I love history and was really impressed by Clavell in Shogun and Tai-Pan, though I never understood the need for renaming the true historical characters such as Tokugawa vs. Toranaga, etc...In any case - this book is horrendously slow. The last half is just being plain awful. It fills like Clavell was being paid per word and had to come up with as many of them as he could describing totally ordinary events that hardly deserve mentioning, while leaving aside so much that could be very interesting.Definitely NOT RECOMMENDED, especially if you value your time.