Toranaga learns the hornpipe

Bathed, Blackthorne is so happy he dances a hornpipe for the maids Rako, Asa and Sono. Toranaga walks in, demands the dance, learns it, strips to his loincloth and dances beside him, then gives him his own brown kimono with the five scarlet crests. Blackthorne leaves at dusk for Yedo with Kiri. Left with Mariko, he describes Felicity to the maids, then explodes when Mariko offers a woman and, failing that, a boy ("Do I look like a God-cursed sodomite?"). Mariko and Blackthorne quarrel over sin and pillowing; she hides her contempt under honeyed apology. Father Alvito, waiting with the rutters, remembers the Taikō's death poem, "a dream within a dream". Toranaga, alone with him on the dais, offers Jesuit exclusivity, church and cathedral, if Onoshi and Kiyama come over within forty days. When the priest has gone, Toranaga dances a hornpipe.

Comedy as instrument. The hornpipe is the first scene in which Toranaga is playful, and Clavell frames it so that the reader sees the daimyo learn a man by imitating him. The quarrel with Mariko over pillowing fixes their starting distance. Toranaga's dance alone at the end tells us he has already decided.