Having a bit of a lull between seasons (Insomnia still hasn’t finished and a few premieres have hit, but you get the point) means opportunity where Netflix dump series are concerned.  Oooku hasn’t quite captivated me but it’s certainly an interesting piece of work.  It’s also resoundingly different than anything else airing, needless to say.  What it lacks in flash it makes up in depth and substance, two terms one doesn’t get to apply to anime all that often.

To the extent this is working for me (which is mostly) I think a big reason is how straight the narrative plays it.  This really reads as an alternative history of Japan – it’s so easy to lull yourself into believing these events really happened.  And a takeaway from that, I think, is that Oooku’s vision of how the country would change under these circumstances is very believable.  Part of that, honestly, is that a lot of what the men in the story go through is pretty much what Japanese women always have in reality.

The fascinating thing is that this is an incredibly patriarchal society, even to this day.  It’s also extraordinarily wedded to tradition and resistant to change, and it’s these two sides which are forced to reconcile in the wake of the red-face smallpox plague.  As the series sees it, it’s the latter that pretty much wins out over the former.  Gender roles largely swap, but the establishment finds it easier to cope with that than to fundamentally change the way society operates.  That may change farther into the future (in arcs anime will likely never adapt) but for now, that’s the way it’s playing out.

Arikoto’s sad tale is basically the genesis story of the Oooku as we saw it in the prologue.  Iemitsu is in fact dead – it was the man Kasuga ordered to become his body double – her son, Masakatsu – that met with Arikoto in court.  There is in fact a giant conspiracy to hide the truth here, as Iemitsu died without leaving an heir.  He did have a child however – a product of rape that was in effect an attempt by Iemitsu (a total scumbag) to show off for Masakatsu.  That girl is the last remnant of Tokugawa blood, and Arikoto’s real role here is to one of the contenders to father an heir with Iemitsu’s illegitimate daughter (now 17).

Whatever it evolved into by Yuuoishin’s time, this was the Oooku’s real purpose – seed stock.  Things initially get off to a rocky start between the young “shogun” and the former priest, but one assumes they’re eventually going to become rather close (she gifts him a cat, after all).  It’s also worth noting that by the prologue, this pretense had been dropped and the shogun was openly a woman.  The implication here is that Kasuga’s plan failed, though it’s possible that the fiction collapsed sometime after her death.