Swordspoint and Ooku (Not a Comparison)
Jan. 3rd, 2011 07:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiA Couple of Gender-Exploration Reads: Swordspoint and Ooku.
Thanks tosidhebaap on both counts, I have recently read Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint (finally) and the first three volumes of Fumi Yoshinaga's manga, Ooku. They don't have much in common, but both explore alternate quasi-historical societies with attitudes toward sex and/or gender different from real world history. Brief thoughts on each follow:
Swordspoint, published in 1987, is an early example of "slashy" original fiction. It's an m/m romance set against political intrigue in a fictional country with a Regency feel. I want to say that by "today's" standards, it reads as pretty old school slash, with very recognizable tropes of h/c, romantic sex, utopian lack of homosexual stigma, etc. But it is pretty old, and it certainly deserves credit for being a mold-breaker in its time. It's very competently written and a thoroughly engaging story with complex world-building, a good sense of mystery, a core couple that works well, and at least one really great female character to boot.
Niggle: the emotions of our lovers never seem to quite reach the pitch they could. There are good reasons for this. Richard is calm by nature and has trained himself by long experience not to expect too much of people or invest too much. He cultivates a certain detachment and, as he's our main POV character, it shows. Alec may well be the more emotionally involved of the two, but he is also the "mystery" character, and thus, we are largely kept out of his POV. What we see, instead, is his prickly facade. So it goes.
The anthropologist in me is trying to figure out whether I buy Kushner's conception of complete acceptance of homosexuality (in a relatively egalitarian and non-age-restricted way) in a world that is strongly patriarchal. Culturally, sex is always highly concerned with relations between men and women, and homosexuality will bear the mark of those attitudes. In a strongly patriarchal society, I would expect homosexuality to be mainly acceptable between men and youths, where the youths are coded "female" in relative status. This type of relationship seems to exist in the world of Swordspoint, but it is clearly not the default "normative" model.
On the other hand, one could argue that women in Swordspoint have somewhat more standing than in, say, Regency England. They are able to hold political offices (on rare occasion) and the ubiquitous (and all are female?) prostitutes seem to garner some degree of social clout. The world is clearly pagan and polytheistic. With very slight tweaking, it might make an alternate history England were Christianity never ascended. One could argue that this religious background is less misogynistic than in our history and, thus, that women (and by extension homosexual relationships) have more nearly equal status than we might expect. But there's still a lot of textual evidence that women are pretty second class...
As an exploration of gender, Ooku is much more sophisticated than Swordspoint. This manga posits that a disease sweeps Japan in the early 1600s, killing off about 80% of the male children. The disease takes hold and remains a constant feature of life thereafter, so that the population stabilizes with about 20% men. As a result, women take over many of the tasks once held by men, including the role of shogun. The manga carefully chronicles an alternate history of the Tokugawa shogunate in a Japan dominated by women.
As one review from the Tor website noted, this does not stop the manga from spending an awful lot of time focusing on the men. Indeed, male homosexuality gets more exploration than female homosexuality, while most of the romantic relations remain heterosexual. (This is not an inverse of Ai no Kusabi--sorry.) The plot focuses on the Inner Chambers of the shogun's palace, where a harem of men are kept, initially to protect the shogun in case of invasion but later as a mark of opulence.
It's a good human-interest story. Volume 1 establishes the female-dominated society; its characters are a bit secondary. Volume 2 goes back in time to the early days of the plague to explore the ascendance of the first female shogun. Volumes 2 and 3 are, among other things, a very good het love story (and you don't see those every day). One thing that keeps the love story so powerful is that it doesn't dominate the plot; our lovers are sympathetic because they are highly sensible of the myriad considerations demanding their attention above and beyond their relationship. Points, of course, for very strong female characters, and points for a nuanced look at how gender relations would change and not change under such circumstances.
I imagine this story, which apparently uses rather archaic Japanese, is hard to translate. That being acknowledged, the translation is annoying. I concur again with the review noted above that the translation mixes an attempt at Elizabethan English with completely inappropriate modern locution to ill effect. But one gets used to it.
Thanks to
sidhebaap on both counts, I have recently read Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint (finally) and the first three volumes of Fumi Yoshinaga's manga, Ooku. They don't have much in common, but both explore alternate quasi-historical societies with attitudes toward sex and/or gender different from real world history. Brief thoughts on each follow:Swordspoint, published in 1987, is an early example of "slashy" original fiction. It's an m/m romance set against political intrigue in a fictional country with a Regency feel. I want to say that by "today's" standards, it reads as pretty old school slash, with very recognizable tropes of h/c, romantic sex, utopian lack of homosexual stigma, etc. But it is pretty old, and it certainly deserves credit for being a mold-breaker in its time. It's very competently written and a thoroughly engaging story with complex world-building, a good sense of mystery, a core couple that works well, and at least one really great female character to boot.
Niggle: the emotions of our lovers never seem to quite reach the pitch they could. There are good reasons for this. Richard is calm by nature and has trained himself by long experience not to expect too much of people or invest too much. He cultivates a certain detachment and, as he's our main POV character, it shows. Alec may well be the more emotionally involved of the two, but he is also the "mystery" character, and thus, we are largely kept out of his POV. What we see, instead, is his prickly facade. So it goes.
The anthropologist in me is trying to figure out whether I buy Kushner's conception of complete acceptance of homosexuality (in a relatively egalitarian and non-age-restricted way) in a world that is strongly patriarchal. Culturally, sex is always highly concerned with relations between men and women, and homosexuality will bear the mark of those attitudes. In a strongly patriarchal society, I would expect homosexuality to be mainly acceptable between men and youths, where the youths are coded "female" in relative status. This type of relationship seems to exist in the world of Swordspoint, but it is clearly not the default "normative" model.
On the other hand, one could argue that women in Swordspoint have somewhat more standing than in, say, Regency England. They are able to hold political offices (on rare occasion) and the ubiquitous (and all are female?) prostitutes seem to garner some degree of social clout. The world is clearly pagan and polytheistic. With very slight tweaking, it might make an alternate history England were Christianity never ascended. One could argue that this religious background is less misogynistic than in our history and, thus, that women (and by extension homosexual relationships) have more nearly equal status than we might expect. But there's still a lot of textual evidence that women are pretty second class...
As an exploration of gender, Ooku is much more sophisticated than Swordspoint. This manga posits that a disease sweeps Japan in the early 1600s, killing off about 80% of the male children. The disease takes hold and remains a constant feature of life thereafter, so that the population stabilizes with about 20% men. As a result, women take over many of the tasks once held by men, including the role of shogun. The manga carefully chronicles an alternate history of the Tokugawa shogunate in a Japan dominated by women.
As one review from the Tor website noted, this does not stop the manga from spending an awful lot of time focusing on the men. Indeed, male homosexuality gets more exploration than female homosexuality, while most of the romantic relations remain heterosexual. (This is not an inverse of Ai no Kusabi--sorry.) The plot focuses on the Inner Chambers of the shogun's palace, where a harem of men are kept, initially to protect the shogun in case of invasion but later as a mark of opulence.
It's a good human-interest story. Volume 1 establishes the female-dominated society; its characters are a bit secondary. Volume 2 goes back in time to the early days of the plague to explore the ascendance of the first female shogun. Volumes 2 and 3 are, among other things, a very good het love story (and you don't see those every day). One thing that keeps the love story so powerful is that it doesn't dominate the plot; our lovers are sympathetic because they are highly sensible of the myriad considerations demanding their attention above and beyond their relationship. Points, of course, for very strong female characters, and points for a nuanced look at how gender relations would change and not change under such circumstances.
I imagine this story, which apparently uses rather archaic Japanese, is hard to translate. That being acknowledged, the translation is annoying. I concur again with the review noted above that the translation mixes an attempt at Elizabethan English with completely inappropriate modern locution to ill effect. But one gets used to it.
