Ooku: The Inner Chambers, Vol. 19

In Eisner-nominated Fumi Yoshinaga's alternative history of Edo-era Japan, the men of Japan are dying out, and the women have taken up the reigns of power-including the shogun's seat! In Edo period Japan, a strange new disease called the Redface 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... The new government of Japan is determined to not only end the reign of the shoguns but erase any mention of the generations of women who once ruled the country. Try as they might to rewrite history, though, they cannot erase the memories of those who served in the Ooku...