Sleep Is For the Weak

Rated M for sexual content and adult themes, although sex is mostly of the fade-to-black variety in this one; official English website (Viz)

Ooku is amazing. It’s Fumi Yoshinaga’s (current) defining work, an alternative history of Edo-era Japan where a disease has killed off something like 80% of men and turned them into the scarce, valued “sex class.” Men are married off for political and “heir-producing” reasons, put into brothels, or stuffed into decadent harems. Pretty much all power positions go to women, including the position of shogun. Men are still beloved and valued and respected in their own way, of course, but they don’t actually get the real power in society (not even by waggling their precious, scarce man bits in front of horny women). In other words, it’s a near-perfect role reversal of the patriarchy. For those of you who don’t spend your free time immersed in discussions about feminism and the patriarchy and the Male Gaze, this book couldn’t possibly make it any more accessible. It’s clear as crystal. It’s brilliant, engaging, sympathetic, and oftentimes sad.

A lot of reviews have already flooded the Internet saying exactly why Ooku is amazing, but I want to talk about more than that - about what Ooku could, and should, mean for our comics industry in the West.

Fumi Yoshinaga writes better character stories, consistently, than almost anyone. She’s also very, very smart and very, very aware of the world around us, which is why she’s not afraid to talk about issues of sexuality in this day and age OR do historical fiction OR write something sexy and fun OR write something dark and depressing OR write something that rings very true for women OR write something that rings very true for men. She’s also not afraid to do all of those things at once, which she has absolutely done with Ooku (and then some).

Ooku took advantage of all of her previously proven talents, but then it also tackled a lot of things she hadn’t explored before in her earlier work. Now we also know that she can:

-Write heterosexual relationships well, tastefully, and believably.

-Write well-rounded, believable, likable women in various positions of power (both high and low).

-Deal with all the complications and passions of sex without actually having sex scenes.*

-Talk about feminism in our world a lot more directly.

Fumi Yoshinaga is already a feminist icon. And it’s not that she pushes a particular form of feminist activism so much as she’s just a smart, successful woman who does what she wants, no matter how “girly” the world may think it is, and never compromises, and proves that everyone can love it if they just drop their preconceptions about what it’s “okay” for both boys and girls to like. For example, she writes about gay men for a big men’s magazine and no one thinks it’s weird. That’s because everyone in Japan loves Fumi Yoshinaga and knows that what she writes about and what gender that slants toward and her gender are all irrelevant - she’s brilliant, read her stuff, we love her.

This is really important for us to get in the West, because comics are still largely a boy’s club. We all know why that is - in addition to repeated attempts by, say, Marvel (and DC!) to be as insulting to women as possible** (whether that’s always intentional or not), it’s also that women becoming more than a small percentage of comic readers is a fairly new thing, and the women who were always marginalized before are now becoming a bigger group that is physically harder to marginalize. I hate to say that some groups get acknowledged only because there are too damn many of them to ignore, but sometimes that’s how the cookie crumbles in an unbalanced society. Now that the Twilight fans outnumber a lot of the male-dominated corners of fandom, we’re seeing more proof of this acknowledgment, although a lot of it requires both kicking and screaming.

So to help this new feminist mindset in the Western comics industry move along, we now have Ooku. Ooku is the finest work by one of the finest and most celebrated current mangaka in Japan. It’s also one of the first (if not the first?) manga not specifically aimed at men in Viz’s new, “classy” line of manga. It won the Tezuka Award with A Drifting Life, the manga everyone can agree is art.

And it’s also written by a woman, for a woman’s magazine, and shows an alternative Japanese history where all positions of power are held by women.

Important People in Comics can’t not read Ooku, because now there’s no reason not to other than “I don’t want to read the girly stuff,” which will greatly increase the chance that someone will call them on their bullshit this time around. That means they have to be exposed to Fumi Yoshinaga and women making comics and women loving comics. Maybe they’ll even start noticing the new, awesome shirts.

This can only be a good thing for everyone involved. Especially since it means we’ll all be reading the awesomeness that is Ooku.

Initial impression: If you claim to be a respected manga critic/expert, and you read Urasawa and Tatsumi and all those respected male mangaka who primarily write for adult men or through an adult male viewpoint, and you won’t read Ooku…ask yourself why. Because I know why.

P.S. - Shaenon Garrity gets it.

P.P.S. - I like Akemi Wegmuller, but the editorial decision to have her write the Ooku script in old-timey English was a really bad one. Sorry. BLU got it right with the old-fashioned but still completely accessible scripts for Yoshinaga’s French Revolution smut.

*This may be disappointing to some, considering we know what happens when she doesn’t hold back or has some fun in that regard.

**If you read the comments, you see that since Chris Butcher dared to suggest that women would probably find a teenage girl who’s rotting in all places but her sexy bits and her remaining come-hither eye insulting, he’s the asshole, and he’s lost all credibility. Seriously.

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