Part of the Asian saga written by James Clavell, Gai-Jin focuses on the many lives of the inhabitants of the coastal European legation stationed in Japan around the mid-1800's. Along with these gai-jin, or outsiders when translated into English, there are Japanese officials and rebels trying to come to terms with an ever changing situation that these foreigners bring within their sanctuary. What you get is a rich, textured story that interweaves the lives of these two opposite forces.

This is Clavell's true strength as a writer. His ability to merge a compelling personal story with historic fiction, to yield an adventure that is intriguing. Yet on this particular outing it can be frustrating at the same time.

While you do have a sense that this is a total continuation of his previous works and timeline, the end result comes out as a disjointed tale from the beginning that somehow becomes compelling into the last few pages of the book.

What truly rambles the enjoyment of the book, in my opinion, is the choice by Clavell to introduce too many characters at the beginning of the book. This really limits the reader's attempt to attach themselves to a centralized character. Throughout my read, I didn't feel connected to any single character, we jumped through the thoughts of so many of them. In turn it made the story seem scatterbrained and loose--and in some cases downright confusing.

Also, I felt that some key characters needed to be more important and proactive in the story, particularly Malcolm Struan and Toronaga Yoshi. These were both counterparts of each other. Leaders in their own spheres of influence and central characters to their own cause. Yet in the end, they both felt misused and almost unimportant to the end of the story. As much as these two main people failed to provide a satisfactory conclusion in their own storylines, the secondary characters were actually more rewarding than Yoshi and Malcolm--most notably Angelique and Edward Gornt. Again, keeping the story line intact for you pleasure, these two players come out of nowhere and create a very surprising life to the book's end.

And that's when you feel like Gai-Jin makes a comeback, by book's end. Once a key event midpoint through the book happens, all of a sudden the turmoil between foreigners and Japanese begins to sizzle and create a riveting read. It almost feels like the book should really have cut off 400 pages from the beginning and start at that key event. This is when Clavell really takes his true form and writes with wit and cleverness. The story lines between characters begin to intertwine and thus create a much more compelling read. You actually start to root for people, and find surprising compasion for others.

And this is a shame that most people will be dissapointed with this piece of work. It really is a labor of love to finish it, and in my opinion it really does a good job of pulling you back in. Does the end give you an outstanding conclusion? No I don't think so, but it does give you a conclusion that you can sleep well on. It doesn't force to give you granduor, but it finishes with a conclusion that gives you enough to not feel cheated.

If you have read the previous works in this saga, then I say finish this one off. It will satisfy in the end. If this is your first outing, this will try your patience and you're better off starting at Shogun and start where Clavell was at his finest.

Otherwise a good read if you can get past the beginning.

Amazon should be ashamed to charge us for their Kindle edition of Gai-Jin. The story is OK (not up to Clavell's usual but OK) but the editing for electronic Kindle is so distorted & corrupted that it took me over 3 weeks to read this one book (and I usually read 1-2 books a week). Spellings were consistently wrong - example: Malcolm's nickname is MAL but was consistently MALE thruout the book. Punctuation wrong to the point that I had to re-read not just the sentence but sometimes several pages to figure out what was happening or who was speaking. And there were some words that were so distorted that even SpellChecker could not have helped & I just gave up trying to dicipher the word. Personally I would like a credit to my account.

Great story that ties Shogun with his Noble House books. My only problem is the huge amount of typographical errors. Almost every paragraph has some sort of error. I am almost embarrassed for the publisher. I'm hoping my other Kindle books from Clavell won't be so messy.

James Clavell is a wonderful storyteller. Anyone interested in Japanese history and their rich culture should pick up one of his novels. Tai-Pan is a good place to start. The saga also encompasses the British and Chinese cultures that had such a tremendous influence over this unique country. You won't be disappointed.

I really enjoyed this book, from James Clavel's Asian saga, the same style as in his other books, easy to read, interesting, describes very good asian traditions and customs, good entertaining.