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Bring in the body stackers! The Ajiro villagers didn’t ask for this gross job, but when the impulsive son of a lord goes off script and transforms a throng of rival samurai into red paste, all they can do is stack the remains in a wagon and gripe about beastly cannon. The scenes that open a physically and emotionally quaking episode five of Shōgun chalk this up to the personal cost of the coming conflict, since Yoshii Toranaga has to discipline Nagakado once he arrives in the village with a full contingent of his army. All this kid did was hasten Lord Ishido’s pretext for an attack. “You so easily fell into their trap,” Toranaga tells his son as he conducts a hunt with his beloved birds of prey. “Broken to another man’s fist. Like a falcon, but without the beauty.” It’s a hallmark of the bushō to speak in incisive metaphor. But here, Hiroyuki Sanada also lets Toranaga’s serene veneer of chill purposely slip, because Nagakado needs to know he done fucked up. Still, what’s done is done. And the lord further continues to twist the two-timing uncle-nephew combo of Yabushige and Omi toward each other like two rusty barbs on a string of concertina wire.
With Toranaga’s arrival in Ajiro, the real revelation is that Lord Toda “Buntaro” Hirokatsu managed to fight his way out of Osaka. That’s right, Mariko’s seemingly dead samurai husband will now join her under John Blackthorne’s roof. The hatamoto and Fuji-sama both look to Lady Toda for guidance, but she does not address her and the Anjin’s nocturnal activities. Instead, the household’s attention and pinched nostrils turn to the pheasant, gifted by Toranaga, that Blackthorne lets hang untended to the point of rot. It might be a little taste of home for the Englishman, but it’s an awful blight on the locals’ constitution, and will end up being an even more dramatic sticking point.
In case Ishido and the rest of the regent council didn’t know about the cannon attack, Jozen’s severed head arriving by messenger is a pretty good indicator. And though they can’t decide on a replacement for Toranaga, they might not have to – Lady Ochiba no Kata (Fumi Nikaido), mother to young heir Yaechiyo, has returned to Osaka. Ochiba is no fan of Toranaga, nor does she suffer fools. (“Maybe ‘God’s kingdom’ is up your own ass, have you thought of that?” she told a Portuguese priest in an episode two flashback to the Taikō’s deathbed.) When the usually cold and calculating Ishido only offers stumbling promises that he’ll get things back on track, she immediately silences him. “The time for politics has come to an end. The Council will answer to me.” Toranaga had good reason to sequester Lady Ochiba in Edo while her sister, who’s married to one of his sons, gave birth. The mother to the heir is as ruthless and intimidating as she is beautiful.
Macho saké drinking challenges will only get you so far, and Buntaro’s tense first dinner at the Anjin’s pad quickly goes from veiled insults to drunken feats of strength. While the slo-mo shot of Buntaro’s arrows whipping by Mariko’s face and passing through shoji walls before burying themselves accurately in a post is cool, it’s also a harbinger of how combustible their marriage is, with the added volatility of Blackthorne and Mariko’s still fresh romantic dalliance. Blackthorne’s sense of honor manifests in a fumble, with his ignorance once again clashing with the ongoing reality of life in feudal Japan. All he takes from Mariko’s heartbreaking story about her late father being forced to murder her whole family is that she should leave Buntaro, who cruelly manacles her yearning for retribution. He does not see that her silence is not submissive, but itself a weapon. “I will give my husband nothing. Not even my hatred. Because that is what he merits.”
And it turns out Blackthorne’s ignorance has an even worse consequence. When he forbade his household to interfere with the smelly hanging pheasant, it forced Fuji-sama’s hand as his consort. In the reality of life in Japan, it was not she who put to death the elderly gardener who ended up moving it. It was the Anjin, whose harsh words had become village diktat. For every advance Blackthorne makes – ably training the cannon regiment, becoming familiar with their customs, and building his command of the language – his ingrained pride and stubbornness throws him back a step. “It is you who are imprisoned, Anjin-sama,” Mariko tells him. Imprisoned by his assumptions about the nature of love of order. “We live and we die,” she says, echoing the advice of Rodrigues in episode one. “We control nothing beyond that.”
And how. Because when a massive earthquake suddenly strikes the village, it threatens to consume the bushō himself.
When Toranaga is sucked into a chasm that was not there seconds before, the immediate danger negates any arguments over hatamato protocols and Blackthorne’s sudden desire to permanently depart Japan. Together with Mariko and Nagakado, he leaps into the tangle of uprooted trees and soil, and they dig with their hands until their lord’s body appears. He’s coughing, choking on dirt, and disoriented, but alive. We’ve heard it before – no yesterdays, no tomorrow, just today. And on this day, Toranaga crawls out of the rubble just in time to see half his assembled forces consumed by waves of shuddering earth. If there was silver lining to Nagakado’s rash cannon attack, it was that the action would draw out Ishido’s forces, away from the heavily fortified Osaka Castle and toward an entrenched Toranaga army, who would then be able to diminish their numbers. Now the Lord of the Kantō is at a greater disadvantage, one on which Lady Ochiba is sure to seize.
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.
