Story of Saiunkoku Volume 5 by Sai Yukino and Kairi Yura
This continues to be one of my favorite current shoujo series because it is just so well crafted. It manages to juggle a large cast of handsome men with distinct personalities, and the main character Shurei is one of those rare shoujo girls that inspires total sympathy in the reader. The first story in this volume was hilarious as it provided a nice twist on the somewhat stale plot point of the heroine getting incapacitated by a cold and needing someone to nurse her back to health. Shurei is stuck in bed, with older adopted brother Seiran looking after her. This is necessary, because her father’s attempts at nursing involve burying her beneath over a dozen blankets, and brewing his horrific “special recipe ginger broth.” Shurei’s house soon becomes host to a parade of visitors as Ran and Koyu shows up and Seiran orders them to make something for Shurei to eat before her father destroys the kitchen. Minister Ko and Shurei’s secret uncle Reishin lurk outside and even the Emperor manages to sneak into her room to check up on her, with unfortunate results.
A new cast member is introduced when a young scholar comes to town and seems to be a target for a gang. Unfortunately for the gang the boy manifests an entirely different personality when he drinks and handily bests them at gambling and fighting only to lose an important tablet in the process. He wakes up in the most notorious brothel in town, where Shurei just happens to be wrapping up a part-time job. One of the things I love about this manga is the unconventional ways the characters act. Shurei gets a job as an assistant bookkeeper in the red light district and is anxious about hiding her job from her father and Seiran. Unbeknownst to her, her father visits the madam Kocho to ask her to give Shurei the benefit of feminine advice that she’d lack because she’s growing up without a mother, and Seiran makes a similar visit as well. The madam just happens to also be one of the leaders of the criminal syndicate that rules the underworld in the city, and she’s not happy to see that young scholars in town for the civil service exams are getting targeted. The young victim Eigetsu ends up becoming friends with Shurei.
I enjoy the way humor is interlaced with character development in Story of Saiunkoku. In this volume Shurei’s ignorance of her father’s past as a government assassin is played for laughs as she’s utterly confused as to why threatening men near her suddenly fall down or why a table where a couple of misogynists are sitting collapses abruptly. There’s an element of warm humor that is present to some degree in all of the stories, and the way Shurei manages to surround herself with people who care about and support her makes Story of Saiunkoku enjoyable to read.