In the Service of the Shogun

Reading Cryns’s work is as close as we might ever come not just to living in feudal Japan, but to feeling the human heartbeat at its centre. – Justin Marks, co-creator and executive producer of FX’s Shōgun

In 1600, English helmsman William Adams washed ashore in Japan, and was interrogated by Tokugawa Ieyasu, Japan’s most powerful warlord and soon-to-be shogun. Far from executing Adams as a pirate, Ieyasu made him one of his most trusted advisers. This biography traces Adams’s rise from humble pilot to a position of immense influence in Japan’s foreign relations. It unravels the subsequent diplomatic manoeuvres of the Western powers in the shogun’s empire, and Adams’s eventual downfall.