Spotlight #5: Ōoku

English Title: Ōoku: The Inner Chambers
Japanese Title: Ōoku (“The Shogun’s Harem”)
Author: Fumi Yoshinaga
English Publisher: Viz Media (Viz Signature)
Manga?: Yes.
Novels?: No.
Anime?: No.

After reading a fairly positive review of Ōoku, I went out and bought it "sight-unseen." Yes, folks, Ōoku is one of those titles that comes vacuum-sealed in plastic wrap (at least at the major chain bookstores to which I have access and for which I have coupons) with a tasteful "PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT CONTENT" notice on the cover. Is it pornographic? Not at all. It's not even properly erotica, despite taking place almost exclusively in a harem. It's also not a "harem" (nor a "reverse harem") title despite taking place in a harem. It does involve sex, violence and plague, though. It is also really, really good. It has even won some critical acclaim, but you have to turn the tankoubon over to see the "Eisner Award Nominee" and "Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize Winner" notices. (Or at least that is the design I came across when purchasing.)

Volumes 1-3 only are currently available in English, so this post is limited to a discussion of those volumes.

Plot / Backstory: In Tokugawa era Japan, a mysterious plague called the "redface pox" has decimated the population of young men. Women take on more and more roles that formerly belonged to their sons and husbands, and girls start to inherit family enterprises. It becomes a major effort to produce family heirs, and men, as rare commodities, are protected and valued for their precious "seed." (This should ring familiar for anyone who has read Wen Spencer's highly enjoyable A Brother's Price.) The shogun becomes a female position, and she is served by a collection of rare, beautiful and frequently ambitious men in the "inner chambers."

Fumi Yoshinaga has received a good bit of attention over the last few years, especially for shounen ai titles like Antique Bakery, which showed up on YALSA's "Great Graphic Novels for Teens List" in 2007. (Antique Bakeryhas also been adapted into an anime, a live-action Japanese drama and a live-action Korean movie.) Beautiful men and food are a pretty common common theme in her work, and she has also produced a number of shoujo titles and period pieces (which seem to be mostly shounen ai). Ōoku, though it shares many traits with her previous work, is a definite change of pace.

Ōoku's art is produced in the mangaka's distinctive, spare style, and exhibits a particular skill in capturing characters' facial expressions, no matter how overt or how subtle. The illustration moves from moments of stylized, 'cartoony' humor to moments of high dramatic tension with a fluidity and grace that is quite possibly unrivaled. The panel layouts are clean, regular and aesthetically appealing, and shadows and highlights are used expertly throughout for emotional emphasis. (There is one panel consisting of nothing but solid black that I found especially poignant.) As far as I can tell from what little I have seen of her bibliography, the mangaka makes more use of backgrounds and patterns in Ōoku than she has in her other works. The books themselves are quite beautiful--slightly oversized for manga trade paperbacks, with a beautifully rendered, off-center color portrait of a central character on the cover of each volume. The front and back covers are folded to emulate the look of a book jacket, and the flaps, when unfolded, continue the covers' images.

The language of Ōoku's English translation is a bit odd. What I assume was originally a "formal dialect" used for dialogue is presented in a stilted, archaic English that at first is remarkably distracting. I was pleasantly surprised (actually a bit astounded) to find that, once I had gotten well into the first volume, the speech had begun to read as natural, and in the end it did not detract from the story at all. Once I became accustomed to it, I realized that it allowed for a few moments of linguistic beauty that might not have been possible had more conventional dialogue been used. I do, however, freely confess that the writing seems over-the-top (and then some) at first glance, and therefore might easily scare aware some potential readers. Narration, unlike dialogue, is given in a comparatively plain, modern style.

The first volume shows the entrance of a young man into the Ōoku; in this volume, the female-led shogunate is already well-established. Volumes 2 and 3 cover the origin of the new, matriarchal system and the beginning years of the first female shogun's rule. In addition to its setting in a more-or-less matriarchal society, Ōoku goes on the femdom manga list because the main female character is always the shogun and the main male character always her favored "concubine" (so far).

Conceptually, one of the most interesting things about Ōoku is that the rise of a predominantly female work force does little to change the society as a whole. As the culture is already under threat from the "red-faced pox," every effort is expended by surviving characters to maintain Tokugawa-era Japan's economy and culture. Class divisions are scrupulously upheld. Instead of issuing in a revolution, the extreme shift in population causes a desparate clinging to the
past, to the ideals and traditions that will provide the structure necessary for the country's survival in a global context.

Ōoku presents the moving, sometimes painful stories of characters struggling to live and work together in the enclosed, stifling world of "the inner chambers" within the larger-yet-still-enclosed world of an alternate-history Japan that has almost entirely cut off its contact with all other nations.

And I really, really like it.