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Anna Sawai: ‘I Have This Weird Confidence’
She could become the first Japanese actress to win an Emmy for her lead performance in Shōgun. But she’s keeping her cool.
Shōgun had been dramatized once before as an NBC television event in the ’80s starring Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro Mifune, but Kondo and Marks’s version inverts the source material by shifting its emphasis away from Blackthorne and toward its Japanese characters — including, and especially, Lady Mariko. Mariko starts out the series in limbo, the daughter of a disgraced samurai who wants to honor her family’s memory by ritual suicide but is denied a redemptive death by her bitter husband, Buntaro (Shinnosuke Abe), to whom she’s bound by societal structure. It’s part of a steady wave of cross-national productions and imports exposing American audiences to more subtitled programming than ever before — Squid Game, Call My Agent!, Pachinko, Tokyo Vice, reality shows of all languages — and a testament to the globalizing influence of the streaming era.
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