Ôoku: The Inner Chambers by Fumi Yoshinaga

Manga set in feudal Japan. Most of the men have died from some kind of plague and the remaining dudes are a hot commodity. It was… sort of interesting, I guess? The ways in which the author explores how certain power structures seem to encourage certain types of, what I might think of as, specifically gendered behavior. (For example, the protagonist can’t marry the woman he loves, because she’s not rich enough, and he needs to support his parents. So he goes to join the shogun’s harem, for lack of a better word, because it’s financially lucrative.) I feel like I was missing a lot, culturally, reading this.

The first in a series. I probably won’t read the others.

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