Shogun comes to an end with an elegiac final episode that subverts expectations and affirms its greatness. As Toranaga’s plan for victory is revealed, each character, for better or worse, meets their fate.

Editor’s note: while originally intended to be a miniseries, Shogun has been renewed for two more seasons. This review appeared the day after the season one finale, and was originally assumed to mark the conclusion of the series.

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We open on a scene of an aged and bedridden Blackthorne clutching Mariko’s crucifix. He is back in England, and lies old and half-senile while his grandsons marvel over the spoils of his return from the East, including his katana, chipped from “fighting a whole army of Japanese”.

Ok, you see where this is going. This is a dream. In reality, it’s still the storeroom of Osaka Castle in 1600, where Blackthorne and Lord Toranaga’s consorts kneel screaming in anguish over the body of Mariko as a traumatized Yabushige mutters a plea for forgiveness into the air. 

Soon after, political matters come to a head. Kiri no Kata and Shizu no Kata along with Toranaga’s other retainers and infant son are allowed to depart Osaka. Ishido rallies the council to declare open war upon the news that Toranaga has fled Edo in protest and now marches on them. Ochiba affirms that the Heir’s banner will accompany them, rendering Toranaga an outlaw.

Having fallen into the hands of the Christian Regents, Blackthorne is now marked for death. This is what he expects when, upon waking from his concussion a day after Mariko’s funeral, he is ordered to Osaka harbor by a retinue of Kiyama’s men.

But it is not to be. After promising Mariko during her last confession to save Blackthorne’s life, Fr. Martin has persuaded the Church to spare Blackthorne, albeit in return for a price he does not yet comprehend. Though initially scheduled to have been killed in the forest en route (so many bandits in this damn city!), he is allowed to rejoin Yabushige and the ladies upon the galley and sail for Ajiro.

Meanwhile, episode 10 permits Tadanobu Asano to bring one last lap of manic charisma to Shogun from Yabushige. I say “manic”, because from his first appearance after the cold-open, Yabushige has gone totally apeshit, obsessed with desperate last minute schemes to escape his inevitable fate.

Traumatized, he hallucinates (maybe?) and attempts to catch portentous catfish in the Osaka koi pond, collapsing in a hilarious last spasm of “the gods are laughing at me!” self-immolation. The days of “Kabuto Drip” are long gone. 

Though Ishido orders him to return to Ajiro and prepare for war, it’s clear the befeathered bushi’s days are numbered. This is only reinforced when the gang returns to Ajiro to find that the Erasmus has been burned, the price paid to the Portuguese in return for Blackthorne’s life.

As an increasingly desperate Yabu pleads with the Anjin to teach him to dive or even sail away with him to England, Blackthorne shakes his head, telling him to “pull yourself together, man”. John has his life, but the days when he had any prospect of bending “the Japans” to his will are over.

So are Yabushige’s. Immediately upon making landfall, Yabu is arrested by Toranaga’s samurai and brought before his liege lord, who has been informed by Omi. By begging forgiveness of Mariko’s spirit in the storeroom in the presence of witnesses, literally the only instance of remorse he has demonstrated all season, Yabushige inadvertently signed his own death warrant.

Time for a final will. Yabu’s deranged plea that Toranaga grant him a more interesting death than the standard seppuku is one of Asano’s finest moments all season (“let me be torn apart by cannon, or eaten alive by angry fish!”). 

It’s a testament to the man’s brilliance as a comedic actor that even as he stumbles toward his execution, Yabushige retains his remarkable charisma, so matter-of-factly ridiculous and unhinged that it’s impossible not to root for and against him at the same time.

In my episode 4 review I speculated that he would last this long only for Toranaga to kill him out of boredom in the finale, and that’s sort of what happened. But despite the innate tragi-comedy of Yabu’s demise, the show reworks his seppuku from the source material in a manner that actually enhances it.

In James Clavell’s Shogun#ad, Omi and Yabushige’s relationship is more antagonistic, with Yabu privately fearing Omi will outmaneuver him and seize lordship over the Kashigi clan. That is exactly what happens. After Omi reveals Yabushige’s treachery to Toranaga, Yabushige is likewise ordered to commit seppuku and is seconded by Omi.

That doesn’t happen in FX’s Shogun, and Omi’s motivations to rat on Yabushige are reduced to a clear-cut sense of moral duty rather than a desire for personal advancement. He even weeps silently at Yabushige’s death after his uncle says he was like a son to him. Rather, after requesting and being denied the right to have Blackthorne as a second, Yabushige asks Toranaga to second him personally, a shift that allows Yabu’s suicide to be merged with an even more pivotal scene from the book: Toranaga’s final monologue.

The novel Shogun famously ends with Toranaga’s interior monologue as his army plans to march on Osaka and meet Ishido in battle, when the reader is finally let in on his plans.

Far from shunning the title of Shogun, he has craved and maneuvered to attain the office his entire life, seeing it as his birthright as a Minowara [i.e. Minamoto]. It was he who burned the Anjin’s ship, both to appease the Portuguese and the Christian regents, and Mariko’s sacrifice which enabled him to turn the regents and Ochiba no Kata against Ishido. It was Mariko’ s fate to die gloriously for her lord, Anjin’s never to leave Japan, and his to be Shogun.

Added to this are darker plans the show omits—the coming persecution of Japanese Christians and the strict closure of the country under the Sakoku policy, which were historically imposed by his successors (cf. Silence#ad).

Clavell, as both a student of history and a survivor of Changi Prison as a POW during WWII, framed Toranaga’s project of national renewal in explicitly harsh and nationalistic terms, not out of a racist attempt to demonize the Japanese (for he described the book as “passionately pro-Japanese”), but presumably in an attempt to portray Japan, its people,  and its culture as inherently morally gray figures, embodying human contradictions and an ethos he admired but did not idealize, having encountered 20th century Japanese militarism first hand as a “teki” himself.

This monologue is merged with Yabushige’s seppuku in the show via a dialogue between the two, and though Toranaga still seeks to create a golden age for Japan based on peace, Yabushige pointedly raises the question of whether it has all been a sham based on hypocrisy.

Having spent the lives of so many to achieve his dream, a dream that merges the good of the state with his own personal attainment of total power and glory, is Toranaga the enlightened despot or merely despotic, the enslaver of Japan or its liberator? 

One month from today, Toranaga says, his army will meet Ishido’s at Sekigahara, and with Ochiba no Kata having written to him in secret to withhold the Heir’s banner, Ishido will be undone. With no legitimacy in law and the memory of Mariko’s death fresh in their minds, the Regents will rebel against the bureaucrat and Toranaga’s victory will be achieved before the first sword is drawn.

The show omits Ishido’s grisly fate in the novel—Toranaga will bury him to the neck and leave him exposed to the elements to die. But in Yabushige’s dissent, we are at last allowed to peek through a crack in the veneer. Toranaga will not simply back the Heir. Will he eventually kill him, as in real life and as he predicts he must eventually do in the novel? Unknown. But he does not deny Yabushige’s main allegation. Whether he has come around at last or lied all along, Toranaga will be Shogun. 

Did he always plan to seize power? Were we all fooled all along? Perhaps. And so it is fitting that to the last, after nodding to the Anjin as he salvages the wreck of the Erasmus off Ajiro beach, Toranaga remains inscrutable, our last shot of the series a view of the “great master of trickery” from behind as he looks off into the clouds, his secret third heart forever known to him alone.

What about Blackthorne, the man who has survived this long “not because he is important, but because he makes me laugh, and my enemies need a distraction?” Earlier in the episode, after Toranaga executes a few of the villagers of Ajiro for being “Christian spies” who burned the Erasmus (which Toranaga himself ordered. Who knows why he actually had them killed…), Blackthorne threatens seppuku in protest against Toranaga’s injustice, actually wounding himself in the gut briefly before Toranaga knocks the wakizashi from his hand. “If you’re finally done, then now go build me a fleet” he says, slapping Blackthorne on the back and ceasing his persecution of Ajiro. With this final test of responsibility (ironically, one of the most absurd moments in the whole series), Blackthorne has set aside his selfishness, his desire to “use” Japan, and his empty dream of returning home to a lifetime of regret. 

As the series ends, Blackthorne (after a moving farewell to Fujii),  works with Muraji, the men of Ajiro, and even a reconciled Buntaro to succeed in hauling the Erasmus from the depths. Anjin exchanges a nod with Toranaga, and the story of Shogun comes to an end.

We do not get to see the Battle of Sekigahara, as in the book, and in that this ending is sure to be divisive, but on the whole, I found it perfect. Crimson Sky already happened in episode 9. Shogun is over, but the golden age of the Tokugawa Shogunate (and hopefully, the Emmys) has just begun.

No work, not even a classic, is flawless, but despite a brief midseason dip, Shogun is a classic and will be remembered as a brief, glorious, and monumental triumph. And now, like a dream of a dream, it is gone. “Flowers are only flowers because they fall.”

All photos property of FX.

Benjamin Rose is a poet from Washington D.C. and the author of Elegy For My Youth (2023) and Dust Is Over All (2024).  He studied English at the Catholic University of America and is the winner of the 2023 O’Hagan Poetry Prize. From 2019 he has edited The Path. Buy his books here.

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