Episode 4: ‘The Eightfold Fence’
Last week’s episode dropped the ball when it came to depicting visceral combat. This week’s fired it straight at the enemy and pulped them.
In the bloody climax of this episode, Lord Nagakado (Yuki Kura), the untested young son of Lord Toranaga, decides to make a name for himself by blowing the visiting enemy forces of the Lord Ishido to bits with John Blackthorne’s frighteningly precise cannons. Virtually every witness to the slaughter, including Blackthorne and Lady Mariko, is aghast, the double-dealing Lord Yabushige most of all.
The exception is Yabushige’s equally calculating but somewhat less comical nephew, Lord Omi, who was by Nagakado’s side when he made the fateful decision to ambush the Ishido samurai, a distraction that keeps his dad’s battle plans under wraps. The young lords have drawn first blood in a war that threatens the entire nation — Nagakado for family pride, Omi for pure ambition.
Where this leaves Blackthorne is anyone’s guess. He’s fulfilling the bargain he made with Lord Toranaga to train a regiment in the Western ways of war. To the best of his abilities, anyway. Since he doesn’t know anything about infantry tactics, he shows them how to use English cannons instead, arguing that a naval bombardment can breach walls faster than any besieging army can.
But Toranaga does not appear to be honoring his end. He departs Lord Omi’s village almost as soon as he arrives, leaving Blackthorne without the access to his men and his ship that Toranaga promised.
Blackthorne can hardly believe what he’s offered instead. Befitting his status as hatamoto, he’s granted a house of his own — a prison with better accommodations, he says — and a consort in the form of Fuji, the bereaved mother and widow. Neither is thrilled by the arrangement, but they make the best of it, culminating in an exchange of gifts — his best pistol, her father’s swords — that leaves them both fumbling for words.
Defending the household is one of a consort’s many duties, and Fuji shows her mettle by pointing a gun at Lord Omi on Blackthorne’s behalf when there’s a dispute over him carrying his own weapons. Disputing with the Anjin is one thing, but a high-ranking woman like Fuji is no one to trifle with, whether or not she actually knows how to use the gun she points.
While Fuji does not bed down with Blackthorne, at his insistence, Lady Mariko eventually does. Her feelings for the Englishman fluctuate wildly throughout the episode. Early on, she becomes righteously angry at Blackthorne for putting his beef with the Portuguese Catholics above serving Toranaga’s interests, whatever they may be.
But Blackthorne’s decency toward Fuji clearly impresses Mariko. So does his naked body, of which she gets an eyeful when she stumbles upon him preparing to bathe in a hot spring. There they sit back to back, and using increasingly tender, sensual dialogue, he walks her through what it might be like to spend an evening in London as his guest. In part he’s joshing her, saying he’d take her right to the queen. But he’s not kidding about going to the theater and enjoying a good tragedy, just as she does. And his near-poetic reverie about walking along the Thames seems to transport her right there.
Yet it might be his praise of her fortitude that truly plants the seeds. When you look at a house that’s been knocked down and rebuilt by one of Japan’s natural disasters, he explains, you don’t see the ruins, you see the house. Whatever happened to ruin Mariko’s life in the past, including the recent death of her husband, she has managed to rebuild herself. The two face away from each other throughout the conversation so that solely words bridge the distance between them. Through this arrangement, the writer Emily Yoshida and the director Frederick Toye paradoxically heighten the sense that the characters are closer than ever.
That night, Mariko sneaks into Blackthorne’s bedroom, wakes him up, undresses and makes her move. Having been roused from snoring slumber, it’s seemingly all he can do to convince himself he’s not having some kind of erotic dream. After the back-to-back conversation at the hot spring, Mariko’s forwardness, and the blustery, seen-it-all Englishman’s shock, are a seductive departure from their norms. The actor Anna Sawai, who plays Mariko, is also a leading player on one of the most romantic shows of recent memory, the Godzilla-based series “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,” where she also expertly communicates intimacy, affection and attraction.
Even so, her finest moment in the episode — a necessary precursor to her eventual softening to Blackthorne — sees Mariko’s thoughts take an entirely different direction. Echoing earlier dialogue from Lord Toranaga, she explains the concept of the eightfold fence, an impenetrable psychological-emotional wall she says Japanese people are taught to construct within themselves. Never mind the smiling and bowing, she tells Blackthorne: Inside their heads, the people he sees performing cruel or obsequious acts may well be miles away. Even as Mariko says all this, a look in her eyes obscures her true feelings about what she’s saying, and to whom she’s saying it.
You can see why she comes to Blackthorne in the dark, and why she and Fuji have agreed to the polite and utterly transparent lie that it was a courtesan, not Mariko, who visited him. Letting your heart out from behind that fence for any length of time is a bad idea.
