A sickness with no name and no cure moves through early modern Japan, and within a generation most of the men are gone. The shortage reorders the rest: who farms, who inherits, who carries a family name, who rules. Women hold the shogunate, and the Ōoku, the inner chambers of Edo Castle, becomes a household of men kept in service to a female Shogun.

Fumi Yoshinaga works the idea through as political history rather than spectacle. Rank, marriage, succession and money all get rebuilt around the imbalance, and the romance plays out in a court where an attachment can cost someone their standing. The register stays formal and unhurried, closer to a dynastic chronicle than to a costume thriller.

Hakusensha's magazine Melody carried the series from June 2004 to December 2020, and the chapters collect into 19 tankōbon volumes, with Viz Media publishing the North American edition. Sixteen years of serialization give the premise room to be argued out instead of coasting on its hook. It suits readers who want alternate history with the paperwork included, and period romance that takes its own rules seriously.