#1 Milligan and the Samurai Rebels
The Shogun has been forced by the threat of Western firepower to re-open Japan to the outside world, while samurai outraged at this decision are scheming to topple the Shogunate and re-establish Imperial rule. Britain and France are fighting by every means except open warfare to establish themselves as the leading influence on the government of Japan.  Into this maelstrom steps Robert Seamus Milligan, a young British diplomat with a weakness for women and drink.
Milligan survives several real historical clashes plus a Royal Navy Commodore on the warpath, humiliation at the hands of a French spy, sex in the bath with a female Japanese aristocrat, life as a Satsuma samurai and a sumo bout against a homicidal maniac – thanks on more than one occasion to his Japanese servant, Miyazawa, and with much more credit than he deserves.

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#2 Milligan and the Reluctant Shogun
Rebel samurai are trying to restore imperial rule, while the Shogun's forces respond with the most ruthless of crackdowns. Japan is a bloodbath.
Britain and France are backing different sides in the struggle as they each attempt to establish themselves as the leading foreign power.
Robert Seamus Milligan, a British diplomat with a weakness for women and drink, believes he is about to settle down to a quiet life of married bliss in Yokohama. How wrong he is.
Deciding to join an excursion to the historic town of Kamakura, Milligan is once more pitched into the crucible of history. He narrowly avoids assassination and execution, befriends the most powerful man in Japan, behaves scandalously on more than one occasion in the Shogun's castle, joins the most bloodthirsty swordsmen in the country, breaks out of prison, and becomes an assassin. None of this was in the plan.