Ooku vol. 2

Title: Ooku Vol. 2
Author: Fumi Yoshinaga
Publisher: Viz
My take: A second volume that lived up to its first in every way.

Spoiler-free thoughts: Volume 2 doesn't exactly pick up where Vol. 1 left off - the first book ended with someone seeking answers with a historian, but instead of staying with them, this volume takes place entirely in the past.



Life in the Inner Chambers is just as brutal then as in the "present" of the story, but the situation is far less certain. The Redface Pox is a fairly recent development - one that's killed most of the young men in Japan. This time, the story follows a young Buddhist Abbot who's on a journey to Edo, having been summoned there by the Tokugawa Shogunate (I hope I'm getting the terminology correct). He thinks the reason is just to present himself, as he's newly taken his position, but what he finds is more dangerous than he could have imagined.

Once more, the book does an astoundingly good job of showing the violence and cut-throat nature of the inner chambers without getting too graphic - there are both murders and rapes that take place but they don't play either one up for gore/shock value.

In the first volume, the world had already adjusted to the Redface Pox, but in this one, there were also moments of seeing how the change was taking place. It really added to what we learned in Vol. 1. However, Vol. 1 actually wasn't much needed to understand and enjoy Vol. 2. If alternate histories intrigue you, this may be worth picking up.


Spoilery info: When this series was recommended to me, it was billed as an alternate retelling of Japanese history with the male and female roles reversed, but that's not quite it. I don't want to get too much into Vol. 1 (I'll probably reread it before too long and I'll review it then, all out of sequence and junk) but some of the setup is helpful. The Redface Pox took out a majority of the men in Japan, and as it went forward, only a few men make it through childhood and into child-fathering age. This means those that do are to be protected. They don't do much manual labor, and they don't tend to be the heads of their households. Marriage is a right reserved for the richer women, while men of lower classes have been put into brothels of a sort, so women who wish to have children have an option - pay and pray.

This has obviously made changes in the officiating structure as well, and in Vol 2 we find ourselves faced with the first of the female shogun. However, at this point they're mostly hiding the fact that she's a woman - she was the illegitimate (and only) child of the previous Shogun, and at this point the hope is not to have her rule, but to have her bear a child who can then rule after her.

The main character, the Abbot Arikoto, comes to Edo thinking he's just visiting as a formality. However, the woman who is watching over the young female Shogun called him for a different reason - thye cannot find a man she is pleased with, and they brought him in as a potential father to her child. When he refuses, they resort to stronger and stronger means, eventually killing one of his companions and threatening to kill the other. At that point, rather than be the cause of more death, he agrees to join the inner chambers.

The pacing of this part, the steps that are taken to try to make him agree, was one of my favorite parts, and one of the strongest. I won't go into too much detail because it really won't have as much impact in summary as it ever would in the story, but a number of dead bodies and one very tame sex scene later, we're into the inner chambers.

The rest of the book deals with three chief things - women coming to the realization that they must change their roles and their ideas of their roles, a nation coming to grips with the ideas that women may have to be encouraged to do men's work and the slow relationship budding between our two main characters. the Shogun reminds me in many ways of Akito from Fruits Basket, full of violence and arrogance and disdain to cover fear and confusions about her identity. I'll be honest, I don't really pity either of them beyond that their confusion was forced on them. Their actions and their attitudes, however tuned, are their own. This made a closing scene between she and Arikoto, which I think was supposed to be touching, was sort of uncomfortable.

Still, it was strong enough on other counts that I liked it quite a lot. It wasn't as feminist as I thought it might be given the subject, but it's still really, really strong and worthy of its Osamu Tezuka award.