Shogun is the long-awaited new novel by the author of the internationally acclaimed best sellers, Tai-Pan and King Rat. The setting of Shogun is Japan in the year 1600. The principal figures are John Blackthorne, whose dream is to be the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, to wrest control of the trade between Japan and China from the Portuguese, and to return home a man of wealth and position; Toranaga, the most powerful feudal lord in Japan, who strives and schemes to seize ultimate power by becoming Shogun -- the supreme military dictator -- and to unite the warring samurai fiefdoms under his own masterful and farsighted leadership; and the Lady Mariko, a Catholic convert whose conflicting loyalties to the Church and her country are compounded when she falls in love with Blackthorne, the barbarian intruder. Shogun is a glorious saga of the Orient. In dramatizing how a Westerner, the representative man of his time, comes to be altered by his exposure to an alien and exotic culture, Mr. Clavell provides a spellbinding depiction of a nation seething with violence and intrigue as it moves from the medieval world to the modern. - Jacket flap.