A Statement of Subject and Method: Fumi Yoshinaga’s Eisner
Award-nominated and James Tiptree Jr. Award-winning series Ooku: The Inner
Chambers is a multi-volume manga series set in an alternative version of
Medieval Edo Period Japan in which a terrifying plague has wiped out 75% of the
male population. Using this fictional event as a point of divergence (or
Jonbar hinge), Yoshinaga sets about exploring what might have happened had
Japan’s Edo-period social and political institutions been forced to adapt to
such a dramatic demographic change.Using a Jonbar hinge to examine the different
ways in which the world might have been different is hardly anything new.
For example:
Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) is set in an
America occupied by Japan and Germany in the wake of defeat in the Second World
War.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) is set in
an alternative version of the Americas in which large stretches of Canada were
settled by Russians.
Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union
(2007) features a densely urbanised version of Alaska that was set aside after
the Second World War as the site of a new Jewish homeland.
Most alternate
histories are painted with a broad brush. Authors tend to focus upon the
grand narrative sweep of history and so exact their speculative change in the
currency of lost battles, fallen governments and toppling civilisations.
With Ooku, Yoshinaga takes a different approach.