Ooku 3

Fumi Yoshinaga – Viz – 2010 – 5+ volumes

There are certain series that I am ashamed to fall behind on. This is one of them, especially since we will very shortly be forced to wait a year between volumes. On the other hand, rushing through it to stay current should never be done. Ooku is best read at a very slow pace, since it takes some time to digest the full meaning behind everything that is going on.

This volume is still covering the Chie/Tokugawa time period. Reading back through my comments from the last volume, it’s interesting that the shogun Chie was portrayed in such a negative light in the last volume, since in this one, she is a very sympathetic character. I remembered the terrible things she had done to get Arikoto to live in the castle, but other than a shrewdness when it comes to politics, she turns into something of a tool for the elderly Reverend Kasuga. The relationship between she and Arikoto takes on an air of tragedy when she is forced to take other men into her bed in order to conceive a child. Neither takes it well, but Arikoto continues in his benevolent role, while Chie sees it as an extension of her duties as shogun, and something that women have been doing since the beginning of time. This conflict is surprisingly romantic, moreso because the stoic characters show so little of what’s going on that the snippets we catch of their real feelings haunt their placid expressions and compliant behavior.

The way the story moves around Japan is interesting, too. We see the lives of regular citizens when the first man to step in as a potential match for Chie is profiled in his hometown. He’s a lazy womanizer who absolutely refuses to take over his family business or do any work, since he is one of the few young men in town. We see that much of the population still believes that men should be doing the work, while others believe they should be valued and exploited since women still need them to father children. This latter, more disturbing view is showcased in a later segment where Chie visits Edo and encounters families more than willing to prostitute out their sons for high prices, as well as cheap brothels full of men both old and mentally handicapped. The desperation of the general public is kept in the back of the reader’s mind throughout the volume, though most of what goes on focuses on the palace. Women are taking over, people are learning to live without men. The sex industry is rather disturbing, and I could not figure out why Yoshiwara had such sad matches. Perhaps the families of the handsome young men kept them for their own profit? That’s probably what was implied, which means that any family with a son could go from sudden poverty to extraordinary wealth overnight. The social system in Japan seems to be that they still wouldn’t be upper class, even with money, but perhaps things like that will be addressed in future volumes.

We also see how, despite the fact that there are no men, the elders are still unwilling to let women take over entirely. The women do an admirable job of running labor-oriented professions, like farming and fishing, but the samurai families tied to the palace absolutely refuse to let anyone believe that their sons are dead, so they force their daughters to dress and act as men. Pride keeps the warriors from admitting that they have only women in their families, and its interesting that, when women take over every other aspect of life, they refuse to let them take up the position as head of the family.

Kasuga is something of a controlling tyrant in this volume, but she never gets out of hand, and always gives orders in a respectful manner to people who will listen and agree. And frequently, her orders are good advice. Kasuga is given a backstory that didn’t soften my heart to her as it did some of the others, but it does go far towards explaining her practical outlook on everything.

While the first volume focused on why women mimicked men in the world of the book, and had a shogun that looked toward changing that and making women strong in their own right, this book seems to be all about reinforcing the traditional roles of women, even for the shogun, and showing how the outlook more or less remains the same even when they begin taking over the men’s work. It’ll be interesting to see how the story works its way back up to the time period of the first volume, and how the extremely rigid and traditional society portrayed in the book will adapt to having women in the dominant roles. In theory, it should only take a generation, but teachings from one’s parents go a long way to keeping certain traditions alive.

Having put off reading this volume, I am happy to see that the fourth should be here in a couple weeks. I suspect there’s still quite a bit of Chie’s story to tell, so I doubt we’ll be seeing a jump in the timeline anytime soon.

This is certainly the most well-crafted of all the work I’ve read by Yoshinaga, and it only gets deeper with each volume. Unfortunately, I’m having trouble relating to it in the same way I have her other work since it relies so much on Japanese history (which you’d think I’d be an expert in by now, or at least enough so that I could read stuff like this), but not knowing what the events correspond to in history is, amazingly, not that much of a hindrance, and there’s so much else going on here that such problems are rare. There are a lot of good series coming out from the Viz Signature line, and saying this is one of my favorites is pretty high praise.