The Last Shogun

I have a big interest in the Meiji restoration, the period when Japan was forced to open up to the world, so Ryotaro Shiba's novel about this period, The Last Shogun (1967) was of great interest to me. However, the novel was very much historically based and therefore something of a slog since there were so many characters and historical references there were not as familiar to me as I would have liked to have enjoyed the novel to the fullest, but an interesting portrait of Yoshinobu Tokugawa, the last Shogun to serve as Japan's leader.