Spoilers follow for the fourth episode of ShÅgun, “The Eightfold Fence,†which premiered on FX and Hulu on March 12.
Strict etiquette, rigid ceremony, and a pervasive understanding of how to behave dictate everything in ShÅgun. This is a world of genteel courtliness, in which regents exchange bows and endearments by day and send killers after one another by night in demonstrations of calculated, personal violence. There is an honor and order to all this that must be maintained for the system to function. And in the thrilling, nauseating, transformative final minutes of “The Eightfold Fence,†all of that decorum is literally blown to pieces.
For most of ShÅgun’s first four episodes, political maneuvering is the narrative priority. Yes, a man is boiled alive, bandits’ throats are slit, and a three-way battle breaks out between feuding regents’ convoys in the middle of the night. Yet far more screen time is devoted to Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) tricking the Council of Regents and its leader, Lord Ishido Kazunari (Takehiro Hira), into delaying their impeachment of him; the regents bickering over what to do about shipwrecked Londoner John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) and the Protestant threat he poses to the country’s Catholics, converted by Portuguese missionaries over the years; and Lady Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai) serving as Blackthorne’s translator and sharing his intentions and plans with her liege lord, Toranaga. At some point, Toranaga will make his move, but probably not from the little fishing village of Ajiro, where so many of his allies are hiding out, and certainly not for weeks or even months.
Until then, nearly everyone in “The Eightfold Fence†thinks they have time. Time to prepare: Mariko tells Blackthorne that Toranaga expects it will take six months for the pilot “Anjin†to train the Japanese army in “foreign tactics,†in particular how to use the cannons Toranaga claimed from Blackthorne’s ship, the Erasmus. Time to strategize: Lord Kashigi Yabushige (Tadanobu Asano), who is playing both sides of the Toranaga-Ishido rivalry, is increasingly irritated by Toranaga’s absence from Ajiro and unsure of how to prove his loyalty to Ishido, who believes Yabushige helped Toranaga escape Osaka. And time to approach a future death in the heavily ritualistic and honor-driven way that is customary to this culture in this time: Yabushige considers going to Osaka to turn himself in, knowing that the regents will, worst-case scenario, at least let him commit seppuku; Lady Usami Fuji (Moeka Hoshi) agrees to be Blackthorne’s consort for six months but plans to kill herself afterward to join her husband and son in the afterlife.
The cannon attack, though, interrupts this sense of nebulous Hereafter to ground the story in a fatal now. It’s in character for Toranaga’s son, Yoshii Nagakado (Yuki Kura), to start a war to prove himself; in all their father-son interactions, Toranaga is chastising Nagakado for his hotheadedness. It’s also in character for the scheming Lord Omi (Hiroto Kanai) to trick Nagakado into recklessly acting outside his own self-interest if it could actually benefit Omi and his uncle Yabushige. ShÅgun lays the constitutional groundwork for the scene well, but there’s no way to anticipate what the final moments of the episode will actually look and sound like — how visceral, how sensorial, how graphic.
When Nagakado turns the cannonballs against Ishido’s messenger, Nebara Jozen (Nobuya Shimamoto), and his samurai, the projectiles and chain shots rip through bodies and upend the performative civility with which the regents are supposed to treat one another. Horses and people are split into pieces. Blood spurts out of where some limbs used to be, while bone sticks out of other parts. The precise aim that the cannons had previously exhibited while smashing far-off targets during training is just as effective on the living, scattering corpses haphazardly on the ground, the camera capturing the askew angles found in death. Exploding cannons and agonized screams are the soundtrack of a polite society being ushered into a new, more indiscriminately brutal age, one that Nagakado meets with foolish confidence, Omi with a nefarious grin, Blackthorne with outsider confusion, and Yabushige and Mariko with informed despair.
This raising of stakes could never have happened if Blackthorne hadn’t landed in this country, if he hadn’t brought these more advanced weapons with him, and if his very Protestant presence (and the information he shares with Toranaga about Portuguese claims on Japan) hadn’t helped spark a bitter religious conflict. The “eightfold fence†that Mariko told Blackthorne the Japanese build within themselves to guard their secret feelings from the outside world is rendered useless here; the cannon attack is too shocking, the danger it brings to Toranaga and his allies too dire, for anyone here to hide their reactions to it. To understand the impact of the episode-closing cannon attack, a more suitable comparison than the eightfold fence can be found in an earlier scene. As Mariko explained to Blackthorne after the Brit experiences his first earthquake — to the practically shrugging Mariko, “a babyâ€; to him, an amazing shock — “Death is in our air and sea and earth. It can come for us at any moment.†Think of Yabushige’s repeated drafting of his final will and obsession with pinpointing the moment that separates life and death: The likelihood of cataclysmic shifting has taught the Japanese that, to a certain degree, they “control nothing†— even with all the rites and traditions they use to exert some power over the unknowable, the possibility of random death is a constant.
And yet: Random death by geological happenstance isn’t the same as random death by surprise massacre. “This is not how samurai fight. You’re savages, all of you,†Jozen yells before Nagakado cuts off his head, and his shock is not necessarily at the treachery of this strike; we’ve seen ambushes, abductions, and assassination attempts in ShÅgun already. But all of that violence goes on at night or behind closed doors — nowhere as brazen as on a battlefield in the middle of the day, with no announced terms, and without the approval of one’s liege lord. Nagakado’s act not only breaks myriad societal rules and goes against combat protocol, but it heralds a destruction of the established order; there’s no intimacy, no comparison of merit or speed or skill, to a cannonball offensive lodged from hundreds of yards away.
Toranaga was aghast at Blackthorne using the word belongs when describing how the Catholics consider Japan, and here we see the explosive impact of foreign interference, how an invention and ideology from another place can be more infectious than an invasion. In “The Eightfold Fence,†that friction turns combustible, serving both as a warning about breaking with tradition in a place so steeped in it and as a step forward into the next phase of the ShÅgun story. War is coming! But more broadly, change is coming, and that may prove even more destructive.