Read this past weekend

[telophase]

Ooku: The Inner Chambers, Volume 1, by Fumi Yoshinaga. The mangaka of Antique Bakery turns her pen to historical fiction with a gender-bending twist: during the Edo period, an illness arises that kills off most of the men in Japan. The manga examines what might happen to society if this was the case, with a focus on the (now female) shogun's inner chambers, now staffed by men instead of women.

The book contains one complete story arc and the beginning of another. In the first one, a beautiful young man enters the Inner Chambers to support his family and encounters politics and treachery. The second story arc begins to cast the net a little more widely, and features the new shogun starting to ask questions about why the government hides the truth about Japan's gender imbalance from the rest of the world.

Ooku is a more serious than Antique Bakery, so if you're looking for a more lighthearted story, this may not be your first choice. My only problem is that the editors chose to portray what I suspect was classical Japanese in the original as slightly archaic English full of thees and thous. And while I didn't catch them using 'thee' and 'thou' incorrectly at any point that I bothered to check*, it still grated on my nerves and the dialogue felt more like that at a RenFaire than that of an imperial court.

But recommended anyway, if you can get past the language.


--
* "Thee/thou" is intimate, used for those you are close to (and perhaps your social inferiors?) - "you" is formal. People who don't know better at RenFaires and in bad books often screw that up in an attempt to sound Olde Worlde.

Comments

[ailelie]

The thee/thou thing bugs me too.

What makes you think that it would be used for social inferiors? I never understood it as a hierarchy thing, but rather just a distance one. So, to further distance one's self from people below, wouldn't 'you' work better? This was also the manner of address used for God, after all.

[telophase]

I don't know whether it was the case in Early Modern English or not; I'm just extrapolating from the use of the second person formal/informal in other languages. It's a condescending, infantilizing use - you address children and social inferiors in the informal, but they have to use the formal back to you. That may not have been a part of English, however.

This was also the manner of address used for God, after all.

The King James Bible and other translations from the time were using "thou" as singular and "ye" as plural - it was a time of transition. That use was preserved in other translations.

'Thou' and 'thee' to address everyone wasn't in until the Quakers, who emphasized its use as part of Plain Speech, and to signify that we were all egalitarian before God. They were deliberately using it in contrast to normal use of the time. I think the Puritans continued that tradition.

[keelieinblack.livejournal.com]

I was surprised at how few reviewers mentioned that particular oddity of the translation, or, if they mentioned it, didn't seem to have any problems with it at all. I thought it made the manga a lot more of a slog than it should have been.

(And I was startled to see that the translator for Ooku was Akemi Wegmuller, who did the Kamikaze Girls translation that I really liked, for the most part--and that novel was definitely written in very flowery Japanese.)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

It's an editorial decision for sure, but I don't know whether the translator wrote the final text or whether Viz gives the translation to a rewriter, but either way it's the editor who's ultimately at fault. :)

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I felt roughly the same way about the translation. Still looking forward to the next volume, though.

[golden-bastet.livejournal.com]

I've been semi-tempted to check this out, but I'm still not at the tipping point.

Actually, it sounds a bit like the translation for Ai no Kusabi. I wish I had some knowledge of that translating community to figure out why they make these language choices (and I do like Ai no Kusabi).


But do they have turkey drumsticks in the land of Ooku? It's not a real take on a RenFaire w/o the turkey drumsticks...

[elfiepike.livejournal.com]

...this sounds AWESOME. i love fumi yoshinaga's art and general story-telling/character-building skillz, but i haven't been keeping track of manga much lately, so thanks for pointing it out! :D

[darkelf105.livejournal.com]

I just started this and like it, but must agree that the langauge makes it feel more like a "slog" than a read "read", but thanks for the note on thee/thou...cuz, I am ashamed as a medieval history major to admit this, but totally did not know that.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

The thee/thou thing is also mixed in with 'thou' as 2nd person singular and 'ye' as 2nd person plural. It's a big messy area. XD