Ooku: The Inner Chambers Series Review: Fantastic Historical Fiction with Flipped Gender Roles

Director: Noriyuki Abe

Writers: Fumi Yoshinaga (manga), Takasugi Rika (screenplay)

Imagine an alternate timeline in which the rigidly conservative world of 17th and 18th century Japan is turned upside down so that women are the ones occupying positions of power while men are the second citizens, used as concubines and kept sequestered for their own safety. This is the world of Ooku: The Inner Chambers, an anime series based on an award-winning manga by the same name. 

When a mysterious plague rapidly spreads across Japan and claims only young men as its victims, the country is plunged into crisis. Men and boys are cloistered indoors for their own safety and as the male population dwindles, adult men become simultaneously more coveted and marginalised. They’re valuable for being able to impregnate women but are otherwise considered weak because of their vulnerability to the killer “red-face smallpox”.

Ooku: The Inner Chamber opens in a time when people have practically forgotten that once, men rather than women occupied positions like that of the shogun (military dictators who were de facto rulers). It’s the reign of the pragmatic and blunt Yoshimune, the eighth shogun who has little time for the posturing and flamboyance of the capital city of Edo (modern-day Tokyo). As shogun, she must select her sexual partner from the men who have been selected as potential concubines and who live in the harem, known as Ooku. When she begins to learn about the various rituals and traditions of the Ooku — one of them is that the first man that the shogun has sex with must be killed — Yoshimune becomes curious about the past. She starts digging around and learns about records kept in a book titled “The Chronicle of the Dying Day”, which recounts how Japan changed from being patrilineal to female-dominated. 

Part of the charm of Ooku: The Inner Chambers is that it retains historical details, but puts a different spin to the incidents from bygone eras. For example, Ooku was the name given to the women’s quarters in Edo Castle but in this series, it’s shown as both a prison and a sanctuary for men who have evaded red-face smallpox. Similarly, Tokugawa Iemitsu was the third shogun who ruled from 1623 to 1651, and is known for expelling all Europeans from Japan. In Ooku: The Inner Chambers, Iemitsu is a victim of the plague and to prevent the Tokugawa dynasty from being toppled, his wet nurse Kasuga plants his illegitimate daughter as shogun. The daughter’s older identity is erased and she’s known as Iemitsu, which serves to obscure her father’s death. Iemitsu’s decision to close Japan off is attributed to the daughter, who does so to keep the plague of red-face smallpox from spreading. Especially in our post-Covid times, her decision has a chilling resonance to the lockdowns of our recent past.

Ooku: The Inner Chambers keeps reminding viewers that at the root of social evils is not a particular gender, but power imbalances — and that these very things that make reality unbearable can make for complex and fascinating stories.  

The reversal of gender roles also allows the story to explore a range of complex issues, including body dysmorphia, hierarchy and abuse of power. Outside Edo Castle, the country is wracked with famine, hardship and fear. There are daughters who are raised as sons and feel alienated from their own bodies. In poorer families, women taking on the roles of men brings some degree of authority, but this comes at the cost of adding to their labour. The red-light area gets an air of the grotesque and nudges the viewer to think about how gender changes their perception of sex work. Within the walls of the Ooku, a different set of terrors unfold. The powerless are violated and those who seem powerful are revealed to be crippled by their circumstances. Happiness is briefer than the seasons in this beautiful but cruel world where power games leave everyone feeling insecure and vulnerable. We can only hope from the abrupt end that there’s another season coming, which will follow the manga’s storyline to show how the history of Tokugawa women was effectively erased despite the immense power they wielded for approximately a century.