A sort of linking novel between Shōgun, Noble House, and Tai-Pan, Gai-Jin continues the story of the British in Japan with particular interest in business and politics in Hong Kong. Crossing these distinct cultures at a crucial junction in history, the story transports us into the minds of leaders and significant change-makers within each Asian political camp, and several of the Europeans and Americans in their midst.

Amid the heating political tension, a young French girl is trying to gain her footing in this man’s world. She juggles her desire for love and her need to secure her future in ways that men never have to consider—and Clavell relates her innermost thoughts with astounding insight. All these spiralling stories rotate around our anti-heroine, Angelique Richaud, like a series of spinning plates, poised to fall at any moment and destroy her tranquility and all hopes for her future.

It is apt that in what should be the tenderest scenes of human intimacy here, the lights are dimmed, the deed is done in violence or in secret shame, and the air often reeks of death or the threat of death. I found the contrast between unsatisfactory intimacy and a steady looming threat to be a poignant theme throughout this novel, and it makes it all the more real at the brink of our modern age. It is symbolic that the book opens with a dishonourable scene of murder which takes place out in the open, leading to a scene of rape in the shadows under the very noses of those who claim to be living in the light. This set the scene for the rest of this epic piece; if not exactly historically accurate (it is fiction), most definitely a realistic picture of 1862, at the dawning of the modern global age in Asia, most specifically in Japan.

It’s not my favourite of the series, though it remains some of the most fantastic story-telling of the 20th Century. This addition to the ‘Asian Saga’ series lacked the tenderness of those relationships the An-Jin developed with Toranaga-San and Mariko in Shōgun, and didn’t quite storm in with all the contrasting boldness of Dirk Struan and his vulnerable intimacy with May-May as in Tai-Pan. Equally, Toranaga Yoshi longs to live up to the ancient example of his forefather, yet never seems to get it right—and embarrassingly, the young Emperor is a shadow of what the man in the position had once been. Indeed, many of the characters in this novel were wont to be like the greater men and women who came in generations before, always striving and never quite feeling the satisfaction of arrival. Appropriately, as I read this incredible epic story, I also felt that I was always hoping for more, but constantly having to settle for a mediocre less.