Season 1, Episode 8: ‘The Abyss of Life’
Lord Toranaga is a sick man. Sick in his heart, grieving the loss of his son Nagakado, who died in a vain fight on his father’s behalf. Sick in his body, having contracted an illness on the long road back to Edo for Nagakado’s burial. The central scene of this week’s “Shogun” — perhaps the scene from the series so far — confronts vassal and viewer alike with an even more troubling question, one that it draws out for minute after excruciating minute: Is Lord Toranaga sick in his mind as well?
Toranaga gathers his vassals in Edo to certify his big decision. He will not authorize Crimson Sky, the plan to attack Osaka and overthrow Lord Ishido and the Council of Regents. Once the customary mourning period is over, he will dutifully march off to his execution, and many of them must join him in marching to theirs. He wants their signatures to this effect.
The vassals are aghast. Lord Yabushige and his nephew Omi are the only ones who sign before protest breaks out. The vassals have a duty to give honest advice, and their advice is that this course of action is madness. To go down without a fight over a charge — that Toranaga is conspiring to kill the Heir — with no basis in reality whatsoever? Surely it’s better to stay in Edo and defend their home turf, where they have the advantage over Ishido’s forces.
No, Toranaga says. That would destroy the city, just as surely as marching on Osaka would destroy the realm. The survival of their clan is secondary to the survival of Japan, he argues.
The vassals’ argument coheres in an impassioned challenge from Hiromatsu, Toranaga’s oldest and closest friend, who begs him to stop “throwing away all we’ve fought for.” Hiromatsu threatens to commit seppuku on the spot if Toranaga persists in his plan to surrender. Minute after tense minute, the two go back and forth, barely stifling their tears in a grim game of chicken — but Toranaga won’t relent.
“So you do believe in pointless death,” Hiromatsu says, seemingly stunned. “Your vassal dies in vain.”
“Then die,” Toranaga replies.
The ritual of seppuku has been described and threatened by multiple characters since episode 1, but it isn’t until this point that “Shogun” finally depicts the act in graphic, agonizing detail. Indeed, Hiromatsu’s death scene functions as a microcosm of the whole series: teasing us with the taboo thrill of violence, then really making it hurt when it sinks the knife in.
The good-hearted Hiromatsu is the canvas on which the sound and effects team paint a grotesque portrait of metal tearing through flesh and muscle and viscera, until the sword of his son Buntaro, who Hiromatsu has asked to “second” the act, severs his head. It rolls directly toward Toranaga, like a grotesque accusation.
Here’s your code of honor, the show seems to say. Choke on it.
But this magnificent scene plays a second, unexpected purpose. As noted above, Toranaga spends the episode radiating loser vibes. He’s in mourning — the Regents grant him several weeks to grieve, as per custom, before he needs to report for his execution — and he’s physically sick. In his every action, he appears to have completely given up. Earlier in the episode, he goes so far as to dispatch Father Alvito, the diplomatic Portuguese priest, back to Osaka to report that he’s accepted his fate. (But first he grants the priest land for a new church — right next to the red light district he’s ordered up for Gin and Kiku’s courtesan operation. There goes the neighborhood.)
Deploying the priest plants the idea that maybe Toranaga’s planning to fight after all. As Hiromatsu points out to Mariko, why send a messenger to Osaka to report your willingness to die if you’re already on your way there?
In his challenge, Hiromatsu seeks to root out for the group what they’ve suspected: that the trickster Toranaga has something else planned. But by forcing his closest friend’s suicide, he convinces them all that the fight is truly lost. Blackthorne and Yabushige, who’ve been getting along surprisingly well, immediately form an alliance and steal Blackthorne’s ship, with the intention of unilaterally attacking Ishido’s Portuguese allies.
It took Hiromatsu’s death to convince Yabushige, who’d previously rejected the idea, to spurn his feudal obligations in favor of waging warfare by the Englishman’s side. Blackthorne is compelled after finally getting what he’s been asking for. When he’s reunited with what’s left of his crew, he’s shocked at an old mate’s barbaric manner and rage against the pilot for landing them in this mess. Blackthorne has no real home with them anymore. Better to fight by the side of “a brave [expletive]” like Yabushige.
Aside from Gin, the one character who sees a brighter future ahead, everyone seems to contract Toranaga’s despair and defeatism. Doing his absolute best to be a decent guy, Buntaro performs a lovely tea service for his wife, Lady Mariko, then asks her to kill herself with him that night. If he’s surrendering to a death sentence, he figures, best to finally grant her wish to take her own life. That way they’ll die together as husband and wife.
But Mariko rejects this out of hand, and she tears down her entire internal Eightfold Fence to let her husband know exactly why. She sought death as an escape, not a way to be united with Buntaro forever. The rejection reduces the gruff samurai to tears. Only the pleas of his father that he remain loyal to Toranaga, uttered just before he chops the old man’s head off, keep Buntaro from killing himself.
There’s a certain poetry in the narrative role Mariko plays next. As a translator, it’s been her job to relay other characters’ ideas and desires to one another. In the episode’s big twist, she helps Toranaga reveal his true intentions to viewers.
After defeating him in an impromptu poetry slam, she reports on the doings of Blackthorne and Yabushige, who until that point had refused to abandon Toranaga.
“He’ll change his mind after today,” Toranaga says. “Hiromatsu made sure of it.”
That’s when it all hit me like one of the Anjin’s cannonballs. Toranaga and Hiromatsu planned the entire awful spectacle of the older man’s seppuku. It was the only way, Toranaga says, that they could convince Lord Ishido and Lady Ochiba back in Osaka that his surrender is legitimate — which, of course, it is not. The man plans to fight. Scratch that, he plans to conquer.
Hiromatsu sacrificed his life for this plan. Inadvertently, Nagakado did too, as the mourning period has bought Toranaga valuable time. Having extracted this information from Toranaga, on his orders Mariko then makes a surprise visit to Yabushige and Blackthorne’s getaway ship, where she plans to continue serving as translator — and helping Toranaga wage war for the future of Japan.
I’m always impressed by an episode of television that requires much of its cast to act at the highest emotional tenor available. This hour of “Shogun” asked this of the actors Hiroyuki Sanada as Toranaga, Tokuma Nishioka as Hiromatsu, Anna Sawai as Mariko and Shinnosuke Abe as Buntaro, all of whom ace the assignment. Even Hiroto Kanai as Omi shines in a smaller role that carries a lot of the reaction to the central narrative: Reeling from the fluky death of his good friend, his coming separation from the woman he loves and the impending surrender, he senses that the system to which he has dedicated his life is locked in meaningless free-fall.
Next week’s episode is portentously titled “Crimson Sky,” named after Toranaga’s big battle plan. For all the horror of Hiromatsu’s seppuku, the violence used in “Shogun” often lends clarity of purpose to those who wield it. Perhaps the battlefield is where these lost souls will find themselves.
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