Ôoku vol. 1

merin_chan went to an alien maid cafe in Akiba this summer. Very interesting.

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Yoshinaga Fumi. Ôoku. 5 vols. Tokyo: Hakusensha, 2005-10. [English translation: 5 vols. San Francisco: VIZ, 2009-10.]

I first heard about this manga as part of an exhibition at the Kyoto International Manga Museum in 2008 on worlds of shoujo manga. The premise (in an alternate Edo Japan, a plague kills 75% of men, forcing women to take power in society) was enough to get me to Book-Off immediately. Yeah, it did take me two years to actually finish volume 1.

In the interim, of course, the manga has been translated (clumsily) into English, and the first two volumes of that translation co-won the 2009 Tiptree Award, the first time a manga or graphic novel has taken the prize. I heard Alexis Lothian discuss the translation and the jury's reasons for selecting it at Wiscon 34, and one of the things I really liked about her remarks was that in them she situated the manga in a long global tradition of feminist science fiction and fantasy. Before the manga won the award I would have approached the manga primarily from the fact that it is a josei (women's) manga, a genre that is by far the least popular in Japan and the most infrequently translated into English.

To give a really brief introduction to a complicated concept, shoujo and josei manga since the 1970s have been coping with what has been called "the love trap"--essentially, the unequal power dynamics of heterosexual relationships in a sexist and/or patriarchal society mean that for a heroine a "successful" romantic relationship necessitates her relinquishing her agency and independence. One way to spring the love trap is to invent yaoi and write BL ad infinitum, which a number of 1970s manga-ka did and which continues to be a hugely popular genre with women in Japan (similar dynamics clearly underlie media fandom's origins in the 1960s outside of Japan, I suspect).

Another way to spring the love trap is to do what Yoshinaga does here, namely to remove men's actual political and social capital and give all of that to women. Crucially, however, the symbolic capital and the symbolic regime of social power in this alternate Edo retains its masculinist trappings, so that all women of rank assume "male" names upon their accession to their offices, to take one example. Yoshinaga also introduces us to the world and to the oooku, the inner chambers of the shogun's castle in Edo, through the eyes of its newest male member, Mizuno Yuunoshin, though by the end of volume 1 the manga is mostly following the new shogun Yoshimune, eighth of the Tokugawa line and the first to accede from a branch family, Ieyasu's direct descendants having died out.

I really want to know whether Yoshinaga expects her readership to sympathize with the male or the female characters. The men in this manga read like women, not in some gender essentialist "mannerism" crap kind of way but in that they have the limited power and circumscribed social roles of women in the historical Edo period and in contemporary Japan (though the situation of women in contemporary Japan is, very slowly, improving). And for the same reasons, the women read like men, except that they have to deal with the burden not only of power but also of history; less than a hundred years before society was the complete opposite of what it is in the manga's present, and no one can quite forget it, even if most people know better than to talk about it.

Yoshinaga hews fairly close to history; the historical Yoshimune was a noted fiscal reformer, and in the manga Yoshimune is portrayed as almost comically stingy--it's her intention that the oooku and the bakufu (shogunate bureaucracy) will bend to her will, and not the other way around. I like her and her right-arm retainer Hisamichi a lot. We'll see what Yoshimune's curiosity about the foundation of the women's political system reveals in volume 2.