The camellia and the challenge

In a new winged over-mantle Blackthorne walks to the Taikō's Great Hall, where five hundred samurai and their ladies watch him bow before the Lady Ochiba and Ishido. He congratulates her on her birthday, answers Ishido's sneer with "I am no longer barbarian", then lays a pink camellia before her. She accepts it, to applause. Mariko is called forward with her son Saruji; Kiyama, chief Christian daimyo, forbids Blackthorne his lands on pain of death. Asked for a poem theme, Mariko offers "On a leafless branch" and announces she leaves tomorrow with Kiri and Sazuko. Ishido forbids it; she calls herself Takashima, samurai a thousand years, "no peasant to be trodden on", and Blackthorne's hand goes to his hidden knife. A maid runs in: Yodoko is dying. She promises Blackthorne "tonight I will find thee". Kiyama comes with Saruji, hears the Onoshi plot from Toranaga's letter, and tells her she is the sacrificial lamb.

The birthday reception is theatre inside theatre: Blackthorne performs his Japanese and his camellia, and then Mariko performs the challenge the whole plot has been waiting for. Clavell writes her Takashima speech as a public act, so that Ishido's refusal becomes a matter of record. Kiyama's 'sacrificial lamb' is the reader's warning.