??oku: The Inner Chambers, Vol. 19

This is a review for the entire series.

It???s been years since I read the first three volumes of this series, but then I found out that the first season of the animated version was on Ntflx so I decided to give that a shot, as well as find the rest of the series. Took me a while to get all the volumes, but once I had them all it was easy to do a speedrun, so to speak, and finish it.

One of the first things I need to say about this series is that it is bittersweet. Tragedy abounds in this series, as does heartbreak, and all manner of desires and goals remain unrequited and unfulfilled. That being said, I still thought this was a great read. I can understand why some people would choose not to pick it up because of the potential triggering content, or just because they don???t want to read something that???ll put them through the emotional wringer (as it were), but I found that I liked how tragic this whole story was - not for tragedy???s sake, but because of the characters. They???re a complex lot, and not all of them are good people, but I enjoyed reading about how the choices and decisions they made affected not just themselves and those around them, but the characters who came after them - a plot that???s allowed by the long scope of the manga???s story (from the reign of the third Tokugawa shogun, all the way to the dawn of the Meiji period some two hundred years later).

if there is any other media I could compare this to, at least on the surface, I???d say it comes pretty close to Game of Thrones - up until Season 5, since the show infamously loses the plot after that point. Fortunately this manga has a much more coherent storyline, even as it features many of the same beats such as forbidden romance and court intrigue. The alternate history aspect, wherein Japan is ruled by women instead of men, is interesting not because it drastically changes the way the world works, but because it showcases how so many things actually remain the same. Women are still people, after all, and power is still power, and people in power do things in similar ways regardless of their sex or gender, with similar outcomes both for good and for ill.

Overall, this was a pretty good read, even if it was heartbreaking in a lot of places, and even if there???s plenty of content that made me flinch, and which will very likely trigger other readers. If there???s one thing that I found a bit off-putting about this, and which other readers might find off-putting if the trigger warnings don???t, was the use of Shakespearean-style English, especially in the first half of the series. I suspect it was an attempt by the translator to mimic the more old-fashioned Japanese in use during the 1600s-1700s, but it can be rather jarring in certain scenes. One gets used to it after a while, but it can take one out of the moment sometimes.