Review: Ooku – The Inner Chambers

Also spelled “Oooku”, but that just looks wrong.

When I first saw the premise for Ooku, I was a little worried it would be one of those lazy ‘gender role reversal’ stories that just takes a historical setting, swaps the men and women, and then goes “really makes you think, huh?”

Thankfully, that isn’t the case, and Ooku has a lot more effort put in its setting. It’s an exploration of what might happens to Japanese society after the male population is decimated by a plague. The author clearly has a lot of interesting ideas, and the way practical concerns are weighed against political struggles and traditions felt very plausible. The shogunate is forced to adapt, but it doesn’t come easily.

While the working class, out of pure necessity, soon start employing women to fill the roles of their deceased family members, the samurai class is much more resistant to change. The first female shogun is no more than a placeholder until she can birth a male heir, her existence kept a secret from anyone outside the inner palace. Similarly, some councillors who’ve lost their sons diguise their eldest daughters as men.

Change happen slowly, and not out of altruism. For example, when the shogun Iemitsu suggests allowing women to inherit titles, it’s a calculated move for poilitical reasons. Since few boys survive to adulthood, ensuring a male heir becomes a numbers game. Powerful families can afford enough concubines to stack the odds in their favor, while smaller families are likely to die out. The shogunate wants to avoid any challenge to its power, so it benefits from a fragmented samurai class. Thus, allowing female inheritance is in the court’s own interest.

So, the alternate history in Ooku is done well. But you also need to build a good story within that setting, or else it’s just an essay. And this is where Ooku didn’t quite succeed for me.

It starts off with an 80 minute long opening episode. I understand why it was done this way, because it’s a self-contained story that sets the stage for the main arc of the anime, but my attention span for a story like this isn’t that long. Still, for the most part, it was pretty good. It introduces the world within the inner chambers through a new arrival, and you get a feel for what sort of place it is: decadent and unwelcoming, filled with a bunch of men with too much time on their hands. At least, until the new shogun arrives and decides to cut down on all the excesses. I liked her and her advisor quite a bit, which is why I was a little disappointed that neither of them appear again for the rest of the anime.

What I didn’t quite like was the ‘twist’ towards the end of the first episode. It turns out there’s a custom that the first man to sleep with the shogun is put to death afterwards. Our main character didn’t know about this, which is a little odd (everyone else seemed to know). It’s later explained how this custom came to be, but it doesn’t change the fact that it felt like forced drama within the context of this episode. And it’s kind of obvious that he’s not going to die anyway, because it would be a dumb way to end the story. Instead, Yoshinobu fakes his death and releases him with a new identity, allowing him to return to his old sweetheart.

The rest of the episode involves the beginning of Yoshinobu’s rule and her investigation into the past, which eventually leads her to the scribe who’s been chronicling everything that’s happened inside the Ooku. This allows us to go back in time to see how it all started. I was a little skeptical about the fact that, at this point in time, people apparently no longer know that this isn’t how it always used to be, and that men weren’t always a minority. It happened about 80 years ago, which is recent enough that there are still living survivors of that age. But it’s not that important anyway, since the rest of the anime takes place in the past.

The remaining 9 episodes tell the story of Arikoto, a monk who’s effectively kidnapped into the inner chambers under threat of death, as the wet-nurse-turned-regent Kasuga searches for a man who’ll suit the tastes of the secret shogun Chie.

The first half of the arc has a lot of suffering, to the point where I wasn’t actually enjoying watching it. Not that I never like depressing stories, but there has to be something special to it. While I did like Arikoto and Chie as characters, when it’s just horrible things happening to people who didn’t deserve it, it gets exhausting.

But the opposite happened in the second half. Even though it keeps looking like the drama will continue, it always backing off, so there wasn’t enough of it to make it interesting. When it comes to the drama, the story ‘peaks’ after the two of them have fallen in love but find themselves unable to have children, and Chie is forced to sleep with other men to produce an heir. Unable to cope with the situation, they consider mutual suicide as their only way out.

It doesn’t happen though. Chie eventually comes to accept her role, although Arikoto is still the only man she loves. And once her child is born, she has a new reason to keep living. However, that still leaves Arikoto himself, who’s now even more isolated. Locked away inside the Ooku for life, he no longer has a real purpose. But once again, the drama is left to simmer for a while, without ever coming to a boil. It’s the same when the other male concubines are introduced. You’d expect there to be tension and rivalry, but instead we have Sutezo, who soon gets paralyzed in a goofy accident, and another one who’s one is so irrelevant I can’t remember his name or what he looked like.

By the end, it started feeling more like a documentary. It’s like the story ran out of steam before it was done going through the world building, so we get kind of an epilogue that covers the remaining bits. And while I can see how it might be tragic for Chie to die at 27, it’s hard to feel emotional when it’s left as a footnote.

Overall, I respect Ooku for its interesting ideas, but I wish I’d gotten more out of the story iself.

Rating: 7/10