of hatamoto and samurai, as he begins to understand and deeply respect Japanese culture. However, to complicate matters, he starts to fall in love with the interpreter, Mariko, and they eventually become lovers. Though Blackthorne asks Toranaga to sever Mariko's marriage so she will be free to marry him, Toranaga refuses and orders Blackthorne never to speak of the matter again. In spite of this, Blackthorne becomes a trusted friend of Toranaga. At the end of the book Toranaga defeats Ishido's forces (this is a reference to the Battle of Sekigahara) and becomes shogun. Though Toranaga secretly had Erasmus burned and beached, he permits Blackthorne to begin constructing another ship as a way to keep him occupied, but also determines that he will never be allowed to leave Japan for the rest of his life. It can be assumed that Blackthorne eventually dies in Japan without ever having returned to England. Although Blackthorne's later life is never covered in any real detail in Clavell's later Asian Saga novels, Gai-Jin (which features Malcolm Struan the Tai-Pan heir to the Noble House of Struan's) mentions that Blackthorne later built ships for Shogun Toranaga, and had families in Nagasaki and Izu. One of Blackthorne's Nagasaki descendants, Shin Komoda, is mentioned as having been a samurai who died in a brawl shortly before the events in Gai-Jin take place (during the early 1869s). Komoda and his wife Gekko had one son, who was sent to live with his grandparents shortly after Komoda's death. It is also revealed that Blackthorne is later used by Toranaga to destroy Osaka Castle after the Battle of Sekigahara. In Clavell's novel Noble House, a minor character named Riko Anjin makes a brief appearance. When main character Ian Dunross (Tai-Pan and a descendant of the Struans) notes her blue eyes, she relates a family legend that she is descended from a shipwrecked Englishman who became a samurai. Dunross considers the story implausible. Blackthorne, John Blackthorne, John Blackthorne, John Blackthorne, John