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"Saiunkoku": Bureaucrat vs. Bureaucrat
By Maxie Zeus
07-13-2009, 12:42 AM |
Astonishing. In The Story of Saiunkoku I have finally found the anime counterpart to Seinfeld: a show about nothing. Alas, it's not the neurotic, prickly, entertaining nothingness that Jerry Seinfeld pioneered, but the more familiar, marshmallowy nothingness of whipped air. Neither satisfying nor nutritious, The Story of Saiunkoku can barely fill the viewer's time, and doesn't even manage to annoy as a waste of life's precious hours.
 The Saiunkoku of the title is a fictitious, pre-modern country vaguely reminiscent of China or Japan. It's not one of those fantasy kingdoms full of magic and monsters (although there is one ghost and one girl with some strange, vaguely supernatural power), and though it is home to a couple of preternaturally gifted swordsmen, it's not full of fighters who can do impossible physical stunts. It's just an ordinary pre-gunpowder agrarian empire stuffed with merchants, farmers, townsfolk, soldiers, bureaucrats, and the like.
The suspicion that you've surrendered your attention to the animated equivalent of a census form may first take hold when you discover that it's the bureaucrats who take center stage. Shurei Hong is the impoverished heiress to one of the eight noble families of the kingdom, and what with one thing and another, she winds up taking the exam that will get her a job in the imperial bureaucracy. The first season, at least, is about what happens after she gets that civil service position.
Full disclosure: I have not seen the first 15 episodes of the series. I was only sent the last two DVD volumes of Season One for review, so apparently I missed out on most of the cutthroat timeserver-on-timeserver action that culminated in Shurei triumphantly winning her bureaucratic spurs. The important stuff there, I gather from my research, is that she wound up forming some kind of personal connection with Saiunkoku's young, layabout emperor and got him to start taking his job seriously. Not that I'm sure anyone could tell if he was taking it seriously or not. Those who (wrongly, as it happens) imagine Oriental monarchies as Oriental despotisms in the hands of whimsical god-emperors may be surprised at Ryuki Shi's extraordinary lack of power: this is a king who more or less has to get permission from the imperial sanitation ministry before he can use the toilet. Still, he manages to conceive a "thing" for Shurei, and by episode 19 he has named her and her friend Eigetsu as co-governors of a distant, trouble-wracked territory. It then takes Shurei and Eigetsu another twenty episodes to get to Sa province while avoiding bandits, assassins, price-gouging shopkeepers, and the like.
The plot, which is almost but not quite organized serially as a sequence of cliffhangers, is quite intricate, with lots of lookalike characters running in and out, forming and breaking alliances, and betraying each other and pretending to betray each other. Buffoons are revealed to be subtle and intelligent monsters, and the most vicious schemers are revealed to be clodhopping buffoons whose defeats will culminate in a pratfall. There are conspiracies, and conspiracies within conspiracies; there are even, as near as I could tell, conspirators who conspire to launch new conspiracies within the coils of some of the larger conspiracy-encompassing conspiracies before confusing themselves into bemused passivity. But none of it really matters. To follow The Story of Saiunkoku you only have to understand three things: Shurei will constantly land in trouble; she will never get herself out of trouble; and the writers will pull off the most outrageous stunts in order to save her shapely ass.
That's because Shurei is basically a "Mary Sue" character. Her standing as a "princess" of the Hong family gives her an extraordinary social standing, but her impoverished background makes her as sweet and adorable and plucky as any goose girl in a fairy tale. So everyone who meets her falls in love; the series' main villain will kill himself when she rejects him; and the only people who seem to hate her will either be revealed as secret allies who were only pretending to hate her or as incompetent, malice-ridden boobs whose opinions can be safely disregarded. Everyone else, from the most gimlet-eyed merchant and crustiest bureaucrat to the bravest warrior and most deferential palace page will constantly marvel at her beauty, her intelligence, her sagacity, her bravery; and when standing in groups they will whisper to each other in awe-hushed tones about how marvelous she is; and they will nod sagely and try to outdo each other in thinking up extravagant metaphors for how amazing this sixteen-year-old girl is.
And they will do so even though Shurei herself never once does anything more complicated than exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide.
I'm serious. I can't think of a single predicament she lands in—and her predicaments range from being ordered to clean toilets to being kidnapped and held in a maze-like palace in preparation for a forced marriage and ritual deflowering—that doesn't end with someone showing up and rescuing her or giving her a special key or something. At one point in the series, when she has been accused of having cheated on a qualifying exam, a mass strike by her clan causes the entire country to teeter on the verge of revolution. At another point, when she is plotting to rescue a political prisoner, it will turn out that he escaped a long time ago and has been traveling with her incognito. Solutions to her problems will, sometimes literally, drop from the sky at the precise moment she needs them. She doesn't solve problems; she just channels the solutions the writers have provided.
 This would be quite annoying if it weren't for the lingering, airy sense that it's all not worth bothering about. To the series' credit, it doesn't seem to take itself too seriously, and if it is tediously worshipful of its heroine, at least it gives some of the supporting players a little juice. Seiran Si is a disgraced former prince of the realm who is very adept with his fists and with a sword; Shurei's friend and colleague Eigetsu is a thirteen-year-old near genius who harbors a second personality that comes out when he drinks; Ensei Ro is a bandit-turned-bureaucrat who combines subtle intelligence with brash charisma. They are none of them characters you would cross the street to hang out with, and those who know anime better than I can probably spot their archetypes a mile away, but they sometimes say interesting things in interesting ways. About the best that can be said of everyone else is that they are so interchangeable that it doesn't matter where you pick up the series; they are only there to help out Shurei, and if one of them doesn't happen to be available another one will be along shortly.
Production values are competent, but don't go in expecting to see a lot of excitement; as with any intricate soap opera, it's mostly a succession of talking heads. The voice actors get the job done, and the music is about as obtrusive as beige wallpaper.
The Story of Saiunkoku feels like it was made for thirteen-year-old girls: children who have no idea how the world works and so wouldn't really be able to closely identify with a genuinely competent female protagonist, but who are in love with the idea of being adored. If you are a thirteen-year-old girl, know a thirteen-year-old girl, or still have a thirteen-year-old girl living near the surface of your psyche, you might find The Story of Saiunkoku a worthwhile investment. For everyone else, there really is nothing about it to be recommended.
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