Toranaga and the falcon

Searched by Yoshi Naga, Toranaga's seventeen-year-old fifth son, Blackthorne enters the audience room and, against all custom, sits and stares at the man on the dais, who is imping a broken feather on a peregrine falcon. Toranaga meets the stare, then returns to the bird. Father Martin Alvito, "Tsukku-san", steps from the shadow as interpreter, and translates simultaneously, inflection and all. Toranaga's interrogation cuts through England, Portugal's vassalage to Spain, Protestant against Catholic ("a very stupid reason to go to war"), letters of marque, mercenaries and pirates, and the Dutch rebellion, which has one mitigating factor: "Unless you win." Alvito considers the heretic crucified by his own words. Ishido strides in with ten Grays, refuses the cushion he will "take one day", and mocks the ugly barbarian; Toranaga agrees he is worthless and has him put with the common criminals.

The interrogation scene, and the book's argument in miniature: information is the only currency. Clavell gives Alvito simultaneous translation so that the reader hears three minds at once. The falcon on Toranaga's fist is the emblem that will organise the whole novel's imagery of men as birds trained to the hand.