No question about it, The Apothecary Diaries was one of the big possums of the fall season.  It walks late, and as is all the rage these days. debuts with a multi-episode (three in this case) movie-style premiere.  Unlike Sousou no Frieren it actually starts three weeks in, so the episode count (24) isn’t inflated.  I have mixed feelings about this approach to be honest – material that’s tailored to be consumed episodically is often better served that way.   If there’s a unifying theme to the extended premiere – as was the case with Vinland Saga and Oshi no Ko – that makes it feel like a movie, it makes sense.  If it’s just multiple episodes strung together, not so much.

This seems more like the latter to me, but that’s fine – in the end what matters more is the quality of the material.  Kusuriya no Hitorigoto is based on a light novel, a medium about which I have great skepticism, but it seems to be one of the most well-regarded.  In fact it reminds me of another of the rare LN adaptations to win me over, Koukyuu no Karasu.  I have no idea which started first and I don’t necessarily think there’s any imitation going on, but the similarities are unavoidable – a young courtesan in ancient China who’s not intimate with the emperor, who specializes in solving mysteries.

What’s different is just as obvious, though.  First of all there’s no overt hint of a fantasy element in the first of these episodes.  And stylistically Koukyuu is all classical elegance and spare production, where Apothecary is bright primary colors and an almost American cartoon art style.  That really surprised me in fact, as did the frequent distorted-chibi shots, which frankly started to annoy me pretty quickly.  They miraculously disappeared as the episodes got more serious, but keep popping up intermittently.  Hopefully I get used to them in time.

Maomao (Aoi Yuuki) is a freckle-faced girl from a small village with a talent for apothecary skills.  She’s kidnapped and taken to the capital, where she’s sold off as a servant in the Imperial Palace.  It’s not clear (even to Maomao) whether she was simply kidnapped or sold out by her father – it’s clear both things happen, and whoever does the selling gets a cut of the abducted girl’s pay.  Maomao’s strategy is to settle into life at the palace as a servant girl, and keep as low a profile as possible.  But she’s obviously exceptional, and exceptional people draw interest in places like this.

Maomao’s strategy is foiled by her own inability to stay quiet when she deduces the reason why the Emperor’s two children – by different concubines – are falling ill.  It’s not an illness but a poison related to a face powder – one used by the women at a brothel in her hometown that was also a client of her father.  She tries to intervene surreptitiously, by leaving a note on the windowsill of concubine Lihua’s (Ishikawa Yui) – the mother of the prince and heir – palace.  But Jinshi (Ohtsuka Takeo), the eunuch(?) in charge of administration in the inner palace (and clearly Maomao’s chief foil) puts the pieces together and eventually catches Maomao in a trap, where her literacy (which she hid in order to avoid more money going to her kidnappers) gives her away.

Maomao’s actions come in time to save the princess daughter of the other favorite concubine, Gyokuyou, but not the son of the suspicious and skeptical Lihua.  Maomao is then hired as a lady in waiting for Gyokuyou (Tanezaki Atsumi), who – like Jinshi – is clearly no fool.  The other ladies in waiting are curiously sympathetic towards Maomao, and it soon becomes clear why – her main job is to be a poison tester for Gyokuyou.  But as her experiments have made her largely immune to poison, she’s a rather poor fit for the job (though being a chowhound, she’s not complaining).

Jinshi, in fact, is in the inner palace in part because his supposed beauty serves as a test of the loyalty of the resident concubines.  Maomao is certainly immune to his charms, which makes her that much more fascinating to him.  He appears to try and get her to eat aphrodisiac-laced pork buns (now at Family Mart), and then asks her to make an aphrodisiac for him for unspecified purposes.  Which she does, using highly precious cacao among other ingredients.  She also supports his suspicion that a supposed poisoning case involving a village and the army was in fact most likely an accident.

In the third episode we find Maomao investigating a ghost story Koukyuu-style, and it turns out to be a concubine, Fuyou, sleepwalking.  Except even that turns out to be bogus, as Maomao’s investigation shows.  The truth is that Fuyou is faking to keep the Emperor from showing interest, so that she can be chaste when she’s sold off to the military officer who in fact is her childhood sweetheart from her home country.  Maomao basically covering this up is the key takeaway here, since in doing so she’s effectively betraying the Emperor for the concubine’s benefit.  Gyokuyou gets the truth out of her, but it goes no further than that.

So how does all this work?  Quite well on the whole, at least for me.  I did like Maomao, and Aoi’s performance (as usual, great) has a lot to do with that.  She’s blunt but low-key, obviously smart, simultaneously secure in herself yet insecure at times about her role at court.  Maomao solving mysteries is clearly going to be the meat of the story, so it had better work right from the get-go if that’s how you’re going to start the series.  She has a lot of potential as a lead, though at this point I don’t feel as enthusiastic about Jinshi as a deuteragonist.  Gaojun in Koukyuu no Karasu was a lot more immediately interesting, but it’s early days yet.

As for the production side of things, it’s certainly highly competent – some of the backgrounds are lovely and there’s not much CGI (or need for it).  As noted earlier though, the overall visual style is slightly misaligned to the material, at least to my eye, and considering that there are three pretty big names (including Kevin Penkin) on board as composers I found the music to be pretty forgettable.  None of those seem like insurmountable problems, and on the whole these three episodes were certainly enjoyable.  I don’t sense any greatness in Kusuriya no Hitorigoto, but the floor strikes me as being pretty high – I’m confident that it’s going to be no worse than very good.