The 2024 series adapts James Clavell's 1975 novel, and its main decision is one of language: a large part of the dialogue is in Japanese with subtitles, where the 1980 miniseries kept the audience inside the English pilot's incomprehension. That changes who the story belongs to. Toranaga and Mariko become people with their own reasoning rather than a court the outsider is trying to read, which is available in the novel and had not been taken up on screen before.