Shōgun’s sixth episode is appropriately titled, “Ladies Of The Willow World” and is focused heavily on the cast’s female characters, including the important backstory of Mariko (Anna Sawai) and her once-friend Ruri—now Ochiba No Kata (Fumi Nikaido)—the mother of the heir to the Taikō.
We already learned bits and pieces of Mariko’s troubled past. Her father, Lord Akechi Jinsai, murdered the previous shōgun and was forced to execute his surviving family members and commit seppuku (suicide) as punishment. He did this because the former shōgun was an evil tyrant who needed to be stopped.
We learn more in the latest episode. It’s clear that Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) had a hand in this assassination. We see him very clearly restraining Jinsai at one point in one of the flashback sequences. Later, Ochiba No Kata tells Ishido (Takehiro Hira) that while Jinsai killed her father, it was Toranaga who planned the whole thing. This is why she hates him so much and is urging the regents—more like forcing the regents—to destroy him, though she has such disdain for these men that she tells Ishido plainly that she doesn’t think he can win.
We have a couple important moments with Toranaga and Mariko and Mariko’s spiteful husband Buntaro (Shin’nosuke Abe). Buntaro begs forgiveness for his actions at the Anjin’s house and Toranaga is clearly unhappy with him, telling him he’s disgraced himself and his lord. When Buntaro complains about his wife’s coldness, Toranaga exclaims “Then divorce her!” but Buntaro is stubborn. You see a flicker of his humanity now. He tells Toranaga that he thought she’d be grateful that he kept her alive, but all she asked for again and again was death. She is all ice to him, but she shows Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) a different side. Long, unhappy marriages can make anyone angry and bitter.
When Toranaga later speaks with Mariko, she tells him she doesn’t understand why—if her father had big plans for her as Toranaga suggests—he married her so badly. “You didn’t know?” Toranaga asks, surprised. Her father sent her far away to keep her safe, knowing that he was about to carry out his heinous but necessary regicide. His big plans were that she could come back and finish what he started.
Toranaga also asks Mariko why Ochiba wars against them with such hatefulness. Mariko replies that men go to war for all sorts of reasons. Conquest, revenge, etc. Women simply go to war. It’s a poignant conversation, and Toranaga is clearly impressed by Mariko’s insights.
At the end of the episode, when news of further strife in Osaka reaches them—the murder of the only regent left resisting Ishido and Ochiba—he summons his war council and declares that Operation Crimson Sky is happening. This is a plan long in the works to storm Osaka with tremendous force and overwhelm its defenses, forming a new government with Toranaga as shōgun. He claims he never wanted the title, but it is part of his family’s legacy. And if Ochiba is right, and Toranaga did plan the assassination of the previous shōgun, he may be playing a longer and more subtle game than he lets on. “His secret heart is not secret to me,” Ochiba tells Ishido.
One of the best scenes in the episode involved Blackthorne and Mariko paying a visit to a “Tea House” (aka, fancy brothel) so that Blackthorne could spend the night with a famous courtesan, Kiku (Yuuka Kouri). The Tea House is called Willow World, and Blackthorne is introduced to a very different kind of brothel than he’s accustomed to. Mariko is there as translator and spy for Toranaga, but the rumors of her and the Anjin’s closeness have preceded them. After a ritual sake pouring and some discussion of what the Willow World means—Kiku’s words about abetting pain leaving Mariko clearly shaken—she invites both of them to the private room. Mariko declines, and Blackthorne follows the courtesan alone, brushing his hand over Mariko’s on the way. He clearly would prefer a night with her, but cannot refuse Toranaga’s gift.
Nor can he refuse Toranaga’s other gifts: a fiefdom with an annual salary and the position of admiral over Toranaga’s cannon regiment. He tries but his Japanese host refuses him. Blackthorne asks to be allowed to attack the Black Ship of the Portuguese, who he claims are their common enemy. Toranaga is confused why he would attack a friendly nation. Blackthorne’s protestant war against the Catholics is not exactly the same as Toranaga’s against the regents and Ochiba, though Blackthorne wants to make them part and parcel. Elsewhere, the Jesuits wonder if they have made the wrong allies.
In the end, even despite the heavy losses Toranaga’s army took during the earthquake last week, war is on the horizon. Not a defensive one, either, but an assault on the Osaka itself. Wars of the heart are also underway. Jealousy abounds. I only wish we had more than four episodes left.
One last note on Ochiba’s backstory. We get some of it through flashbacks, and then we get a really interesting dramatization of the past, in which a Lord Ito plays the former Taikō. Ishido asks Lord Ito to become the fifth member of the council so they can finally impeach Toranaga.
The play was quite fascinating. It shows the Taikō defeating Jinsai after the death of the former shogun, but we know already that Jinsai killed himself. The Taikō has been lauded by just about everyone as a powerful man and leader in his own right, but in Ochiba’s memory of him, he was anything but. His wife could not give him an heir, so she employs Ochiba to do it instead, and the brief scene of the leering old man foisting himself upon her is deeply unpleasant.
Ochiba tells Ishido that he tried with countless women. Courtesans, other noble born women, anybody really. None could give him a child. She asks Ishido if he knows how she did it when nobody else could manage. She tells him she forced fate to look at her and then scratched its eyes out. I think the meaning here is fairly plain: Ochiba did not somehow mystically test fate; she found some other man to put a baby in her. Whoever the heir is—the boy Ishido claims is being plotted against and how Toranaga claims he’s sworn to protect—he is not the Taikō’s son.
In any case, what a tremendously awesome series this has been so far. I keep forgetting it comes out on a Monday, though, and so I keep getting to it late. I’ve also been binge-watching The Fall, which I’ll have something about soon. It’s a bit older, but a terrific serial killer drama.
You can find my Shogun series premiere review right here. I reviewed the next four episodes all together in this in-depth review. I’ll try to have my next Shogun review up on Monday!
P.S. If this was written by George R.R. Martin, Toranaga would die in one of the upcoming episodes because he is, in many ways, the Ned Stark of Shogun. He holds everything together.
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