The Apothecary Diaries S1E1-3

This review was fast-lane commissioned by @Aris Katsaris

"The Apothecary Diaries" has an interestingly complicated history behind it. It started as self-published novel in 2011. Then was restructured into a light novel series in 2014. Then, in 2017, it got a manga adaptation courtesy of Square Enix. And then, finally, the manga in turn got an anime adaptation from the same studio that's been running from 2023 until the present.

I'm only reviewing the anime in this review, but I'd be really curious to have a look at its previous incarnations, because this show is wearing the influences of multiple other works that have come out both before and during "Apothecary Diaries'" journey from novel to anime. Seeing how it changed over time, and exactly when it started taking on visible influences from then-contemporaries, could be fascinating.

For instance, the anime's visuals - especially the style of its intro and outro sequences - are strongly reminiscent of "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End." Since the Frieren anime and the Apothecary Diaries anime both debuted within a couple months of each other in the fall of 2023, I'm going to assume that there was another series that came out slightly earlier that both Madhouse and Square Enix cribbed the notes of.

Looking at the story itself though, well, tell me if you've heard this one before. A genius physician with a prickly demeanor and serious problems with expressing their emotions solves high-political-stakes medical mysteries that often boil down to bad lifestyle choices kept secret for unrelated reasons. Yep. I don't know how popular "House" ever got in Japan, but the original "Apothecary Diaries" novel came out right after the show's heyday, so I'd be surprised if it wasn't one of the ingredients.

Of course, the setting that all these influences are stewed into disguises them significantly, on account of "The Apothecary Diaries" taking place in a slightly fantastical version of medieval China and starring a teenaged girl.

That in itself also makes this story's influences interesting to my western eyes. I've seen western fantasy media handle Chinese history. I've seen Japanese fantasy media tackle western history. Only rarely have I seen Japanese fantasy media tackle Chinese history. Not that I'm well read enough on the period to know how accurate the show is being, but still, medieval China through the lens of anime/manga/lightnovel/bbq should be a unique experience.

The first episode, "Maomao," appears to suffer from over-condensation. The pilot pulls triple duty in establishing the setting and characters, cementing the structure of the episodic adventures to come, and also telling its own (rather simple, but still) episodic adventure, and a lot of it - especially in the first third or so of the runtime - ends up feeling stretched thin. I don't know for a fact that this episode is leaving a lot of novel/manga material out and racing through the setup, but it definitely feels like it.

We're introduced to Maomao as the daughter of a local apothecary, living on an odd little periphery of the Imperial City dominated by a massive brothel. Maomao's father makes most of his money treating the prostitutes, and Maomao herself spends much of her time gathering and experimenting with medicinal herbs for his practice. She gets along better with plants than she does with people, and she's neither shy about nor ashamed of this fact. The only time in the pilot when she looks genuinely emotional is when she's alone in a meadow full of eclectic herbs and flowers.

On the other hand, receiving love and affection from other humans usually just makes her seem slightly uncomfortable. Even being threatened or harmed by other humans only provokes the most understated, deadpan reactions from her. Best epitomized by a scene where she's been captured by bandits, and as they drag her away in a literal cage she just kinda stares straight ahead with a neutral expression and has a flatly delivered inner monologed best summarized as "gee, this kinda sucks."

I'm not exactly sure what Maomao's deal is, but she's most assuredly not neurotypical.

She might be asocial, but she importantly isn't antisocial. As shown in the screenshot above, the closest Maomao comes to having any sort of real feelings about being captured and sold into slavery is when she thinks of how worried her father must be. Likewise, in a much later scene, she describes her experience of watching prostitutes slowly dying to the poisons and diseases their profession is rife with, and there's no mistaking the pain in her voice when she thinks of their fates and wishes she could have helped them.

It's these complexities of how Maomao relates to the people around her that really makes me wish we could have seen more of her normal life before the events that set the series plot in motion. Like I said, I strongly suspect that there IS a lot more of that in the story's original medium that the anime has to hurry past in the interest of pacing a representative pilot episode.

As it is, we know that her father cares about her, and she cares about him. We know that the prostitutes he and she treat all love her, though she herself is awkward about this and always seems to be holding their friendship at arm's length. We know that the stingy madam of the brothel thinks that Maomao would make a good employee, and that Maomao is disgusted by this prospect because of how little time it would leave her to poke around with herbs. But, that's really all we get.

Before being captured and sold into slavery, Maomao's main hobby was doing medical experiments. Mostly on herself, for want of other test subjects.

This included such extremes as burning or cutting herself in order to test the efficacy of different treatments. This bothers her, but mostly because of how slow it is to draw conclusions from solitary data points. Like I said, Maomao isn't neurotypical. The pain of other people legitimately seems to hurt her, but she's all but immune to pain herself.

Through a series of events that I admit I don't fully understand (in large part because the episode brushes passed them in literal seconds), the bandits sell Maomao into indentured servitude to the imperial household. This is probably the best example of the story visibly suffering from compression; we're told that Maomao is keeping the fact that she's an educated physician's daughter rather than an illiterate peasant girl secret, because she doesn't want to increase her perceived monetary value and enrich the bandits who sold her. But...how exactly does this work? How would increasing her perceived value after she's already been sold make a difference? Why would it just enrich the bandits without also getting her out faster? Wouldn't this make the bandits more likely to be in legal trouble, if the royal family finds out they're enslaving people who kinda-sorta matter? Etc. There are ways that this could make sense, but they call for explanation, and I get the strong impression that those explanations did exist in the novel.

Well, fortunately, the story slows down and the episode gets much easier to keep up with and get invested in after this point.

While toiling away as one of the many laundry girls at the "rear palace" that houses the emperor's ridiculously large harem, trying to avoid letting anyone know she can read and write, Maomao is absolutely bored out of her mind. It's not even the hard work, the harsh discipline, and the lack of freedom that bothers her, so much as the lack of mental stimulation. As such, when a mysterious illness starts wreaking havoc among the concubines and infant princes, Maomao's mind latches onto it and refuses to let go until the puzzle's been solved.

Rumors of a curse on the emperor or palace have taken the peasant workers by storm, but their superstitions just make Maomao more bitterly resolved to find a rational explanation. I wasn't kidding, she really is Gregory House lmao. "It's never lupus black magic!" The consorts themselves, meanwhile, are starting to suspect one another of using poison to sabotage each other's chances of producing an heir (or just outright assassinate one another).

The harem doctor is confounded. Maomao doesn't have the highest opinion of the man, though. He very much comes across as an ivory-tower academic with all the theoretical knowledge in the world, but who can't manage to apply it to something as messy and complicated as real life. I'm putting it much more diplomatically than Maomao does, heh. Anyway, dynastic China with its standardized testing system was possibly the first society in history that realistically could have this type of problem among its educated professionals, so this is actually historically plausible.

...well, maybe. I'm not sure if they had the theoretical training and testing bureaucracy for medicine, specifically. So, maybe that's not it, depending.

Eh, anyway, regardless of why the doctor is useless here, he is in fact useless here.

Maomao spends the time while her hands are monotonously wringing wet clothes into less-wet clothes thinking about the problem. The symptoms suffered by the consorts and babies seem consistent with Maomao's knowledge of lead poisoning. However, it isn't hitting everyone in the building, and it isn't effecting any one person persistently. And there isn't an obvious source of lead (if there was, even incompetent harem doctor would have surely managed to figure it out by now). Intentional poisoning would certainly be likely in this kind of intensely political environment, but the fact that politically unimportant girlchildren and their mothers are being targeted just as much as the male potential heirs and their mothers makes it unlikely that this is an ambitious concubine sabotaging her rivals or the like.

If it was just the babies dying, Maomao would have to come to the sacrilegious conclusion that the emperor's seed itself is the problem, but fortunately for everyone's worldview that wouldn't explain why the new mothers (and NOT, notably, the still-pregnant ones) are also getting sick.

Maomao's experiences with the prostitutes enable her to notice something that others miss. However, while she has enough empathy to not want to see more women and babies suffer just like she saw the prostitutes suffer, she also really, really doesn't want to attract attention to herself in a way that might make her situation even worse. So, she surreptitiously leaves a note for one of the new mother concubines suffering from the ailment, a Lady Gyokuyo.

Turns out that some of the nursemaids have been habitually coming to work wearing a type of face-whitening makeup that Maomao recognized. Presumably, some of them brought their makeup kits with them, meaning that they both got the lead-based whitener on their own fingers and might be leaving the makeup where the mothers might be trying it on an/or the babies might be getting into it. Since the makeup isn't being kept in the concubines' own quarters, few staff members are noticing its presence at all.

Lady Gyokuyo switches nursemaids, and she and her baby daughter quickly recover. She then tasks the recently appointed new manager of the Rear Palace - a eunuch named Jinshi - with identifying her secret benefactor.

Jinshi only has a few minutes at the end of the episode in which to introduce himself to the audience, but he uses them quite effectively. He has analytical and observational skills to match Maomao's, only honed by years of navigating the snakepit of palace politics, and with specialties in cold reading and social engineering rather than medical forensics.

Also, he's pretty, and all the serving girls have crushes on him. Including Maomao herself, in a rare moment of being interested in other humans as anything other than patients, though she's still more subdued about it than most of the others (she muses that he'd have very good looking children, if only he could still have children). Plenty of idiosyncrasies to go around.

Jinshi does some detective work of his own to determine that a laundry girl must have left the message. And then does some social engineering and cold reading to get the correct laundry girl to identify herself. He and Maomao really do have similar skillsets and methodologies, just focused in different directions and with Jinshi having much more experience.

Maomao does her best to keep her nature a secret, but Jinshi and Lady Gyokuyo are able to needle it out of her eventually. Fortunately for Maomao, she's done enough of a thing here to lift her out of the "more valuable slave" bracket she was fearing, and into the "actually valued as a person by someone who maybe kinda sorta matters on a good day" one. She's promoted out of the laundry room and made Gyokuyo's new lady-in-waiting, where she can serve as the consort's eyes and ears in palace politics as well as continuing to provide medical advice. Presumably, she'll be working alongside Jinshi in this, as he and Gyokuyo seem to be more or less aligned (though he almost certainly serves other interests as well as her own, and may have ambitions himself that don't quite match up to the concubines'. At least, one can assume as much).

There's one scene right at the end that (finally) touches on the heavier themes of the story that the characters themselves had previously avoided acknowledging. When Gyokuyo and Jinshi ask Maomao why she decided to warn the consort about the nurse's makeup if she wasn't planning to get anything out of it herself, and she had no reason to like the people above her in the palace's hierarchy. Maomao responds, after a long, awkward silence, with an impassioned speech about how she saw the lead makeup slowly leech the health away from so many prostitutes throughout her time working for her dad. How the known hazards of these cosmetics didn't deter them from using it, due to the need to compete for beauty against each other and make more money. A pact, money for lifespan, that inevitably burned them out before they could have much of either. These women trying to get ahead, but only being sucked dry and discarded by a hideous, literally-and-metaphorically toxic machine.

She doesn't say this. She doesn't even imply it, with her words. But with everything we've seen in the pilot, it's clear she isn't just talking about the prostitutes. Or just the consorts. Every named character in the episode has been defined by exploitation and consumption of human beings, in one way or another. The servants and slaves, hiding their skills and talents to avoid being worked even harder and having lower odds of being let free. The eunuchs, giving up a very literal part of their bodies and lives in order to serve as slightly-more-favored royal functionaries than they otherwise could (she explicitly had that inner monologue earlier, where she rues the waste of Jinshi's reproductive ability). The concubines, devoting their lives and ambitions to serving as broodmares for the emperor, any hopes of personal advancement being lived only vicariously through their prospective children. The society they live in is one in which people are, as a rule, tools for other people. Almost universally disposable, and expected to willingly throw themselves onto the fire to burn themselves up to provide tiny amounts of pleasure, convenience, or value for those above them in the brutally rigid hierarchy.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if Maomao didn't even notice how she herself - a literal slave, sold into servitude for profit - falls into this dynamic, with how dissociated she seems to be from her own position. But she's hyper aware of *everyone else's* misery as they give themselves away for far less than they're worth.

She doesn't ever critique the structure of her society as such. No character in the pilot does. If they believe that any world other than the one they know is possible, then they have the good sense to keep those very dangerous opinions to themselves. The show itself is ABSOLUTELY saying this, but none of the characters are.

There's also one moment that hints that perhaps, even now, Maomao is just turning herself into another kind of tool for another kind of exploiter. Lady Gyokuyo tells Maomao that after recieving her warning, she triiiiiieeed to relay the warning to another recent-mother concubine who'd been tossing accusations of deliberate poisoning around, but that other concubine refused to listen to her hated rival. And now her son is dead, and Gyokuyo's daughter has recovered.

Lady Gyokuyo might be telling the truth here, but I'd be very unsurprised if she wasn't, and she kept the warning to herself to undermine her rivals and/or get revenge on women she personally dislikes. Maomao lacks the social instincts to see through this kind of politicking, though Jinshi probably has some suspicions along these lines (regardless of whether or not it's true).

That's where the pilot ends. Maomao has improved her status, but she's still not free, and her two supporting cast members are at least potentially very deceptive, dangerous people whose agendas she'd never knowingly want to serve.

The subject matter of the story going forward is probably going to *mostly* center on episodic medical detectivework (that's what the next two episodes are, at least). But if there's any kind of arc being built up, it's going to pretty much have to be about the above.