Another year, another volume. (It’s like an early Christmas present!) But as Fumi Yoshinaga’s alternate history gets closer to the modern era, and the opening of Japan to the rest of the world, events move faster and more dramatically. Even with the delay between volumes — beautifully detailed historical interactions take time to draw — I had no problem catching up in volume 12. The thorough cast of characters pages help, but so does the universality of the main story. […]

It’s been a year since the last volume of Ooku: The Inner Chambers, but the themes of volume 11 are so powerful and immediate that I had no trouble picking it right back up. And Fumi Yoshinaga’s art is so gorgeous that it’s always a pleasure to spend time with, particularly given her facility with emotional expression. After 150 years, there’s finally a male shogun ruling the country, placed there by his strong-willed, murderous mother. Meanwhile, the doctors trained by […]

Ooku: The Inner Chambers volume 10 feels like a final volume. The cover, a group shot with a white background, differs from the stark single-figure-against-black theme of the previous books in the series, and there’s an incredibly valuable extra included that wraps together many of the previous events. It’s a family tree showing all the shoguns and their key retainers that makes me want to reread the series, now that I better understand the relationships. I wish we’d seen this […]

I admit, it can be difficult keeping up with Ooku: The Inner Chambers. One volume comes out every year or so, and the premise — an alternate history of Japan in which most of the men have died, causing the women to take over leading the country — can be complicated for most readers, who don’t have any knowledge of Japanese history. Yet it’s so well done! I adore Fumi Yoshinaga’s art, with its thin-line detail and expressive characters. She […]

I have been remiss in not talking more about this amazing series by Fumi Yoshinaga, because I fear it’s dropped off many readers’ radar. (Only one book a year comes out in Japan, and this was the only volume released in English this year.) It’s a challenging read, both in its use of Japanese history and in the way it tackles political expectations for its ruling women. The first thing that’s distinctive about the series is how striking it is. […]

Fumi Yoshinaga has quite the fan following based on her short series Antique Bakery and Flower of Life, as well as her yaoi works. With its strong, science fiction-like concept and old-fashioned flavor, Ooku: The Inner Chambers has the potential to make fans of even more manga readers. In medieval Japan, the ooku was a harem, an area of the ruler’s castle where his concubines lived and no men were allowed. In Yoshinaga’s story, there’s been a plague that kills […]