Yoshinaga Fumi - Ooku, vol. 01-03 (Chi. trans.)
Tue, Jun. 24th, 2008 08:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterI first heard about this when it won a special prize from the Japanese Sense of Gender award (awards SFF works that examine gender); the people behind the SoG have been going to Wiscon regularly, which is how I heard of the award. Ooku (pretend there's a macron over the first "o") is an alternate history of Japan where a strange pox ends up killing three quarters of the men in the early 1600s. Because of that, the role of the shogun, like many other roles in Japanese society, ended up being matrilineal. The ooku was a harem formed for the shogun; with a female shogun, it was converted to hold about three thousand some men.
The story begins with Mizuno Yuunoshin's entrance into the ooku, but it also jumps back and forth in time to tell the story of how the role of the shogun ended up being female, along with how the disease affected Japanese history. When I first picked it up, I was afraid it wouldn't meet my expectations, as I've found Yoshinaga's work to be excellent but also uneven in terms of power differentials. I think Ooku is an excellent work of fiction so far; Yoshinaga carries off the broad scope and many time periods and characters with aplomb. As a work examining gender, I think it is awesome.
Why is this not licensed? Why why why?
At first, I was put off by the fact that we're following Mizuno's story. It's the same problem I have with Y: The Last Man; in a world where men are scarce, I still have to read something that's all about the guys? (I like Y and the women in Y, but it still irks me.) I was further put off by Mizuno taking on the more aggressive role with his childhood crush Onobu, as indicated by him kissing her and by the body language: he grabs her and pulls her in, she's slightly bent over backwards during the kiss, and he pushes her away to end it. I also wanted to know why all the women were still dressed in tightly wrapped kimono and obi when they were the ones running errands and doing business. While I love kimono, I think switching over to hakama might have been more practical! Similarly, the male dress in the first few pages is much less flowery than female dress; it looks like Edo in our history, with no hints of the changed male and female roles.
But! Yoshinaga is much, much better than that. Questions of clothing haven't entirely been resolved, but they've been brought up in the ooku already. And while we start with Mizuno, Yoshinaga does something very interesting: she switches between several POV characters, almost all male, and only has minor POV female characters. Yet the effect of this is to remind us how unstable the men's lives are; the shogun's favorites in the ooku may rise and fall, but the shogun and the women in power remain constant and dependable. There's a wonderfully claustrophobic feel to the ooku, a sense of limitation and constriction. I may have evilly cackled to myself and thought, "Bwahaha! See how it feels?"
Yoshinaga is also doing very interesting things with Japanese history; if I had known more about the Tokugawa shoguns, I would have picked up much earlier that she's following the exact same history as our own, only with female shoguns starting from Tokugawa Iemitsu. I particularly love that one of the greatest Tokugawa shoguns, Yoshimune, is a main character (and female). There's a wonderful scene in which Yoshimune meets with a Dutch captain: the pox hasn't spread to the rest of the world, and Yoshimune wants to know why only men are allowed on the Dutch merchant ships, which I read as a critique on how people will sometimes use feminism to justify nationalism or racism (I am not sure if it is, but whatever). And I particularly love what Yoshinaga's doing with Iemitsu, who began Japan's period of isolation, so disparaged by history books.
And there's so much more I'm not even touching on! The looks backward in history are even more fascinating, as they show a country struggling with changing gender roles. I would so suggest an Ooku book club panel for Wiscon, only given the lack of an English translation, I think it would be in vain.
To conclude on a completely random note, aside from being made of win, this manga also contains rodent death (traumatic only to me) and, more importantly, cat flinging as a form of affection.
(Please license this, someone!)
The story begins with Mizuno Yuunoshin's entrance into the ooku, but it also jumps back and forth in time to tell the story of how the role of the shogun ended up being female, along with how the disease affected Japanese history. When I first picked it up, I was afraid it wouldn't meet my expectations, as I've found Yoshinaga's work to be excellent but also uneven in terms of power differentials. I think Ooku is an excellent work of fiction so far; Yoshinaga carries off the broad scope and many time periods and characters with aplomb. As a work examining gender, I think it is awesome.
Why is this not licensed? Why why why?
At first, I was put off by the fact that we're following Mizuno's story. It's the same problem I have with Y: The Last Man; in a world where men are scarce, I still have to read something that's all about the guys? (I like Y and the women in Y, but it still irks me.) I was further put off by Mizuno taking on the more aggressive role with his childhood crush Onobu, as indicated by him kissing her and by the body language: he grabs her and pulls her in, she's slightly bent over backwards during the kiss, and he pushes her away to end it. I also wanted to know why all the women were still dressed in tightly wrapped kimono and obi when they were the ones running errands and doing business. While I love kimono, I think switching over to hakama might have been more practical! Similarly, the male dress in the first few pages is much less flowery than female dress; it looks like Edo in our history, with no hints of the changed male and female roles.
But! Yoshinaga is much, much better than that. Questions of clothing haven't entirely been resolved, but they've been brought up in the ooku already. And while we start with Mizuno, Yoshinaga does something very interesting: she switches between several POV characters, almost all male, and only has minor POV female characters. Yet the effect of this is to remind us how unstable the men's lives are; the shogun's favorites in the ooku may rise and fall, but the shogun and the women in power remain constant and dependable. There's a wonderfully claustrophobic feel to the ooku, a sense of limitation and constriction. I may have evilly cackled to myself and thought, "Bwahaha! See how it feels?"
Yoshinaga is also doing very interesting things with Japanese history; if I had known more about the Tokugawa shoguns, I would have picked up much earlier that she's following the exact same history as our own, only with female shoguns starting from Tokugawa Iemitsu. I particularly love that one of the greatest Tokugawa shoguns, Yoshimune, is a main character (and female). There's a wonderful scene in which Yoshimune meets with a Dutch captain: the pox hasn't spread to the rest of the world, and Yoshimune wants to know why only men are allowed on the Dutch merchant ships, which I read as a critique on how people will sometimes use feminism to justify nationalism or racism (I am not sure if it is, but whatever). And I particularly love what Yoshinaga's doing with Iemitsu, who began Japan's period of isolation, so disparaged by history books.
And there's so much more I'm not even touching on! The looks backward in history are even more fascinating, as they show a country struggling with changing gender roles. I would so suggest an Ooku book club panel for Wiscon, only given the lack of an English translation, I think it would be in vain.
To conclude on a completely random note, aside from being made of win, this manga also contains rodent death (traumatic only to me) and, more importantly, cat flinging as a form of affection.
(Please license this, someone!)
(no subject)
Thu, Dec. 3rd, 2009 06:35 am (UTC)But then I started to read. I am terribly disappointed in the VIZ translation!! The publishers decided to use pseudo-Shakespearean English in some parts, perhaps where there is archaic Japanese.
I'm making a trip to the nearest Kinokuniya to get a Japanese version, and I've been searching desperately for a fan translation or scanlation to support my poor efforts to read the original. Do you know of any?
---SAMPLES
From the opening. Mom and dad, toiling in the rice paddy, are speaking to their little boy who is running off to play:
Dad: "Son, 'tis not for tots to wander far away alone!"
Mom: "Come home ere it gets dark, thou hearest?"
Dad: "Forsooth!..."
In a later scene, a well-dressed mother berates her son's lack of interest in an arranged marriage:
"What complaint canst thou have?... 'Tis not a question of how thou feelst!"
Jarring, out of place words like "prithee," "foppish," "hark!" "Sirrah," "thou knave!" and "Fie upon thee!" are everywhere.
Witness this witty dialogue between two samurai about haircuts:
A. "I wager his pate is near bald by nature, which fact he doth try to hide... do ye not all agree I have hit upon't?"
B. "Fie upon thee!!... Look at thee!! At thy age thou wearest the topknot of a callow youth, which in mine eyes is far more peculiar!"
A Shakespeare fan or SCA Japanophile might love this, and it could be fun played broadly on stage. I understand why the publishers might have thought it was a cute idea, but for me, Elizabethan English just doesn't work in the mouths of Edo peasants and warriors. It distracts the reader from being drawn into an ASIAN culture, an EDO that is quite faithful to the original, except for the reversals which allow the author to explore and spoof issues of gender and power. We pay attention to the clever Elizabethan language play, instead of the class and gender observations at the heart of the author's story.
Fie upon this translation; prithee, canst thou find another?
(no subject)
Thu, Dec. 10th, 2009 05:55 am (UTC)Sadly, I don't know of other English translations... I read it in Chinese.
(no subject)
Tue, Dec. 22nd, 2009 05:27 pm (UTC)It didn't distract me at all. If the translator had left in old-fashioned ASIAN words instead of using old-fashioned English words, I *wouldn't* have been drawn into the culture. I'd have been less able to read the story in the first place.
Some of us who read good stuff in English translation do that because we suck at foreign languages. :( For example, I can't read a whole book unless the whole thing's translated into English (the edition of _Aura_ by Carlos Fuentes I read was bilingual, but the book included the whole thing in English and the whole thing in Spanish on opposite pages - if half the story was in English and half in Spanish, I wouldn't have been able to read it).