''Nobody told me I didn't know how, and my wife told me I could,'' he said. Clavell wrote several movies and then, during a screenwriters strike in 1960, he decided to write a novel based on his experiences as a prisoner of war. I didn't know what a director did, but I knew I wanted to be one.'' Instead, he spent three years as a film salesman before moving to the United States and Hollywood.

''When I asked who he was, my wife told me he was the director. ''I saw this nasty little man in a chair and I noticed that whenever he spoke or got up a hush fell over the set and people rushed to do his bidding,'' Mr. Then one day his wife, April, a starlet in British motion pictures, took him on the movie set. By his own admission, he managed for years to bottle up his emotions about those years while he held a variety of jobs in his native England. Clavell's wartime experiences, it is something of a wonder that he decided to write about the Orient at all. But while the book was a huge commercial success, it was published long before the Clavell name became so well known. Clavell has lived and frequently visited Hong Kong, and ''Tai-Pan,'' his second novel, was also set in that British crown colony. Clavell's name is synonymous with Japan, and it may soon be synonymous with another part of the Orient, Hong Kong, the setting of his current best-seller, ''Noble House.'' Mr.

''In 1945,'' he said, ''I swore I would toss the first brick through the first Japanese Embassy ever erected in London.'' Clavell was an 18-year-old British artillery officer in Java, he was captured by the Japanese and spent three years in two prisoner-of-war camps, including the notorious Changi camp in Singapore. In saying that once he would not have welcomed the Emperor, Mr. So I wrote him a letter and sent it to the Japanese Embassy, saying I would like to welcome you to my country one time I would not have, but now I do.'' ''It was eerie, and I felt personally very badly. ''The British are usually very hospitable, but when he came there was almost no one in the streets at all,'' Mr. While James Clavell was writing ''Shogun'' in the early 1970's, the Emperor of Japan made his first visit to London.

1981 james clavell novel