Volume eleven of “Fushigi Yûgi: Genbu Kaiden” turns on the family drama of a dying kingdom, with the machinations of two brothers coming to their final fruition. Then they die, one after the other.
Written and illustrated by Yuu Watase
When schoolgirl Takiko Okuda attempts to destroy her father’s translation of The Universe of the Four Gods, she is instead sucked into the story, becoming the Priestess of Genbu in an epic journey to find the seven Celestial Warriors! While Takiko learns the terrible truth behind the prophecy that set Uruki against his father, King Temdan, the country of Bêi-jîa faces both civil war and foreign invasion. Takiko’s final hope lies in reuniting the last two Celestial Warriors, the twins Urumiya and Teg. Can she mend the rifts between brother and brother, father and son?
Fushigi Yûgi: Genbu Kaiden changed half way through its series. The first half was an adventure, with our heroes exploring the kingdom and adding new members to their merry, traveling troupe. The second half became a story of hard family drama, with less clear goals and difficult paths to their goal, often by splitting the party and sacrificing small characters. It was smart to relegate most of the champions the background while Watase explored this half of the, it would have been unfathomably complicated if all eight of Takiko’s warriors had important roles in this small family drama.
Sidenote: This book required me to reread the last chapter of the last book, volume ten, which was mostly an extended flashback, to remind myself of exactly who was who and where they were. I drew a little graph to help me.
This latter half of the story could have been it’s own manga entirely, and not one about Takiko and her Genbu summoning. It’s a complex Shakespearean family drama with the crown at stake, and the fate rests on a transsexual child who can only inherit the crown if he chooses to be a male. There are just eight characters, tightly wound, and Takiko barely more than an observer. Instead, in the manga we have, their story is clouded, and potentially important characters are relegated to last minute walk-on roles. Filka is the daughter of the King, a counterpart to Limdo, and if you look closely you can almost see a story where she is as important. Instead she’s barely a love interest.
This is not to say that I disliked it, I loved how this complicated kingdom fit it the main narrative. Yuu Watase likes to write like this. She builds careful stories in the deep background, then uses them up completely in just a couple volumes. The emotional scars (and a war) linger, but they’re concluded quickly.
There are some similarities to the family in Takiko‘s life. Limdo’s mother is lying in bed, not quite dead, while his father is out in the world being suspiciously unhelpful until it’s too late. And then there are brothers separated by some degree of destiny or choice, like Teg and Hagus, and Tegil and Tamden. I don’t think there’s a positive moral in how these variations on a theme played out, except that Yuu Watase likes exploring certain aspects of the human condition in parallel. And maybe that people have better fates when they’re on the side of our hero Takiko.
In volume eleven, the penultimate book of the series, “Fushigi Yûgi: Genbu Kaiden” has brought a lot of threads to their final conclusion. Yuu Watase spent the past few volumes secretly putting everyone into the right place for her semi-final denouement, then she showed us exactly what she did it. Despite my wishes for a different focus on certain players, the story that Watase actually wrote is quite a feat.
