Hello everyone! I just wanted to start off by saying thankyou to all who have decided to click on my fan fiction! :D This will be my first fan fiction though it's certainly not my first time writing some sort of story so I really hope you like it. ^ 3 ^ I got the idea for this story from a very unpopular manga actually, but the story and art is so beautiful, I highly recommend it. Anyway, this first chapter really isn't mine at all. I used a lot from the original story so that I could get the beginning of how everything started out of the way haha, so forgive my unoriginality. OTL It'll all be mine soon, I promise!
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto nor do I own Ōoku as much as I would like too. ; ~ ;
"All who serve inside the Ōoku, the Inner Chambers in the deepest interior of Edo castle, must seal with blood the following oath- 'Never shall I speak of things I have seen or heard inside the Ōoku, nor of anything that doth take place therein, to my parents, or to my brothers or sisters, or to any other person beyond its walls.'" – From the Ōoku Code
"Sadakichi, where are you going?" A young boy called out, almost in a whining tone.
An even younger boy was running out to the woods with a grin on his face.
"Not tellin'! It's my secret place that nobody else knows!" He laughed as he ran.
"Sadakichi, son! Don't wander too far away alone!" The boy's father called after him as he worked with his wife in the fields.
She called out, "Come home before it gets dark, you hear?"
"I know, I will, ma!" And with that, young Sadakichi disappeared into the woods.
"The boy's already ten years old. He should be helping in the fields!" Sadakichi's father complained.
"Sometimes I think he'll stay a little monkey-child forever!" His wife laughed softly.
Sadakichi ran through the woods, searching for his special place. His heart was pounding as he ran along, gasping for air. He began climbing up some rocks, reaching up to a low cliff where a tree rested with some good, large mushrooms grew beneath it. Sadakichi was after those mushrooms. He picked a few and put them in a sack he had with him.
"Heh heh! An Ōtsugatake! The first one this season!" He brought a mushroom close to his face to examine. "Nobody from the village comes so far into the forest. I've found a right good spot here. They say eating the first find of the season makes one live longer…" He smiled softly. "So I'll come here every year to take one for my ma. She'll get right strong and sturdy from it."
A rustling sound was being heard from the brush behind the boy. He quickly turned around, hiding his mushrooms behind his back.
"Who's there?"
A large bear stopped in its tracks and stood. Its face calm.
Sadakichi stayed still and stared at the bear in awe. Until the bear's lip curled back and it began snarling. Sadakichi's eyes widened.
"SADAKICHI!" The boy's mother screamed as a man from the village carried him.
He was scratched up, bleeding, and was missing his right arm.
A sullen search party followed the man carrying Sadakichi.
It was only after the dying Sadakichi drew his last breath that calamity befell the village.
First, Sadakichi's eldest brother, Otokichi, came down with a fever for no apparent reason. Otokichi's entire body became covered in red pustules, which swelled and festered. Four days later, he was dead.
The family's second son, Matasuke, soon developed the same symptoms and died.
Six days later, their father, Otomatsu, contacted the disease. He survived, although Otokichi's childhood friend Chobei, who fell sick around the same time, did not.
Sadakichi's mother, Seki, and his younger sister, Tei, did not fall ill.
Seki understood what had happened- the gods of the forest had punished her son Sadakichi with a terrible plague, which he had brought back to the village.
The pestilence rapidly spread to the next village, and from there to the next village beyond. Only men were affected and only young men at that. Eight out of every ten who fell victim to the plague died.
At first considered a terrifying but endemic local disease, the plague spread outwards from the mountain villages until, several years later, it was a full-scale epidemic affecting all of the Kanto region, and it continued to move westward.
People were totally helpless against the disease.
The male population of the country continued to decrease at a frightening rate.
Because its symptoms resembled those of smallpox, the disease came to be called the Redface Pox. And, with no effective cure for it ever found, it took root as a horrible, yet common, disease.
And so it was that close to eighty years passed…
The male population of the country stabilized to about one-fourth that of the female and, due to their alarmingly low survival rate, boys were raised with extreme care as precious seed-bearers, with all labor in the land carried out by women. Trades and occupations that had been passed down from father to son were now handed down from mother to daughter.
The institution of marriage collapsed. Low-income women could not even dream of taking a husband, so they visited the pleasure districts and paid for men's favors in order to bear children. The right to take a son-in-law became a privilege accorded only to samurai warrior class and very wealthy merchants and village magistrates.
Ever since the reign of the third shogun, Iemitsu, military rule of the country had also become a responsibility handed down from woman to woman. Since samurai society in the peaceful years of the Tokugawa reign was already largely a bureaucracy, the inversion of men's and women's roles took place relatively smoothly.
As the sole ruler of all the land, the supreme leader of the entire country, the shogun alone had the privilege- the height of luxury in this time of male scarcity to enter an interior palace populated wholly by beautiful men- said to number three thousand in all- from which all other women were strictly banned….
So I wanted to point out that this takes place in the Edo period of Japan. And I had something else to say but I suddenly forgot...oh yeah I just remembered, I had planned to write the whole story before uploading it but I'm thinking that if I go by updates, I'll get it done faster so I don't keep everyone waiting. I have no clue how long it's gonna be haha. Sorry. I hope you'll stay with me!