Journey to the Past – This Week in Anime

How’d you like to roll back the clock with me and chat about some choice titles in this genre while we try to figure out just what makes historical fiction so timeless?

I was immediately charmed by Jaadugar‘s presentation, but also by how firmly it’s rooted in the culture and history of 13th-century Persia. Of specific note, I love how the original writers include both the specific term “iddah” for a widow’s mourning period after her husband’s passing as well as enough context clues to discern what that culturally-tied term means. Also, props to the localizer on this anime for recognizing the intent of this phrasing and keeping the term in the subtitles!

Though not an anime, but still a delightful work of animation, I really recommend that anyone who appreciated Jaadugar watch the film Persepolis, which covers the recently deceased author and director Marjane Satrapi’s experiences growing up during the Iranian Revolution.

While we’re talking about stories that take place in the 13th century, we should probably talk about the equally creatively rendered anime adaptation of 13th-century historical epic The Tale of the Heike, or The Heike Story.

Which, before we say anything else about this anime, I’d like to stress just how much it absolutely whips! If you like crunchy tales of empires and how interpersonal friction or cohesion can play just as big a role in warfare as tactics or resources, this is the anime for you!

But yes, Sitara and Biwa are both terrific frames of reference and audience POV characters, and both being young women is a clearly intentional choice that helps these works feel just as much about the culture of the times and places they depict, instead of just the events that took place in those periods.

And if we’re beginning to bridge into the more fictitious side of historical fiction, we’ve gotta talk about one of my absolute favorite entries in the genre, Golden Kamuy! Equal parts classical western and an exploration of Japan’s tumultuous Meiji Era in the early 20th century, it’s about a war veteran and a young woman from the Ainu people indigenous to Hokkaido and other islands north of Japan searching for a fabled hoard of gold.

I especially appreciate how Asirpa isn’t just an avatar of the community that she’s from and instead has her own feelings about and connections to her culture, as well as opinions on how they should integrate into a rapidly industrializing world.

Of course, Golden Kamuy‘s depiction of the Ainu people in the Meiji era is just a small part of the history it takes inspiration from! It also features critical figures from the Bakumatsu period (basically the conflicts at the end of the Edo period that resulted in Japan no longer being an isolationist nation), like the Shinsengumi (basically secret police from the time that acquired enough power to have political influence), vice-captain Toshizou Hijikata, as well as Japan’s ongoing land disputes with Russia at the turn of the 20th century.

It is shockingly informative and educational for a work that also frequently has its cast of mostly male and beautiful men posed as sexily as possible.

Though, for anyone who did click with Orb better than I did, I STRONGLY recommend playing the game Pentiment, which similarly explores and humanizes the life of those living through the incredibly regressive Middle Ages.

And if people like romance in their historical anime, they should get ready for Firefly Wedding next season! Another story taking place in the Meiji Era, outside of its central situationship, this work is very much about the different (though all similarly limited) ways women fit into this society and is a painfully honest portrait of the era.

And yes, charismatic, sociopathic assassins aside, Firefly Wedding really puts into place how far women’s rights and their personhood in broader society have come in the past 100+ years. That isn’t to say that things are great for women today, but they used to be a lot worse a lot more recently than we care to remember.

Even in the face of a lot of high-profile sequels hitting next season, I think this is going to be an anime to keep an eye on, as it’s hitting that sweet spot of a historical story overtly informed by modern social politics.

Explicitly informed by mangaka Makoto Yukimura‘s experiences growing up during the Cold War and motivated by the September 11th attacks that would act as the catalyst for the next decades spanning global conflict, this adaptation of Nordic historical myth is as much a critique of tribalism and jingoism today as The Crucible was of McCarthyism when that play premiered in the 1950s.