SOURCE: "The Sixth Episode in James Clavell's Asian Saga," in The New York Times, May 24, 1993, p. C16.

Below, Lehmann-Haupt provides a negative assessment of Gai-jin.

At the opening of James Clavell's intermittently absorbing but over-long new novel. Gai-Jin two previous works in the author's so-called Asian Saga collide with each other, producing a thousand pages of complications that never do get completely straightened out, although by the end the reader is happy to take a rest from them, at least until the three-pound sequel is born.

At the start of Gai-Jin which means foreigner in Japanese, Tai-Pan crashes into Shogun. On Sept. 14, 1862, three Englishmen and a Frenchwoman are traveling by horseback not far from Yokohama on the Tokaido the coastal toll road that joins the Shogun's forbidden capital, Yedo (today Tokyo), to the rest of Japan.

Not long after setting out, the riders meet two columns of samurai...