彩雲国物語 一、はじまりの風は紅く

The heroine, Kou Shuurei, is a princess from a family of high rank and poor finances. Thanks to her family’s poverty, she had to learn to work hard and is more knowledgeable about the real world than a highborn princess would usually be. She is educated and works part-time as a teacher, but her dream is to take the imperial exam (forbidden to women) and become a government official in her own right. A job offer comes her way with a dazzlingly high reward, and she leaps to accept it without asking the conditions. And so she enters the palace as temporary consort to the irresponsible new Emperor, to teach him how to work.

This is a light novel series from the early 2000s. It’s set in a fictional ancient China, and might be considered something of a reverse harem story. It was very popular at the time, and spawned an anime series and later a manga version, which were translated into English as "The Story of Saiunkoku." The original Beans books in a light novel format with illustrations are out of print, but 角川文庫 is currently releasing a new edition, with a more grown-up style cover that the (now-grownup) fans can have on their bookshelves without embarrassment.

So how is it finally reading the book, years after the anime? TBH, it’s hard for me to say. Many parts are fluffier and more preposterous than I remember. But some of the plotlines and character motivations make more sense to me now after having read this. Anyway, the characters already live rent-free in my head and I need to know what happened after the anime ended. This is not great literature, but I’m entertained and intend to read more of the series.

The first 50 pages were rough for me. I had the advantage of knowing the story and the character names already; if not, I think I might not have made it through that first part at my current level. But it got easier after that. Since the setting is the court of ancient China, there was a lot of new vocabulary for everything from everyday objects (like old-fashioned words for tables and wine glasses) to ranks and bureaucratic departments. Sometimes the characters speak extremely formally. I recommend having a good dictionary app with multiple dictionaries for this, including J-J and kanji.

The sentence style tends not to be long, but there’s N1 grammar everywhere. Volume 2 has even more. The author doesn’t just use a couple of pet expressions, she draws from the whole basket of N1 grammar. Although these are light novels, they’re denser and use a wider range of grammar and descriptive vocabulary than I’ve been seeing in modern light novels that originated on syosetu.com.

It is assumed that readers are fine with middle school level kanji, so words at or below that level do not have furigana unless the author is specifying a reading. Furigana appears for higher level kanji. It also appears in character names when they are first introduced. The characters have Chinese-style names and some kanji used in their names are uncommon in Japanese. I recommend keeping a character list.