Episode 5: ‘Broken to the Fist’
Sometimes there’s nothing worse than a miracle. On this week’s episode of “Shogun,” Lady Mariko is shocked when her lord husband, Buntaro, emerges unscathed from what seemed like certain death at the hands of Lord Ishido’s soldiers back in Osaka. Though a brave and formidable warrior, he’s also a emotionally and physically abusive husband. To Buntaro, being forced to share a house with a barbarian like John Blackthorne is like living in the monkey house at a zoo. What he would do if he found out about the clandestine dalliance between Blackthorne and Mariko is all too obvious.
Buntaro’s disgust with the Anjin is easy enough to explain. But his contempt for Mariko — on display during a drunken target practice when he laces arrows millimeters past her face —is part and parcel of his contempt for her entire family. In violation of virtually every shibboleth governing the conduct of samurai, her father assassinated a brutal lord for the sake of the realm. Mariko’s entire family was executed for it — by her father, who committed seppuku after being forced to carry out the act. Mariko wished to fight and die to avenge this injustice, but Buntaro has ordered her to live. She does this while offering him no emotional response to his importunities whatsoever.
To Blackthorne, who cannot fully grasp the concept of the eightfold fence, it sounds like a miserable existence — and to be fair to the Anjin, Mariko has given him little reason to believe otherwise. “You’d die to avenge your father,” he says. “You live in anguish to spite your husband. What becomes of you?” Does she not crave the freedom of self that Englishmen like him enjoy? She wouldn’t enjoy that kind of freedom, Mariko retorts, because it’s a prison of its own. “If freedom is all you ever live for,” she says, “you will never be free of yourself.”
By the time they have this bitter conversation, Blackthorne has come to rue intensely what he perceives to be Japan’s absence of freedom. In an attempt to capture the flavors of home, he allows a pheasant to rot outside his house — the better, he says, to prepare it for stew. For a while, the bird’s stench and the flies it attracts are the stuff of comedy, as is Blackthorne’s complete inability to talk to his consort Lady Fuji about it without Mariko around to translate. (His inability to make himself understood absent Mariko’s aid will become important later.)
The miscommunication, however, turns fatal. Seizing the few words he knows, Blackthorne hyperbolically says that anyone who touches the pheasant in defiance of his wishes will die. The servants have no choice but to take his words literally, just as they have no choice but to remove anything that upsets the harmony of the village as much as that stinking bird.
So it falls to Blackthorne’s favorite employee, the old gardener Uejiro (Junichi Tajiri), to dispose of the bird, and then kill himself for disobeying the Hatamoto. Blackthorne is naturally horrified. Had anyone asked him — had anyone been able to ask him, that is, and had he been able to reply — he would have simply said it was no big deal. Instead, Uejiro died for nothing.
But his death turns out to serve a vital purpose for Lord Toranaga’s cause. As the jockeying for power between Toranaga and his son Nagakado, on one side, and Lord Yabushige and his nephew Omi continues, the latter two have been hunting for Toranaga’s spy in their village. That spy, Muraji — who isn’t a humble fisherman at all, but a samurai working a deep cover assignment for Toranaga — uses Uejiro’s death and the chaos of an earthquake to plant incriminating documents in the wreckage of the deceased servant’s home, ending the search.
Blackthorne is distraught when he learns what has happened. You can read in the eyes of the actor Cosmo Jarvis not just Blackthorne’s grief, but his fear — fear that a similar misstep will cause a similar tragedy. The rules may be different for a ship’s pilot leading his crew and a Hatamoto running his household, but responsibility is a commonly held concept.
The best thing about “Shogun” is that the sword of ignorance and understanding cuts both ways. Consider the entire geopolitical situation surrounding the Anjin’s arrival. Despite his canniness, Lord Toranaga had no idea the Portuguese were building a secret army using Japanese Christian soldiers in order to cement their so-called ownership of Japan. Toranaga, too, did not understand the ways of a dangerous foreign culture, and people died for this as well.
More deaths may be on the way. Returning from Toranaga’s captivity, Lady Ochiba no Kata, widow of the daimyo and mother of the Heir, arrives in Osaka and promptly takes command of the squabbling council of regents. With this one confident maneuver, she establishes herself as a more formidable opponent than Lord Ishido. That’s unlucky for Toranaga, Mariko and Blackthorne. But I have a feeling that if you like the look of those “Lord of the Rings”–size armies and encampments, it’s lucky for you.
By now, all Blackthorne wants to do is take his ship and his crew and go home. He feels he’s upheld his end of his deal with Toranaga. But following that punishing conversation with Lady Mariko, she refuses to translate accurately for him anymore, and his pleas go unheeded.
But John Blackthorne has a talent for being in the wrong place at the right time. His shipwreck on the shores of Japan placed him in grave danger, but it was also what gave him the chance to alert Lord Toranaga, the closest thing Japan has to a ruler, to the perfidy of his Portuguese allies. He winds up a prisoner, but his imprisonment allows Toranaga to delay, and then escape, his impeachment and execution.
Now, just moments after Mariko sabotages his request to leave, he bears witness to an earthquake and a landslide — the kind of natural disaster that horrified him when Mariko first told him about such occurrences.
The landslide gives Blackthorne the opportunity to spring into action, find Lord Toranaga buried beneath the dirt and help drag the man to safety. The Anjin slaps Toranaga on the back a few times until he coughs up the last of the dirt blocking his airway, and then gives Toranaga the swords gifted to him earlier by Lady Fuji, an act just as impressive to this audience in its way. Once again, by finding himself in a jam, Blackthorne is also perfectly positioned to prove his worth to the man on whom his life depends. He is the luckiest unlucky man on television.