Review: Ōoku by Fumi Yoshinaga

Product Summary

In Edo period Japan, a strange new disease called the Redface Pox has begun to prey on the country's men. Within eighty years of the first outbreak, the male population has fallen by seventy-five percent. Women have taken on all the roles traditionally granted to men, even that of the shogun. The men, precious providers of life, are carefully protected. And the most beautiful of the men are sent to serve in the shogun's Inner Chamber...

First Impressions

I first heard of Fumi Yoshinaga's Ōoku when it won the Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize in 2009. I was initially intrigued by the concept—during Edo period Japan a pandemic breaks out, inexplicably cutting the male population by three quarters and leaving the country rudderless in terms of leadership.

A new paradigm driven by survivalist nature is set in motion--roles and occupations that were traditionally carried out by men are passed instead from mother to daughter. Young boys, deemed too fragile to work in laborious conditions, are pampered and raised with extreme caution. Marriage becomes nothing more than a commodity as bidding wars are frequently engaged in over men of the highest rank and station. Other men turn to prostitution, making a living selling their bodies to women desperate to bear children.

Leading Japan through this crisis is the shogun, another position taken up by a woman in the call of duty.

Into this intriguing backdrop enters Yunoshin Mizuno, an impoverished young man and son of Hakamoto, a high ranking and well respected samurai. With his family's begrudging approval, (they'd prefer he take a wife) Yunoshin enlists into the Ōoku, the male dominated inner chambers of the shogun's fortress. He does this with a resigned fate, knowing the Ōoku code forbids ever leaving the castle walls.

The current shogun, Nobu, is perhaps my favourite character. She is a leader of great personal strength and willpower; one who shuns the luxury afforded to her and rejects unnecessary grandeur. A great deal of the later half of the plot surrounds her attempts to reduce the frivolous (and costly) Ōoku traditions in an attempt to make things more practical and efficient. The plot becomes particularly interesting when Yunoshin draws the eye of Nobu, who invites him to her bedchamber...

I do have one tiny gripe with this manga, and that is the over-abundance of "thee", "thou" and other purposefully archaic and lordly language. I am forgiving, however, as I suspect this is a mark of the English translators rather than Fumi Yoshinaga's original work. For those who are unfamiliar, in Japanese there are several archaic honorifics that were used in the days of the samurai for addressing one another. What I suspect happened is the following: because there is no proper English translation for many of these antiquated honorifics, the translators felt limited in how they could still express the period of Edo Japan. In order to compensate they threw in a great deal of archaic English honorifics in the hopes that it would retain some semblance of the subtle Japanese nuances. It didn't. Thankfully I managed to disregard this after twenty or thirty pages. If you tried, I suspect you could too.

As for the artwork, Ōoku is varied in that it wavers back and forth from incredibly detailed and decorative panels to a sort of clean simplicity. Regardless, it is aesthetically pleasing and easy on the eyes.

Final Thoughts

A lovely infusion of fantasy into one of Japan's most fascinating historical periods.