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Shogun Anna Sawai Performance
Courtesy of Katie Yu/FX

THE PERFORMER | Anna Sawai

THE SHOW | FX/Hulu’s Shōgun

THE EPISODE | “Broken to the Fist” (March 19, 2024)

THE PERFORMANCE | You needed an eightfold fence made out of iron to contain all that Lady Mariko was feeling this week on Shōgun.

Just as Mariko’s connection with hatamoto John Blackthorne had reached a new depth, who emerged from the horizon but Buntaro, her heinous husband presumed dead during Lord Toranaga’s escape from Osaka. Adding to that considerable unease, Buntaro was told to share a roof with his wife and the Anjin, setting the stage for one of TV history’s great dinners.

As Blackthorne and Buntaro attempted to hurl barbs at each other, it fell on Mariko as translator to keep a peace between the men in her life, and Sawai showed the wheels turn-turn-turning with every clever turning of phrase. (“He says the sound you make while eating reveals the depth of your pleasure,” heh.)

But bigger cups of sake coupled with bigger taunts steered the evening in a decidedly darker direction. First, a blind-drunk Buntaro insisted on proving his bowmanship by firing two arrows within an eyelash of his wife’s face, to hit a target outside. Here, Sawai broke your heart by showing us Mariko’s resignation to being demeaned. When an aghast Blackthorne called out that antic, Buntaro commanded his wife to detail for the barbarian the “disgusting, filthy line” she hails from. Sawai had us rapt as Mariko, her voice laden with emotion, recounted the vast losses her family endured — as well as her inability to ever attempt any vengeance, all because “my husband orders me to live.”

Adding to Sawai’s incredible showcase this week, you had a cowered Mariko shrieking at Blackthorne to leave her be, when he found her beaten by Buntaro… Mariko later telling the Anjin how she will give her husband “nothing, not even my hatred, because that is what he merits”… and then their conversation just before the earthquake, where Mariko explained that while the pheasant may have “meant nothing” to Blackthorne, “your words gave it meaning” to others, when he suggested that to move it meant death — in this case, the gardener Uejiro’s.

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