I Am Completely Serious

Or probably any other fictional narrative involving Tokugawa Tsunayoshi:

I guess I at one point knew this but forgot about it: Rikugien, my favorite landscape garden in Tokyo, was apparently designed by Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu. The garden plaques and pamphlets describes Yoshiyasu as being known mainly for his contributions to the arts. I do not think that this is, in fact, the case. At the very least, he's a sub-villain in the 47 Ronin narrative, which is better known than the man's poetry. Probably anyone with an interest in the period has opinions about whether he was sleeping with Tsunayoshi.

For purposes of comparison, Koishikawa Kourakuen was designed by Mito Koumon.

Ooku 2-4, Fumi Yoshinaga

(Yes, I did read volume two more than a month ago.)

Ooku volume 2 is set about one hundred years before volume 1. It's a stronger book, I think, but it's clear why it needed to be the second volume in the series. The flawed but relatively functional matriarchal Japan of Yoshimune's reign needed to be established and made to feel convincing, to give the decisions made in Chie/Iemitsu's time the gravity they need to feel real.

There's this sort of story that I think of as a "negotiable narrative" - one where, for some reason, the reader is compelled make comparisons between the narrative presented, and an alternate narrative that is in some sense more "real." In this case, if volume 2 were read before volume 1, the alternate narrative - with which most Japanese readers would be at least somewhat familiar - is the actual historical narrative of the early Edo era.

When volume 2 is read after volume 1 and framed as a story that Yoshimune is reading, however, Yoshimune's own alternate Japan becomes the basis for comparison. We read it wondering what she and the people around her might think of it, not what the historical Iemitsu might have thought.

This is a good choice for the kind of alternate history Yoshinaga is writing here. It's sort of a suspension-of-disbelief issue, but it's also partly a question of tone. The first kind of alternate history always runs the risk of feeling didactic, even when that's not the author's intent (though I think it often is). It's easy for even innocuous decisions on the author's part to feel like criticism, or advice. By beginning the story in a Japan radically different from the real one, then moving backwards to one that is just beginning to diverge, Yoshinaga defines the story as one taking place in another world, which makes the criticisms that she is sneaking in - and I would say that she is making some criticisms here! - seem more organic to the story.

(Incidentally, I feel like Jacqueline Carey did something very similar to this with Kushiel's Dart. She gives the reader a kind of permission to buy into the fantasy by introducing the floating world of the Night Court first - and not making it clear until further in that, oh, by the way, this is all happening in a fairly close approximation of Europe. It just works better.)

Volume 2 and the first portion of volume 3 are the sort of story Yoshinaga is good at - several smart, unhappy people make a lot of understandable bad decisions and hurt each other, slowly coming to terms with the unfairness of the world.

I'm not sure what happened with the second part of volume 3, but it started to fall apart. ( Cut for an infinitesimal spoiler. )

Ooku, volume 1, by Yoshinaga Fumi

This is so good. Yoshinaga Fumi is actually kinda engaging in social criticism this time, instead of gently skating around it like she usually does. And there are hard-ass female protagonists! This is exactly the manga I have wanted from her.

Viz's adaptation, however, is awful. I haven't read the original, and so can't comment on the accuracy of the translation, but the adaptor for some reason decided to use a kind of opaque, ultra-formal archaic English that's very inappropriate to the subject matter. It surprises me that the manga won its Tiptree in this kind of condition.

I'm assuming that the original was in mildly archaic language, but I've skimmed the first few pages of the Amazon.co.jp reviews, and I don't see any of the complaints you'd expect if it had been as self-conscious and poorly-done as this. (Not that I'd expect them, given that Yoshinaga is a good writer.) The Amazon.com reviews, on the other hand, all complain about the adaptation - as they should. I'm really disappointed that this sort of stuff is happening even in the Signature line, which I'm assuming Viz would like us to think of as having a high level of quality control.

Eternal, by Cynthia Leitich Smith

Despite her adoring guardian angel Zachary's attempts to prevent it, a shy teenage girl named Miranda becomes a vampire. To punish Zachary, the archangel Michael turns him into a human. Miranda, getting on with the usual vampire business of dressing fabulously and throwing parties, is instructed by her "Father," the vampire who turned her, to hire a personal assistant - she ends up hiring Zachary, who is determined to save her soul.

This would be fairly normal paranormal romance stuff, except that Miranda's response to becoming a vampire is to murder several million people. It's what you'd expect of a classic vampire, but a little different from what you normally get in a paranormal romance. Miranda is slightly brainwashed at the time, but in most ways still recognizably herself, so that a lot of the book is from the point of view of an insecure serial killer who worries a lot about clothes. Which is, at first, mostly funny:

My coffin is a demure complement to Father's. His is king-size and made from black marble, customized with brass fittings and a NASCAR emblem. It could be fairly characterized as the black-velvet Elvis painting of coffins.

Eternals have no right to speak, to assemble, to anything that I learned about in Government, though everybody seems enthusiastic about bearing arms.

Until it turns around and does something like this:

Annoyed, I mutter, "Why do they need tongues, anyway?"

With his chopsticks, Father stirs wasabi into his soy sauce. "Why, indeed?"

He excuses himself, leaving the room without an explanation.

There's a disturbing scene in which Zachary, still convinced that Miranda can't possibly be a murderer, visits the dungeon full of humans Miranda's servants are keeping for her to eat.

This is a weird book, simultaneously lighter than you'd expect from the genre, because it has a sense of proportion about what it's doing, and darker, for the same reason. Being a vampire is not a good thing here - it's both absurd, because Smith knows the genre conventions and has a lot of fun tearing them to shreds, and horrifying, because, you know, vampires eat people. The ambition required to question all these genre assumptions makes the book interesting, but I'm not sure it gets where it was going. For a book written in first-person, it's oddly distant in places - it's hard to tell exactly what Miranda's thinking a lot of the time, which feels lazy to me. Similarly, it's hard to tell how deep Zachary's denial runs. I enjoyed the book, but it's not quite all there.

Dark Enchantment, by Karen Harbough

In 16th century Paris, an English nobleman named Jack Marstone meets an amnesiac young woman named Catherine de la Fer, who has been living on the streets in a half-deranged state, occasionally murdering people when they do evil things. Catherine has stigmata, and her hands bleed when she is in the presence of evil, something which is very convenient for her vigilante career. Jack worries that she may be a sorceress; Catherine worries that she may be cursed; somewhere, an evil wizard worries that the demons he has been raising to send after Catherine are not smelly enough. Catherine blackmails Jack into teaching her swordsmanship, feeling correctly that it might come in handy.

The plot is very silly and erratically-paced, and I don't think it actually makes sense in the end, but whatever. The book is about Catherine and Jack bickering, slaying demons, experiencing UST, and then taking those actions which excise the U from the acronym. As such, it is a cute book, but kind of forgettable. The villain is a little short on clear motivations - despite having some fairly extensive first-person sections - and Catherine and Jack have no common sense. A pair of comic-relief innkeepers who serve as dei ex machina are nearly the only thing keeping the plot on the rails, leaving me with the impression that the world would be better off if whimsical innkeepers, rather than dashing foreign rogues and magical amnesiac swordswomen, were the typical first point-of-contact for evil wizards.

Does looking up the plural form of deus ex machina make you a total jerk? Because I just did that.