Clavell said he surprised himself by having Malcolm thus become bedridden and largely played out of the protagonist's role. He said he didn't plot his novels and that's how things just went, Angelique Richaud instead taking the protagonist's place in Gai-Jin.
I've been watching Brandon Sanderson's university lectures about scifi and fantasy writing and according to him, discovery writers -- such as Clavell -- struggle at writing endings. You can definitely see that in the Asian Saga. Plotters instead know how to end their stories but have more trouble with the middle part which in turn is the strength of discovery writers.
Like me, Clavell himself too was expecting Tess Struan "to arrive from Hong Kong on every damned boat". In her letters to Malcolm, Mrs. Struan is quite unhappy that some Catholic harlot, some French gold-digger (Angelique) is trying marry her son, the would-be third tai-pan of the Noble House, and get access to the wealth of the Struans'. I was almost certain that Tess would tell straight at Angelique's face what she thought of her and drag the still-underage (according to British law) Malcolm back to Hong Kong. Based on Tai-Pan, I hadn't expected for her to turn out be so loyal to the Struans and so oppose the Brock, her father's, trading company.
Regardless of what Clavell said about Angelique, I didn't consider her alone to be the protagonist. The novel spent as much time on her as any of the other main characters, whom all I considered to be undeniably interesting with maybe the exception of lord Toranaga Yoshi.
Yoshi's story seemed almost separate from the others as he rarely gets to interact with them. But he's an important character in the bigger picture, in how he thinks it's time -- lest they get conquered -- for the Japanese to embrace the technological advancements of the outside world. From which Japan was closed off with the rise of the Toranaga shogunate in Shōgun.
Gai-Jin, like Shōgun, has Japanese dialogue. There were few suspect words, partly again thanks to the Finnish translation, though at least gozaimashita was now spelled "properly". Clavell also had clearly learned a new word, baka ('fool', 'idiot') as the Japanese characters use it rather often.
There was one name, Gjokojama I think, that looked ridiculous to me. What is the gjo supposed to be? Gyo? If kyo becomes kio in Finnish romanization, why would gyo be gjo and not gio? Is the y really pronounced differently?
In Shōgun and Gai-Jin, the Japanese folk refer to karma when being fatalistic about something. (The Westerners start doing so too.) The Chinese have their own, somewhat same meaning word that was spelled dzoss in Tai-Pan. I think the word was at least once used by Malcolm in this book but I didn't first recognize it as it was spelled joss instead. That is apparently how it's in English and dzoss was meant for Finnish readers. I kind of suspected that.
It's dumb that the Japanese names' spellings in Gai-Jin try to follow Finnish phonemics yet joss was left as it was. I can't say I'm a great fan of Anja Haglund as a translator. In addition to Shōgun and Gai-Jin, she also did the translation for Noble House which I am currently reading.
It's a shame only two of Clavell's novels were set in the 19th century. It's such a romantic time period, even in a location so far from London... Traders gathering at a club to hear the latest news from Britain, to gape at how the good-for-nothing parliament has again raised various taxes. Everyone having been trained in the use of weapons due to necessity -- you can never know when the Asian natives start rioting. And the British Royal Navy always being ready scare them back in line if things get really bad.
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