The latter is depicted as the "good guy". He's an honorable and wise man who doesn't want to break the late taikō's last wish but is being forced by Ishido. Or at least so he claims -- Toranaga might be as despicable a schemer as the rest. I think it was a Portuguese character called Rodrigues in the novel who said something along the lines of:"The Japanese have five minds and three hearts." meaning it's nigh impossible to say what they truly think and desire. Toranaga is, however, definitely from the least hostile end among the Japanese towards the book's protagonist, John Blackthorne.
Blackthorne is a pilot, the first English one to make it to Japan. The Dutch ship he pilots, Erasmus, and her crew barely make the trip. Since the ship's captain is all but dead upon arrival, Blackthorne becomes the boss man and gets special treatment. He gets dragged in the daimyōs' power struggle due to his skill and knowledge in seafaring and the information he has about the Portuguese and Spanish who control silk trade between Japan and China.
After being separated from his crew and being exposed to the Japanese way of living, Blackthorne becomes ensorcelled by the culture. He wants to learn the language and customs. It's hardly surprising, considering how his life in Europe is briefly described. In comparison, the Japanese bathe regularly and are well mannered. When he later briefly reunites with the surviving crew of Erasmus, he finds them disgusting and uncivilized.
There are some conflicting things too for Blackthorne. He would like to eat meat but excluding fish, the locals find it revolting. Discussing bedroom activities openly offends Blackthorne, to the surprise of the Japanese. But the biggest issue he has is how little value human life seems to have. And I found it quite puzzling too.
A samurai can chop off the head of a lower caste person for no reason without consequence, the only punishment for any crime is death, and everyone seems to be ready to jump on their sword (or rather, cut their guts out) for even the smallest failure towards their daimyō. You'd think the samurai families would run out of members pretty quickly if Toranaga and his equals didn't often deny seppukus from their subjects.
I also found it curious how in the novel Jesuits seem to have been rather successful in their mission of proselytizing the Japanese. If that is accurate to real life, I wonder what happened. I don't think Christianity had so strong of a foothold in Japan later on. Although, even in the book, the Christian Japanese tend to be Japanese first and foremost -- older customs taking priority.
James Clavell was a World War II veteran, screenwriter, director, and a novelist but I don't think he was much of a linguist. There were quite a few oddities with the Japanese language in the novel. I also read it in Finnish which added another layer of suspect.
The book's Japanese characters have trouble pronouncing Blackthorne's name and instead call him by his profession, Anjin(-san). These days Blackthorne would probably get transcribed into Japanese syllables and become something like Burakusōon. (I love figuring out how English words would be spelled in rōmaji.) For some reason the Japanese don't appear to have trouble with the name of missionary Alvito, though. (Would be Aruito, maybe?) Rodrigues they also call Rodrigu-san, which doesn't seem quite right to me either.
Simple dialogue in Shōgun is occasionally written in romanized Japanese and some words have weird spellings. I don't know if Clavell was following some legit romanization rules or just winging it. Sentence-ending ne's are spelled neh, gozaimashita is goziemashita, and iie is iyé.
I don't know who came up with the idea that some Japanese words should be romanized slightly differently in Finnish, to better reflect their pronunciations, I guess. The Finnish language has a very consistent phonemic orthography. Thus having the same letter pronounced differently depending on word is not optimal. (I believe the dialogue in this translation of Shōgun is like in the original English novel but otherwise Japanese words use Finnish romanizations.)
Example: the rōmaji syllables yo and kyō. The y in them is different and neither even is the same as the y phoneme is in Finnish. The y in yo is like j in Finnish and the y in kyō like i. Thus in Finnish Tōkyō is romanized as Tokio and Yokohama as Jokohama.
The problem arises with rōmaji syllables such as jo. You can't spell the English j phoneme in Finnish and I'm guessing the person whose idea this Finnish romanization was, decided to just keep the j syllables as they were. It causes confusion when you meet a word like joshi in a Finnish text such as this translated Shōgun. You can't tell if it's joshi or yoshi in Japanese. A fool's errand, I say.
I had some trouble adjusting my way of reading -- which utilizes slight skimming -- to this book. For a good while I had to return few lines back every now and then to re-read because I had lost the track. The font size is small and line spacing tight -- I guess they wanted to squeeze the original paperback's 1152 pages into smaller space (though even then this translation is in two different volumes) -- but the formatting could've been clearer as well.
Clavell sometimes uses a long paragraph to describe something but then the last line in the paragraph is suddenly about something completely different. He also likes to switch viewpoint multiple times in a scene. Both were quite a cause of confusion for me if I had happened to skip ahead a bit.
I have all the full novels of Clavell's Asian Saga ready to be read and I think I shall do just that. Shōgun was actually the third book he wrote for it but in internal chronology it takes place before the rest. The next one in this chronological order is Tai-Pan.
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