The Asian Saga is a series of novels by James Clavell, set in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Iran over a period from 1600 to 1979. The novels don't form a single continuous story, but are linked together by recurring characters, and their descendants, and a theme of examining interactions between Asian peoples and Westerners.The novels, in chronological order, are:
1600, Japan: Shogun (1975)
1841, Hong Kong: Tai-Pan (1966)
1862, Japan: Gai-Jin (1993)
1945, Singapore: King Rat (1962)
1963, Hong Kong: Noble House (1981)
1979, Iran: Whirlwind (1986)
Shogun, Tai-Pan, King Rat and Noble House have been adapted for film and television (with the Shogun miniseries/film starring Toshiro Mifune being the best known adaptation), and Shogun was also adapted as an Infocom computer game and a Broadway musical. Also there was a strategy game based on Tai-Pan for many platforms, including ZX Spectrum.
Quillian Gornt from Noble House is a primary antagonist, and yet somewhat charming in his own way - he's a son of a bitch, but he also has quite a way with women. In fact, after he drowns (between Noble House and Whirlwind), Ian Dunross retires from being Tai-Pan of the Noble House because life is just too boring without his archrival there to compete with.
His ancestor who founded the Gornt company is a big character in Gai-Jin, and while he isn't exactly evil, he wastes no time in trying to get Malcolm Struan's widow to jump in bed with him. Even though he founds the company which becomes the Noble House's enemy, you can't help but like him, if for no other reason than he has balls.
Author Avatar: Peter in King Rat and Noble House is based on Clavell himself.
Author Existence Failure: The series was allegedly supposed to continue, but Clavell died in 1993, not long after Gai-Jin was published.
Badass: Too many examples to list, but from Whirlwind the Finnish pilot Yokkonen who fends off a mob of protestors with a fire axe, punches his way through a road block, convinces his captors to follow him in storming a fortified compound and rescuing his wife. Also, the one commando who liberates the prison camp in King Rat.
Benevolent Boss: Dirk Struan of Noble House knows all too well what conditions on ships are normally like, so he makes sure to pay wages on the day, in silver, and equips his ships with the best of everything. Sailors fight for the chance to work aboard one of his ships.
Canon Welding: King Rat was originally not part of the Saga; although it's set in Asia, it's different in style (and much shorter) than the others. Then the protagonist showed up as a supporting character in Noble House...
The love story between Dirk Struan and Mei-mei is a legend in Hong Kong.
Tess Brock, now known as Hag Struan, is used to scare children, and the knife she stabbed into her father's portrait is left there for fear that she return from the grave to wreak vengeance on those who would disobey her.
Several prominent Hong Kong brothels have a bidding war for Dirk Struan's great-great-great-great-great-grandson's virginity, believing Struan to have been the pinnacle of manhood.
In Noble House, the Struan empire is shown to have strong ties to Toda Shipping, and one of their Japanese associates is a woman named Riko Anjin. John Blackthorne was given the name "Anjin" in Japan, and Mariko Toda was his lover.
Cruel and Unusual Death: In Shogun, Ishido (Ishida Mitsunari's Expy) is buried up to the neck in mud, and random passers-by are invited to take turns sawing away at his neck with a bamboo saw. It took days for him to stop screaming and finally die.
Domestic Abuse: Several characters are this by modern standards, but are completely normal for the time. The Victorian-era Tyler Brock is shown to occasionally threaten his wife with violence, but they nonetheless have a very close relationship and are very happy together. Buntaro is well within his rights to hurt or even kill Mariko by samurai law, but Toranaga is still angry with him for beating her up because she's his only interpreter, and when he chastises Buntaro he criticises him for his short-sightedness and lack of self-control rather than saying it's wrong for him to beat his wife. Buntaro is also a somewhat sympathetic case, as he does genuinely try to control himself and reconcile with her, and Mariko explicitly says that she deliberately angers him with her eternally polite and icily deferential behaviour.
Determinator: Most of the main characters in each book go through hell and only come out in one piece thanks to this. It is noted in Tai-Pan that successful ship captains tend to be this by default.
Tai-Pan: One of Dirk Struan's most notable characteristics is that he'd rather die or have his family hate him than lose face in front of his colleagues and enemies. His methods for getting around this problem is one of the things that qualify him as a Magnificent Bastard.
Being set in cultures where face is very important, quite a few characters from various books fall into this.
The Fundamentalist: Whirlwind is full of them (unsurprisingly, since it's set during the Iranian Revolution). Shogun also has quite a lot of fanatical Christians (both Catholic and Protestant) which again is to be expected due to the setting. Tai-Pan and Gai-jin have a few, but they're not really a plot point.
Genre Savvy: Toranaga and Dirk Struan both have a lot of this, which is why they are the resident Magnificent Bastards of their books.
Actually, quite a lot of characters have some level of this, which is to be expected since they are mostly reasonably intelligent people who have been doing their jobs for a long time. One of the few exceptions to this is William Longstaff from Tai-Pan, who is an Upper Class Twit who has been trained for European politics and is totally out of his depth in the fledgling Hong Kong.
Going Native: In Shogun, John Blackthorne, to the point that he find his former companions "alien".
Gratuitous Japanese: Despite being used incorrectly sometimes; in one egregious case, one character of Shogun wants to beg another not to kill someone, but she uses "dozo", which means "please [suit yourself/ go ahead]" instead of "please [don't do that]".
Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: While many of the romances are between Westerners and East Asians, and so some difference in size is to be expected, Blackthorne, Dirk Struan and Erikki Yokkonen are explicitly stated to be big even by Western standards, and some of their lovers are small by Eastern standards. Malcolm Struan and Angelique Richard also have this dynamic even though they're both European, so the author seems to be fond of this trope.
Kangaroo Court: Whirlwind has a huge number of people executed by the hastily set-up and completely untrained religious courts, who often don't even understand their own religious laws particularly well. In one case, the victim was actually set free by the court, but the guard escorting him out applied his personal interpretation of God's will to a random occurrence and led him to the firing squad instead.
Ninja: Shogun features a ninja attack at one point. They fail to kill Mariko/Gracia Hosokawa only because she commits suicide.
Noble Bigot: Given that one of the main interests of the series is the clash between vastly different cultures, it's no surprise that there are many very prejudiced characters who are highly admirable in other ways. Some of them grow out of their prejudices (to one extent or another), while others don't, but are still fundamentally good people.
Personal Seals: Show up and become plot points in the expected fashion.
Plot Coupon: The four broken coins given to Dirk Struan by Jin-Qua. Each half coin allows the bearer to ask one favor of any size of Noble House. One of them was used to get Chiang Kai-Shek out of China when the Communists took over.
Pretty in Mink: Venus Poon in Noble House complains about her lover promising her one, until he finally gives it to her.
Self-Made Man: Both Dirk Struan and Tyler Brock started with nothing and worked and schemed their way into being two of the most powerful men in Asia. Their backgrounds and attitudes put them at odds with many of the upper class politicians and soldiers they have to deal with, and their exasperation with their blinkered social superiors is one of the few topics on which they completely agree.
Linc Bartlett and Casey Tcholock from Noble House also fit this, though they at least come from an era where this was less shocking.
Soap Opera: The adaptation of Noble House plays a lot like the nighttime soaps that were popular at the time.
Subverted by Blackthorne who attempts it but lives to tell, still getting benefits as it raises other people's opinion of him.
Played straight by Mariko, who commits suicide before being killed by ninjas, and before killing herself she states that her death shall be seen as seppuku. It does, and since her master Toranaga's Batman Gambit depended on her commiting suicide, he wins his bets and becomes shogun.
Also played straight by Yabu, who has his treachery revealed at a time when he has also ceased to be useful, and is ordered to do this by Toranaga. For all his many faults, everyone who attended the suicide said his was the most dignified and graceful they had ever seen.
Spank the Cutie: May-may gets spanked twice by Dirk Struan; the first is when she ran the risk of getting herself killed to visit a specialist hair dresser, and the second is when she feels she has disgraced herself in front of her lord, and the best way for her to regain her face is to stoically take her punishment, so Dirk very carefully whips her just enough for her face to be restored.
Whirlwind also has a moment when Sharazad is temporarily unhinged by the shock of her father getting murdered by the revolution she supported, until her husband snaps her out of it with this. To be fair, he tries talking, then shouting, then gently slapping her face before he does this.
Smug Snake: Quite a lot of examples from every book, which is unsurprising in a series where virtually everyone, regardless of competence or intelligence, gets involved in the Gambit Pileups. Probably the best example is Yabu in Shogun, who is repeatedly shown to believe that he is stronger and cleverer than Toranaga. He is very wrong.
The Starscream: Yabu is determined right from the start to betray Toranaga and take his position. Toranaga is fully aware of this, and plays him expertly to keep him loyal, at least until he doesn't need him any more and is provided with a convenient reason to get rid of him...
The Bad Guy Wins: One possible interpretation of Shogun, depending on whether you consider Toranaga to be the bad guy or not. He is unquestionably power-hungry, ruthless, manipulative and has no regard for keeping solemn promises he made in the past, but his combination of genuinely caring for certain people coupled with being an all-round Magnificent Bastard of the highest order makes the reader more likely to overlook his bad aspects. It doesn't change the fact that he is arguably the darker shade of gray in the Gray and Gray Morality of the book.
Troll: In Tai-Pan, Dirk Struan; he throws a lavish ball with a huge prize for the best dressed woman in the then near cultureless Hong Kong, knowing that every female European on the continent will do nothing but nag their husbands into insanity for weeks before hand about buying dresses/getting their hair done etc.
Very Loosely Based on a True Story: All of his books (with the possible exception of Noble House) are based on real historical events, and their protagonists on real people, but the names have all been changed, along with anything else that got the way of the story.
The Noble House is based on Jardine House, and the events depicted in the novel as one week in the 60s were in fact several years in the same decade for Jardine.
Yamato Nadeshiko: Mariko Buntaro both subverts it (refuses her husband in private instead of being subservient to him) and plays it straight ( prefers death rather than renouncing to her ideals). Then again, she is an expy of Gracia Hosokawa who was an Ur Example of the trope.
Yank the Dog's Chain: In Shogun, Toranaga is never going to let Blackthorne leave Japan. Ever.
Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: In the Shogun miniseries, used as a Translation Convention. Portuguese (and/or Japanese and Dutch, depending on the POV character) is rendered as contemporary English. When Blackthorne and Mariko slip into Latin, however, it's rendered as Ye Olde Butchered Englishe. "I say thou art beautiful, and I love thee!"
You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Lots of characters try this, with varying degrees of success. One instance which works, and is carried off so well it appears on the Crowning Moment of Awesome page, is Toranaga offhandedly ordering Yabu commit seppuku.
Upper Class Twit: William Longstaff from Tai-Pan is not totally brainless, but he is very set in his upper-class English mindset and not very decisive, and as such is completely out of his depth when dealing with self-made traders and Chinese ambassadors in the fledgling Hong Kong. When he has to deal with European politics, he is noticeably more adept. Dirk Struan even comments that he would be equally out of his depth at any court in Europe.
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