 1962 and 1993. The high point of the saga was the publication in 1975 of
Shōgun. Set in the year 1600, it chronicles the exploits-nautical, martial, political, and erotic-of John Blackthorne, a British seaman who finds himself shipwrecked in feudal Japan along with a few other survivors of the
Erasmus, a Dutch pirate ship he helped pilot. By order of publication,
Shōgun is the third book of the series, but by internal chronology it is the first. It is also, far and away, the most commercially successful book in the series. By 1980 it had sold more than 6 million copies and become the source of one of the most successful TV miniseries in history. It was preceded by
King Rat (1962) and
Tai-Pan (1966). It was followed by
Noble House (1981),
Whirlwind (1986) and
Gai-Jin (1993).
Grady Hendrix's 2017 book
Paperbacks From Hell admirably chronicles the way that a single novel-Ira Levin's
Rosemary's Baby in 1967-created a boom in cheap paperback horror novels that flourished throughout the 1970s and 80s.
Shōgun was the
Rosemary's Baby of a somewhat similar publishing phenomenon. It triggered a boom in massive historical adventure novels set in Asia but generally featuring English-speaking protagonists, usually either Americans or Britons. I've long been a big fan of these books which, for lack of a better term, I refer to collectively as 'The Children of
Shōgun.'
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