GAI-JIN by James Clavell

Author of SHOGUN and TAI-PAN

"Back to feudal Japan, which now enters the modern world, from the master of the three-decker behemoth (Shogun, Tai-pan, Noble House etc.). GAI-JIN is peopled with larger-than-life comic-strip characters caught up in Japanese exotica and international business deals as well as of internecine warfare. A sequel to Tai-pan (1966), this is the sixth novel in Clavell's Asian saga and takes place in 1862. The gai-jin (foreigners) have arrived, intent on doing business with the Japanese. With laws against the use of the wheel in carriages or carts, the Japanese, their tradition- bound Emperor and competing warlords detest the foreigners, who have ruined the Chinese with the Opium Wars. The mighty Struan shipping empire, Noble House, has built a base in Yokohama, but with the illness (fatal) of Culum Struan, tai-pan (head) of the business empire, 20-year-old Malcolm Struan stands ready to become tai-pan. In the first chapter, however, he's attacked by samurai assassins on the Tokaido road and lies either bedridden or hobbles about for the rest of the novel. Young Angelique Richaud, 18, Parisienne daughter of a gambler who has lost what money the family had, sets her eye on Malcolm. Angelique is raped by a rogue samurai and now secretly carries his child, unbeknownst to the love-besotted Malcolm. Angelique's syphilis-stricken fellow Frenchman Andre Poncin wends his way through the plot toward a glorious love-death with his Japanese mistress while Japanese warlords fight each other, samurai behead samurai, earthquakes shiver, and Yokohama burns.

James Clavell's breathtaking picture of nineteenth-century Japan is a tour de force. The seeds of twentieth-century history are here. But over and above, Gai-Jin is a monumental novel of people and passions that are strong and simple as love and death.

A hard cover book of 1019 pages in impeccable condition.

Sold of behalf of Te Arai Beach Preservation Society Inc.