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Ooku: The Inner Chambers - Volume 1 (2009) - Comic Books, Gestalt Mash, Reviews | Jonathan McCalmont | February 14, 2011 6:31 pm
By Jonathan McCalmont
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.
Ooku: The Inner Chambers - Volume 1 (2009)
BSCreview
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By Jonathan McCalmont
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.
Ooku: The Inner Chambers - Volume 1 (2009)
BSCreview
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/