Shogun is about four times longer than it needs to be. There are all sorts of tangents, including a boatload of irrelevant stuff about Catholic priests that had nothing to do with the story. Pages and pages were spent on Japanese love-making and the samuri code of honor that resulted in dozens of suicides and murders throughout the book. Clavell is a careless writer, leaving all sorts of logic gaps and inconsistencies, but the basic plot, with all the junk eliminated, would be pretty good.