Shogun
The greatest adventure book ever written. This is the first serious book I ever read when I was 13 years old and started both my lifelong love of reading and my interest in Japanese culture.
James Clavell is a 20th century English writer who wrote a number of excellent adventure stories based in Asia, including Tai-Pan and Noble House. But Shogun is the best, and the first one you should read because this story is chronologically the first in the series.
Shogun is a great and gripping story on many levels. As an adventure novel about the Portuguese crew that gets shipwrecked off the coast of Japan and has to survive. About the culture of Japan in the time of the Shogunate. It's a series of great love stories, especially the one between Blackthorne and Mariko.
But more than anything else this is a book about philosophy, about learning to see the world in a different way, based on a code of behavior and morals completely different than what you have been exposed to.
This is the book to give your
