Shōgun: Part Two (Asian Saga, #2)

by James Clavell

“Pillowing always has its price. Always. Not necessarily money, Anjin-san. But a man pays, always, for pillowing in one way, or in another. True love, we call it duty, is of soul to soul and needs no such expression—no physical expression, except perhaps the gift of death.”

Lord Toranaga understands me. He understands everything.”

no nation on earth could conquer China, and no one could civilize China, which had been civilized since ancient times.

We’re taught from childhood to disappear within ourselves, to grow impenetrable walls behind which we live. If we couldn’t, we’d all certainly go mad and kill each other and ourselves.”

Even our language has nuances you don’t have which allow us to avoid, politely, any question if we don’t want to answer it.”

Why is it the female hawk, the falcon, is always bigger and faster and stronger than the male, always better than the male?

“Isn’t this your great opportunity to become Shōgun?

A man can die for his lord only once in this life.”

Toranaga had always preferred experienced women, widows or divorced wives, but never too pretty or too wise or too young or too well-born, so never too much trouble and always grateful.

What’s Shinto?” “Ah, that is inexplicable too, so sorry. It’s like a religion, but isn’t.

A son’s first duty is to his parents. Of course. Sons are given everything by their mothers—life, food, tenderness, protection. She succors them all their lives. So of course it’s right that a son should heed his mother’s wishes. The daughter-in-law—she has to obey. That’s her duty.”

with her, the cruelest, most grasping harpy I’ve ever met, may she be reborn a back-passage whore of the Fifteenth Rank.”

All our best things have come from China,

“Let us pray together, Brothers. Satan is in our midst.”

“Are you deaf? Don’t you understand the simplest thing anymore?”

“It must be terrible to be born barbarian—terrible,”

Tonight I came to see my friend and now I have no friend. So sad.”

It had taken all his strength to continue acting the stupid dullard, to hide his unbounding excitement over the secrets, which, fantastically, promised the long-hoped-for reprieve.

“If he’d said that to me I would have removed his head! At once!”

Men need to share secrets. That’s why we’re superior to them and they’ll always be in our power.”

I suppose they’re talking the Holy Fathers’ language again, he told himself. Hideous language, impossible to learn.

There’s no defense against an assassin if the assassin is prepared to die.

many women marry men who disgust them.

You’ve more sons than a Portugee’s got lice.”

death is thy aim,

She conquered Ishido. Lady Toda won.

all debts and friendships were canceled.

How can anyone believe their religious nonsense?”

This was the soothsayer, the Chinese envoy, who had foretold that the Taikō would die in his bed leaving a healthy son after him, that Toranaga would die by the sword in middle age, that Ishido would die in old age, the most famous general in the realm, his feet firm in the earth.

What impertinence, she was thinking. As if I’d take a peasant to husband.

his estate outside Naples where, mixed with sea smells, would be the perfume of lemons and oranges and warm new breads cooking, and pasta and garlic and abbacchio roasting over the coals,

the priests were part of the betrayal,

“I was shocked with their morals and mistresses and greed and pomp and hypocrisy and lack of manners—and

This world is a vale of tears

You are a worthy samurai. And you have a quality that’s rare here: unpredictability. The Taikō had it, Toranaga-sama has it too.

A pawn can become a queen—but

“To forgive your enemy is stupid.”

“Christians are born in sin, we’re not. We’re a civilized people who understand what sin really is, not illiterate peasants who know no better.

“Now please excuse me, I must consider my death poem.”

they’ll cannibalize themselves soon, so they’re nothing.

how sensible we Japanese are to know that a child is not a proper child until thirty days after birth

I, alone, am heir to the realm. I will be Shōgun. And I have started a dynasty.