Ooku vol. 16

Look at that cover.  You can almost feel the smugness radiating off of it.  No doubt some of it is left over from vol. 15’s cliffhanger revelation that Shogun Iemochi’s new husband, Prince Kazu, is actually a woman.  It read like another kick in the shins at the time, because things have been going bad for the people in the Inner Chambers who want to do the right thing for a very long time now.  The fact that their Shogun was tricked into marrying a woman posing as a man only served to further compound that feeling.

So it’s a real testament to mangaka Fumi Yoshinaga’s skills that Kazu, nee Chikako, actually winds up being a fully sympathetic character by the time vol. 16 is over.  There’s some implied post-bathing manhandling to start with, but it isn’t until we get her backstory that things get interesting.  We see how Chikako has suffered all her life by being born with a deformity, which has made her come off like a lesser person in her mother’s eyes.  Yet when the arranged marriage between her VERY unwilling brother Kazu is set up, she sees this as a chance to finally get some quality mother/daughter time after all these years.

What Chikako didn’t count on was being married to an individual wholly sympathetic to her plight in Iemochi.  Seeing how the Shogun gets her new “husband” to lower her guard and open up is immensely satisfying and even heartwarming as well.  It helps take the edge off of the usual business of how the Emperor and the Imperial Court try to force the country to go one way, with their “Barbarians Out!” agenda, contrary to the will of the world and everywhere else.  (Which makes the 19th-century setting of the series feel much more relevant than it should right now.) Iemochi and the rest of the Inner Chambers may only be able to stall their efforts for now, but experiencing Chikako’s story is what really makes vol. 16 worthwhile.  As well as far less of a drag than recent volumes of this series have been, too.