2025 SAG Awards Red Carpet Armani Gown Turns Heads

The audience learns a similar amount with this approach, perhaps, but Anjin learns less and has less agency, and the book’s two key relationships — the evolving romance between Anjin and Mariko and the odd, testing friendship between Anjin and Toranaga — are left thin. I wondered several times if 10 episodes of nearly an hour apiece was sufficient to tell this overall story properly.

“Simmering exasperation” is the thing Jarvis plays best, even giving the show some of its few moments of humor. But however amazed this outsider might feel in a land that was the stuff of rumor and legend, Shōgun doesn’t fetishize Japanese “otherness.” Every time Anjin is horrified by what he’s experiencing or witnessing, however flummoxed he gets by the foreignness of his surroundings, there are just as many times Japanese characters get to be perplexed or just plain grossed-out by his eating habits or hygiene.

March 1, 2025 | 6:19 am