Purtroppo questo terzo libro è per me un grosso NO.
E mi dispiace, perché come sempre l'ambientazione era ottima e le possibilità c'erano.

Ma non so.

Sarà che il ritmo della storia era lentissimo, saranno i personaggi che non mi hanno preso per niente, sarà che l'unico interesse che ho trovato era nelle lotte politiche giapponesi, sarà che l'arrivo di un Deus Ex-Machina enorme mi ha deluso enormemente.

So solo che per buona parte del libro la lettura si è trascinata stancamente, senza interesse, e solo nel finale le cose sono tornate a scorrere più o meno agilmente.

Un vero peccato, dopo Shogun e Tai Pan.

This is far lesser Clavell. Seemed silly and uninspired.
3 stars

Not my favorite James Clavell book. He does a great job of describing this time period In Japan, but not so great a job making us fall in love with the characters. They did not have the depth as the characters in Sho-Gun or Tai-Pan. I was very excited to read all the little Easter eggs from the other books. I wish there had been more descriptions of the descendants of Toronaga and Anjinsan.

This book got "okay" about a thousand pages in.

Never thought I would ever say that about any book... but alas, that's where we are. For a book titled "gai-jin," Japanese for "foreigner" I was extremely saddened by the fact that the plotline revolving around the Japanese and other foreigners took a backseat to a romance plot that just ultimately was not satisfying. The characters in the book, for the most part, paled in comparison to the likes of Toranaga and Mariko (of Shogun) and Dirk Straun (of Tai-Pan). And it was both cliche and tiring to read passages after passages of basically just men leering and fantasizing about the main female protagonist, and the two (TWO!) rape scenes just... I just didn't care for it.

Meanwhile, the "gai-jin" plotlines were decent, the machination fascinating in aspects but tedious in others. And you'd think, at almost 1500 pages long, James Clavell could have found a good resolution to that plotline, but instead, we spent most of the last 200 pages of the book going over the romance plotline, and wrapped up the gai-jin plotline in two pages... a mockery of a book titled Gai-Jin...

All in all, an unbelievably poor entry into the Asian Saga, and I hope the next book in the series will do much better. Unless you're a completionist, I would not recommend this book.

You really can't read every word of this book, there's just too many, but you have to be careful. Clavell has a habit of starting a scene in the present, and then jumping to the recent past, so it is difficult to figure out who is talking to whom, and about what. And when people die, it's so fast, a sentence here and there, with no preamble. Pages and pages about the least little thing, but blink, and someone has died. And so much of the story is 3rd hand, a character describing to another character what happened. Oh well, I started the series, and I want to finish it.

Third, chronologically, in Clavell's Asian Saga though the last to be published. Amazing work illustrating the clash of contrasting cultures.

Third, chronologically, in Clavell's Asian Saga though the last to be published. Amazing work illustrating the clash of contrasting cultures.