Ôoku vols. 2-5
Jun. 15th, 2011 15:19![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyYoshinaga Fumi. Ôoku. 6 vols. Tokyo: Hakusensha, 2006-10.
Volumes 2-5 of this excellent, discomforting, pointedly skeevy manga back track from the time period of the first volume (the 1720s) to the 1630s, when the "red pox" first begins ravaging Japan and the retainers of the shogunate begin taking extraordinary measures to preserve what the first two generations of the Tokugawa have built. It ends with the future Yoshimune's only meeting with current shogun Tsunayoshi, in the early 1700s.
[warning: the following contains discussion of rape and of highly dub-con situations]
It's striking how much of what was shown about the female shogunate and the men serving in the inner chambers in the first volume is revealed in these volumes to be a product of Iemitsu Jr.'s frankly miserable life, particularly the rule that the first man who sleeps with a virgin shogun be put to death. A child of rape, Iemitsu Jr. and her mother were brought into Edo castle through the paranoid vigiiance of the shogun Iemitsu's wet-nurse Kasuga Tsubone, whose fear that her milk-son will never have any other children of his body because he's gay are realized when the shogun dies in his early thirties of the red pox. After her father's death, Ietmitsu Jr. was forced to cross-dress and brought into the Ôoku proper so that she can bear an heir to the shogunate, though her existence as such was kept secret and she herself was subsequently raped by one of the retainers, whom she killed. So when Kasuga forces the head priest of a Kyoto temple, Madenokouji Arikoto, to re-secularize via the expedient of threatening to kill his retainer-monk Gyokuei if Arikoto doesn't break his vows and sleep with a courtesan, Arikoto initially thinks he's going to be the erastes of the shogun Iemitsu, but then realizes that the shogun is actually female, Iemitsu Jr.
Over the course of these volumes Iemitsu Jr. and Arikoto fall into a painful love, are forcibly separated, and gradually carve out roles for themselves within the shogunate, Iemitsu as the first female shogun, and Arikoto as the only head of the Ôoku chosen from among the shogun's concubines. The way that pre-pox gender role assumptions continue to structure society is made clear in the interplay between Kasuga's plans and Iemitsu Jr.'s realizations of them; Kasuga can't imagine an heir to the shogunate not being male, and when one of her sons tells her that they no longer live in the world she, his mother, grew up in, her death feels like an afterthought. Subsequently, Iemitsu Jr. is insistent that she and the female daimyo are only caretakers of their positions, which results in many of the traditions Yoshimune finds so strange, such as shogun and daimyo taking masculine names (the shogun's concubines are recorded in the history of the Ôoku under feminine names, even though under Iemitsu's example cross-dressing to match the presumed gender of one's position is abandoned). Iemitsu Jr.'s eventual death is recorded officially as the death of her father; to the last, she exists only in a secret history.
As well as rape, these volumes feature a lot of enforced, dubious consent and abuse of power by the shoguns and their retainers; I'm not sure whether the fact that most of it is brought upon male characters makes it more or less noticable or skeevy than it would for female characters. It's interesting too that the manga tends to stick with Arikoto and Gyokuei as the perspective characters. Certainly men can be raped, as well as women, but these volumes, by putting the male characters into a historically "feminine" position, make even more pointedly obvious the fact that it all comes down to power; when one gender holds a preponderance of it over the other, abuses of that power are as inevitable as human nature. I do think that the manga forced me to confront my own received notion of violence against women as something that happens "normally," if abominably; the narratives of popular culture are so insistent about that that subconsciously it comes to seem…natural. Ick.
At the Wiscon panelcoffeeandink questioned whether Iemitsu Jr. even has a concept of sexual consent, and thinking about it, I'd say the evidence is slim. The shoguns, whether male or female, simply take what and whom they want, even as they themselves are not free to choose as they would like. Mari Kotani also mentioned after the panel that Yoshinaga has talked about being inspired by the Ôoku J-dramas that are a more or less perpetual staple of Japanese television, in particular a series that aired in the 1980s. Apparently Yoshinaga and her assistants actually watch episodes of that J-drama while working, and the impression of the Ôoku as a torrid hothouse of interpersonal drama certainly comes through in the manga.
Arikoto and Iemitsu Jr. are the story's most sympathetic characters thus far, I think, and Yoshinaga sets up very clear, strong parallels between them and two later occupants of their offices, the aristocratic Emonnosuke and Iemitsu Jr.'s third daughter Tsunayoshi. Tsunayoshi is the model of a brilliant ruler who is sidetracked by her own appetites and responsibilities, even as she leans too heavily on the brilliant but not unbiased counsel of her two closest advisors, the daimyo Yoshiyatsu and her father Gyokuei, who retook the tonsure after Iemitsu Jr.'s death (and who parallels the historical Tsunayoshi's mother, a concubine originally born to Kyoto merchants before being adopted into an aristocratic family)--who, incidentally, are sleeping together. It's a witch's brew of politics and personal torment, and the past still has its cold hands around the throat of the present, particularly when Gyokuei tells Tsunayoshi that she has to be beautiful to attract men, because that's the world that he grew up in.
The historical Tsunayoshi couldn't beget a male heir; in the manga Tsunayoshi's daughter Matsu-hime dies at the age of five, and despite sleeping with various men of the Ôoku every night, she fails to conceive another child. One of the single most powerful moments in the manga takes place in volume 5, when she orders two of her retainers whom she's just bedded to have sex with each other for her own entertainment, since she knows that they're in love, and one of them tries to kill himself rather than follow her order. if that's not a pointed comment on yaoi/boys' love manga and the fucked-up power structures it's a response to and in the end a part of, I don't know what is. Immediately afterward Tsunayoshi tells Emonnosuke that being shogun is nothing less than being a whore, and it's hard to feel that she's wrong. And this is the golden age of Tokugawa rule.
Yoshinaga is good about integrating notable historical events and above all the period's economic vicissitudes (though on a general upward trend); it's clear she's done her homework, to the point where some of the terminology she uses is anachronistic by way of historiography rather than from actual period usage. In contrast with the horrid English adaptation (the translation itself is fine), Yoshinaga manages to produce a decent "Edo period lite" sort of language for her characters to speak. It's not anything like actual Edo period prose, but it's different enough from contemporary Japanese to give the impression of antiquity, which is a difficult balance to achieve. I'll need a unicorn chaser before I tackle the next two volumes, but this is a brilliant manga.
Volumes 2-5 of this excellent, discomforting, pointedly skeevy manga back track from the time period of the first volume (the 1720s) to the 1630s, when the "red pox" first begins ravaging Japan and the retainers of the shogunate begin taking extraordinary measures to preserve what the first two generations of the Tokugawa have built. It ends with the future Yoshimune's only meeting with current shogun Tsunayoshi, in the early 1700s.
[warning: the following contains discussion of rape and of highly dub-con situations]
It's striking how much of what was shown about the female shogunate and the men serving in the inner chambers in the first volume is revealed in these volumes to be a product of Iemitsu Jr.'s frankly miserable life, particularly the rule that the first man who sleeps with a virgin shogun be put to death. A child of rape, Iemitsu Jr. and her mother were brought into Edo castle through the paranoid vigiiance of the shogun Iemitsu's wet-nurse Kasuga Tsubone, whose fear that her milk-son will never have any other children of his body because he's gay are realized when the shogun dies in his early thirties of the red pox. After her father's death, Ietmitsu Jr. was forced to cross-dress and brought into the Ôoku proper so that she can bear an heir to the shogunate, though her existence as such was kept secret and she herself was subsequently raped by one of the retainers, whom she killed. So when Kasuga forces the head priest of a Kyoto temple, Madenokouji Arikoto, to re-secularize via the expedient of threatening to kill his retainer-monk Gyokuei if Arikoto doesn't break his vows and sleep with a courtesan, Arikoto initially thinks he's going to be the erastes of the shogun Iemitsu, but then realizes that the shogun is actually female, Iemitsu Jr.
Over the course of these volumes Iemitsu Jr. and Arikoto fall into a painful love, are forcibly separated, and gradually carve out roles for themselves within the shogunate, Iemitsu as the first female shogun, and Arikoto as the only head of the Ôoku chosen from among the shogun's concubines. The way that pre-pox gender role assumptions continue to structure society is made clear in the interplay between Kasuga's plans and Iemitsu Jr.'s realizations of them; Kasuga can't imagine an heir to the shogunate not being male, and when one of her sons tells her that they no longer live in the world she, his mother, grew up in, her death feels like an afterthought. Subsequently, Iemitsu Jr. is insistent that she and the female daimyo are only caretakers of their positions, which results in many of the traditions Yoshimune finds so strange, such as shogun and daimyo taking masculine names (the shogun's concubines are recorded in the history of the Ôoku under feminine names, even though under Iemitsu's example cross-dressing to match the presumed gender of one's position is abandoned). Iemitsu Jr.'s eventual death is recorded officially as the death of her father; to the last, she exists only in a secret history.
As well as rape, these volumes feature a lot of enforced, dubious consent and abuse of power by the shoguns and their retainers; I'm not sure whether the fact that most of it is brought upon male characters makes it more or less noticable or skeevy than it would for female characters. It's interesting too that the manga tends to stick with Arikoto and Gyokuei as the perspective characters. Certainly men can be raped, as well as women, but these volumes, by putting the male characters into a historically "feminine" position, make even more pointedly obvious the fact that it all comes down to power; when one gender holds a preponderance of it over the other, abuses of that power are as inevitable as human nature. I do think that the manga forced me to confront my own received notion of violence against women as something that happens "normally," if abominably; the narratives of popular culture are so insistent about that that subconsciously it comes to seem…natural. Ick.
At the Wiscon panel
coffeeandink questioned whether Iemitsu Jr. even has a concept of sexual consent, and thinking about it, I'd say the evidence is slim. The shoguns, whether male or female, simply take what and whom they want, even as they themselves are not free to choose as they would like. Mari Kotani also mentioned after the panel that Yoshinaga has talked about being inspired by the Ôoku J-dramas that are a more or less perpetual staple of Japanese television, in particular a series that aired in the 1980s. Apparently Yoshinaga and her assistants actually watch episodes of that J-drama while working, and the impression of the Ôoku as a torrid hothouse of interpersonal drama certainly comes through in the manga. Arikoto and Iemitsu Jr. are the story's most sympathetic characters thus far, I think, and Yoshinaga sets up very clear, strong parallels between them and two later occupants of their offices, the aristocratic Emonnosuke and Iemitsu Jr.'s third daughter Tsunayoshi. Tsunayoshi is the model of a brilliant ruler who is sidetracked by her own appetites and responsibilities, even as she leans too heavily on the brilliant but not unbiased counsel of her two closest advisors, the daimyo Yoshiyatsu and her father Gyokuei, who retook the tonsure after Iemitsu Jr.'s death (and who parallels the historical Tsunayoshi's mother, a concubine originally born to Kyoto merchants before being adopted into an aristocratic family)--who, incidentally, are sleeping together. It's a witch's brew of politics and personal torment, and the past still has its cold hands around the throat of the present, particularly when Gyokuei tells Tsunayoshi that she has to be beautiful to attract men, because that's the world that he grew up in.
The historical Tsunayoshi couldn't beget a male heir; in the manga Tsunayoshi's daughter Matsu-hime dies at the age of five, and despite sleeping with various men of the Ôoku every night, she fails to conceive another child. One of the single most powerful moments in the manga takes place in volume 5, when she orders two of her retainers whom she's just bedded to have sex with each other for her own entertainment, since she knows that they're in love, and one of them tries to kill himself rather than follow her order. if that's not a pointed comment on yaoi/boys' love manga and the fucked-up power structures it's a response to and in the end a part of, I don't know what is. Immediately afterward Tsunayoshi tells Emonnosuke that being shogun is nothing less than being a whore, and it's hard to feel that she's wrong. And this is the golden age of Tokugawa rule.
Yoshinaga is good about integrating notable historical events and above all the period's economic vicissitudes (though on a general upward trend); it's clear she's done her homework, to the point where some of the terminology she uses is anachronistic by way of historiography rather than from actual period usage. In contrast with the horrid English adaptation (the translation itself is fine), Yoshinaga manages to produce a decent "Edo period lite" sort of language for her characters to speak. It's not anything like actual Edo period prose, but it's different enough from contemporary Japanese to give the impression of antiquity, which is a difficult balance to achieve. I'll need a unicorn chaser before I tackle the next two volumes, but this is a brilliant manga.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-15 06:34 (UTC)Hm. I would say that Iemitsu Jr. definitely has an idea of sexual consent. She was raped, she knows she was raped, and she knows that she did not want it to happen. However, her idea of consent is strictly bound up in power hierarchies.
Those who have power must give consent in sexual interactions (see the lack of consent in her rape, a rape which she also attributes to her being 'weak', and Iemtisu Jr's comment to the father of her daughter about how it is she who beds him). Underlings give consent to their masters by virtue of the power dynamic.
I would say that in Iemitsu Jr.'s world, an underling can rape an overlord, but an overlord is incapable of raping an underling because Iemtisu Jr. perceives the power dynamic as meaning consent is given by default.
So, I would say that she has definitely an idea of sexual consent, but with the conditional that only certain people have the right to give sexual consent, and that sexual consent can only exist to be given by masters to underlings or between equals.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-16 06:50 (UTC)I would say that in Iemitsu Jr.'s world, an underling can rape an overlord, but an overlord is incapable of raping an underling because Iemtisu Jr. perceives the power dynamic as meaning consent is given by default.
I think that's a really good, pithy way of putting it, and it gets back to the question of power imbalances as setting up all the potential for actual abuses of that power.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-15 08:02 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-16 06:47 (UTC)And ditto on the Yoshiwara scene! So freaking skeevy and really emblematic.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-15 22:09 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-16 06:46 (UTC)finishwrite up most of those books, come to think of it), the vocabulary question stood out to me. In a lot of ways it's probably good that I waited to read these four volumes.