Ōoku: The Inner Chambers Season 1
Netflix began streaming an English-subtitled trailer for the anime of Fumi Yoshinaga‘s Ōoku: The Inner Chambers manga on Tuesday. The trailer reveals the anime’s June 29 worldwide debut on Netflix.
Noriyuki Abe is directing the anime at Studio DEEN. Rika Takasugi is writing the script, Yōko Satō is the character designer, and Kenji Kawai is composing the music.
The anime will star:
- Mamoru Miyano as Madenokōji Arikoto
- Eriko Matsui as Tokugawa Iemitsu
- Yuuki Kaji as Gyokuei
- Kikuko Inoue as Kasuga no Tsubone
- Jun Fukuyama as Sutezō
- Tomokazu Seki as Mizuno Yūnoshin
- Miyuki Satō as Onobu
- Sanae Kobayashi as Tokugawa Yoshimune
Hitoshi Kubota is narrating the anime.
Viz Media publishes the manga in English, and it describes the story:
In Edo period Japan, a strange new disease called the Red Pox has begun to prey on the country’s men. Within eighty years of the first outbreak, the male population has fallen by seventy-five percent. Women have taken on all the roles traditionally granted to men, even that of the Shogun. The men, precious providers of life, are carefully protected. And the most beautiful of the men are sent to serve in the Shogun’s Inner Chamber…
Yoshinaga launched the manga in Hakusensha‘s Melody magazine in 2004, and ended it in December 2020. Hakusensha published the manga’s 19th and final volume in February 2021, and Viz Media published the final volume in English in March 2022. The manga won the 2009 James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and won the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 2009. Its other honors include the 1st anan Manga Prize, the 56th Shogakukan Manga Prize in the shōjo division, the 5th Sense of Gender Prize’s Special Award, and most recently, the Grand Prize in the 42nd Nihon SF Taishō Awards.
The manga inspired a live-action film adaptation in 2010, a live-action television series titled Ōoku: Arikoto・Iemitsu Hen in October 2012, and a second live-action film titled Ōoku: Eien – Emonnosuke・Tsunayoshi Hen in December of the same year.
A new live-action series premiered on NHK on January 10 and will have a second season this fall.
The world of Ōoku: The Inner Chambers is modeled on the Edo period in Japan, and centers on the Ōoku of Edo Castle, where the basis of social management and power is shifted from men to women as a result of the rapid decline in the male population caused by a mysterious plague.
In this work, figures who are male in history, such as the Shoguns of the Tokugawa clan for generations and those who held important positions, are replaced by women, and figures who are female by men. The story is composed of detailed descriptions based on historical facts interwoven with fiction. As for descriptions based on historical facts such as a report by an Opperhoofd: “I had an audience with Iemitsu through a blind, and I thought his voice sounded like a boy’s.
