Sakura of DOOM

Exclamation point! Even though I actually haven't read that much this week.

What I finished reading: Finally! I read some manga—vols. 4-6 of Ooku, which I've had out from the library for who knows how long. 4 and 5 were rereads, since I think I meant to post on them after the Ooku panel during Wiscon in 2011 and never quite got around to it. Now that the story has gotten to where the shoguns have become established as female, the story reads more as a historical recounting, although there are still some interesting bits on gender and gender roles. I'm not sure what I think about Yoshinaga's tendency to introduce one male true love per shogun (at least, per shogun adult enough to have one), and now that I think of it, it's odd how het-focused the relationships seem to be. Obviously there's the whole producing an heir bit and that Yoshinaga seems to focus mostly on relationships between the shogun and members of the Inner Chambers, but aside from one or two instances, there's not much mention of f/f or m/m, despite the Inner Chambers being nearly all male and most of Japan being 75% female. I find this particularly odd considering who the mangaka is. Anyway, hopefully I will be inspired to write an actual post later.

(Also, I keep looking up actual Tokugawa history in Wiki, and I love how the male pronouns for the shoguns are weirding me out now.)

What I'm reading now: Er. I basically started and fell out of various books: Courtney Milan's The Duchess War, the Con or Bust book, Ankaret Wells' Firebrand.

What I'm going to read: Hopefully I will get started on a light novel (my very first!), though I suspect I will actually be reading Ooku 7 as soon as I get it. I am ordering books and getting them in the mail again! I've mostly tried to stop buying physical books, since I still haven't unpacked a ton of boxes in my apartment, but there's no good eink substitute for manga, so physical copies it is.

I was browsing through my Amazon wishlists (which I have finally updated), and I feel like I have missed a generation's worth of manga. Sigh. I also really really really want to do a Skip Beat reread and catch up since CB started watching the SB anime and I am happily watching along with him. Kyoko! I forgot how hilarious you are!

I am also so tempted by the FMA manga boxset, as well as the remastered Utena DVDs.

I 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!)

People have been reccing this to me for just about forever, seeing as how it's manga about tasty pastries! Unsurprisingly, I adored the first two volumes.

I'm a little less fond of the latter half of the series, but that's more because it goes more into the personal lives of characters I don't care that much about, and it features some BL tropes that I'm not particularly fond of.

Tachibana is a rich playboy who decides to open a French-style pastry shop called Antique Bakery. He ends up hiring master patisserie Ono, who despite his prodigious talent is unemployed because he is "a gay of demonic charm" and ends up getting into troublesome romantic entanglements anywhere he works. The shop soon acquires ex-boxer Kanda, now apprentice patisseries, and Tachibana's servent/childhood friend Chikage, who is generally useless but very cute.

I love all the characters except Tachibana, which is a little unfortunate, as the last volume is all about his angst. I just don't seem to have that much sympathy for scruffy, rich playboy womanizers with angst any more.

On the other hand, I adore the other characters, and oh! The pastry porn! There's not much of a plot in the first two volumes; instead, we get looks into the lives of various Antique Bakery customers and glimpses of the day-to-day behind running the store. I loved these parts so much. They're small and quiet, and I loved that Yoshinaga included women as well.

Later on, the series gets a little too melodramatic for me, particularly when it comes to Tachibana's angsty past and Ono's angsty past love affairs.

I'm not particulary enamored of Yoshinaga's art or paneling; the paneling in particular gets very crowded by word balloons. On the other hand, I will forgive that, as the word balloons contain words like these:

This rhubarbe fraise is a tarte made of rhubarbs stewed into a sugary-sweet compote, then topped with a fluffy, sour strawberry mousse, and is a seasonal cake offered for a limited time only.

One of our recent best-selling items is the chiboust chocolat framboise -- a chocolate chiboust placed atop a layer of raspberry-flavored custard cream on a crumbly chocolate tarte shell.

And over here we have a new item today -- the pave' au caramel. A caramel-butter mousse has been paired with a biscuit base loaded with chocolate, and is a divinely rich dessert perfect for anyone who loves cakes!

Yum!