(no subject)

[owlectomy]

I did in fact ride on the subway and read Ooku! Which I liked even better once I realized it was Yoshimune's story and not Mizuno's; I liked Mizuno, but Yoshimune is awesome, and if the premise of the manga is that 90% of the men are dead... I don't necessarily want to just read about the men.

I've been aware of Yoshinaga Fumi for a long time but I've never actually read one of her manga before. Her linework is just incredible. I want to stare at it and stare at it.

Comments

[starlady]

Glad to hear we get away from Mizuno, because I sort of hate him (I'm in the midst of volume 1 still, must finish, augh!).

[owlectomy]

I found that the pacing started to pick up about halfway through the first volume. That may be because the Japanese started out being really a slog, and got to be less of a slog as I got used to it, but also, I think, because finally enough of the background has been set up to get on with the story.

[starlady]

So right before where I stopped, then. *g*

Well, as soon as I finish these last chapters of The Anime Machine… (Shut up about Saitou Tamaki and his psychoanalytic patriarchal bullshit already, Tom, argh.)

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

I think that Ooku is nowhere near as anvilicious as you might imagine, so far. Yoshinaga builds up such an intriguing alternate feudal Japan, where the closing of Tokugawa Japan to the outside world was because they couldn't let anyone know that she shogun was actually a woman, where in the absence of male power women can be every bit as ambitious and ruthless as men ever are. Certainly it seems less overtly political than Joanna Russ's world-without-men stories (which I like too, but are certainly political).

There's an article here (http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/flipped_david_welsh_on_fumi_yoshinagas_212oku_the_inner_chambers) on Ooku with some of the art; for what it's worth I really dislike the translation, I don't think their Faux Shakespeare is a good analogue for the highly polite and archaic Japanese of the original.