manga: Ooku: The Inner Chambers Vol 1-2
Ooku is set in an alternate Edo era Japan in which a plague has reduced Japan’s male population to ¼ of its female population, resulting in the women taking over all levels of the government and economy, which is kept a secret from the rest of the world.
The first arc focuses on the female shogun’s harem and its dynamics and power structure. It’s a good standalone arc, but doesn’t create much incentive to read more, and actually made me not care about the titular Inner Chambers, being way more interested in the world outside. The last bit of the first volume and the entirety of the second volume address that, shifting the focus (but not POV) to the shoguns, with the second volume largely focusing with how the first female shogun came to be shogun, and the early years of her rein. Technically speaking, volume 2 actually has one of the best overall plotlines I’ve encountered in a manga, but it also has 3 rapes and one case of sexual intercourse that can, at best, be said to be of extremely dubious consent, which keeps me from going as nuts about it as I think some others do.
While I definitely have a “Japan is now mostly made up of mostly women and a patriarchal society is now a matriarchal society, and everything is still all about the men?” reaction (and, while gender roles are reversed on a societal level, on a more personal, one-on-one basis, many don’t seem to be changed much), the world is fascinating enough to get past that. The main problem is that the translator has decided to translated the formal dialogue of the time with such stilted twee faux!medieval dialogue that this has the questionable honor of being the only manga whose translation I actually find difficult to read, which likely makes my irritation with some parts worse than it would be otherwise. I mean, I’ve read some bad translations before, but none that were so bad it was actually hard to read the manga. A couple examples, located by randomly flipping through the first volume and pointing at a word balloon with plenty of words.:
“If need be, we can resort to adoption to secure a man for Shino. Regardless, thou needst be concerned with thine own fate, and thine alone!”
“A new apartment hath been prepared for thy use. Thou shalt move thy belongs there forthwith.’
And this is a very talky manga.
The world is interesting enough to get past it once things get going, but the translation makes the 200 page manga feel like slugging through the King James version of the Bible (which I have done a few times and which is, in fact, easier to do as it’s more consistent-there are bits where it will randomly have half a sentence or a couple balloons of contemporary dialogue, then switch back-and actually flows) until then, and even when the manga gets interesting, the translation wears it down.