Anime News Network·Japan·Tuesday, September 15, 2026 at 02:00 PM
This Week in Anime - Journey to the Past
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You know what they say about people who fail to learn from history.
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Lucas
Sylvia, we spend a lot of time talking about genre in anime circles. While the more demographically targeted vocabulary of shonen, shojo, seinen, josei, etc. tends to dominate the conversation, there are A LOT of less discussed canons of work that are nothing short of pillars in today's anime and manga landscape. Case in point, while historical anime has always been popular, there are a considerable number of high-profile period pieces hitting this and next season, including Sparks of Tomorrow, Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia, The Apothecary Diaries, Firefly Wedding, and plenty more!
How'd you like to roll back the clock with me and chat about some choice titles in this genre while we try to figure out just what makes historical fiction so timeless?
Sylvia
Can do, Lucas! Historical fiction has always been my mom's favorite genre of literature, and while I cannot claim to be as avid a fan as she is, I've enjoyed my fair share of creative romps through past times and cultures. It may not be a substitute for a proper history education, but I always walk away from good stories in this milieu feeling like I have a bigger and better picture of the mess we call humanity. And I think Jaadugar is a perfect example for this column—both excellently done and utterly unique in the anime sphere.
Jaadugar would obviously be sensational in a vacuum, but it's especially interesting to me as a zillennial, as every adult around me suddenly had major opinions about the Middle East when I was six, but none of them could even answer basic questions about the region or the culture of the people who live there.
I was immediately charmed by Jaadugar's presentation, but also by how firmly it's rooted in the culture and history of 13th-century Persia. Of specific note, I love how the original writers include both the specific term "iddah" for a widow's mourning period after her husband's passing as well as enough context clues to discern what that culturally-tied term means. Also, props to the localizer on this anime for recognizing the intent of this phrasing and keeping the term in the subtitles!
Also, if you enjoy Naoko Yamada, who directed both! In fact, both series get at another important aspect of historical fiction, which is their ability to frame their stories and histories through lenses you might not see in a typical education. Both Jaadugar and The Heike Story, for example, use female POV characters to depict and comment on the roles, plights, and thoughts of women in these societies.
Like, I could easily imagine Jaadugar as told through the eyes of Genghis Khan's successors, and I'm sure there are works of historical fiction that do just that. But what makes Jaadugar so interesting is how it weaves Sitara's and Töregene's ambitions into these grander schemes, in a way that centers these women's motivations and relates them to gender-based restrictions that still feel relevant in the modern day.
There is definitely an underlying element of "the more things change, the more they stay the same" in both works, which also makes them feel like explorations of the human condition and the societies we've built. While I only picked up on a surface-level reading of the gender politics of the leads in both, I did pick up on the tribalism and the Taira clan's timeless family drama immediately.
But yes, Sitara and Biwa are both terrific frames of reference and audience POV characters, and both being young women is a clearly intentional choice that helps these works feel just as much about the culture of the times and places they depict, instead of just the events that took place in those periods.
The Heike Story is cool, too, because the original work is one of the foundational texts of Japanese literature. It's probably somewhere on the level of The Canterbury Tales when it comes to the "Western Canon." And the average overseas viewer probably won't know that context, but it doesn't preclude them from enjoying and learning about this important slice of history regardless. Historical fiction, as fiction, is able to incorporate lies within itself to make the narrative work. So The Heike Story isn't a "pure" adaptation, yet it hits a modern audience harder thanks to its editorializations.
The original text does mention the kids with weird haircuts, though. That's important to note.
I guess I should also mention that this anime inspired me to actually read The Tale of the Heike back when it aired. Which is another cool thing historical fiction can make people do.
Satoru Noda is as serious about history as he is about gratuitously nude men. That's the Golden Kamuy guarantee. And legitimately, I think the series' grounding in historical fact is what helps it feel so consistently novel and weird.
While it features much less male nudity, Orb is another recent sleeper hit that Jaadugar in particular reminded me of. Jaadugar touches on the importance of books in antiquity as repositories of knowledge that are not easily replaced, and Orb takes that idea into medieval Europe at the height of the Inquisition and the beginnings of heliocentrism's spread and acceptance.
While it doesn't feature too many actual historical figures, it eventually links its story to Copernicus in particular, as a means of making the audience think about how much history is actually preserved, and how much inevitably disappears through the ravages of disaster, censorship, and plain old time.
Cuuuuuuuute~
And if people like romance in their historical anime, they should get ready for Firefly Wedding next season! Another story taking place in the Meiji Era, outside of its central situationship, this work is very much about the different (though all similarly limited) ways women fit into this society and is a painfully honest portrait of the era.
Hey, don't forget goofy! A big part of Shinpei's appeal is his goofiness!!
And yes, charismatic, sociopathic assassins aside, Firefly Wedding really puts into place how far women's rights and their personhood in broader society have come in the past 100+ years. That isn't to say that things are great for women today, but they used to be a lot worse a lot more recently than we care to remember.
Right, I should be careful to clarify that there is still some scheming to be found in Firefly Wedding. The first volume ends with Satoko having to pose as a prostitute to dupe a client into buying her and taking her off an island—an island that's a big red-light district, making sex work the only way women can survive and/or escape in this particular time and place.
It's striking how immediately Firefly Wedding comes off as pro-sex work just by the acknowledgment that, during this time period, it was one of the few means of monetary survival available to women, let alone any class mobility.
Even in the face of a lot of high-profile sequels hitting next season, I think this is going to be an anime to keep an eye on, as it's hitting that sweet spot of a historical story overtly informed by modern social politics.
Ugh, I really wanted to like Red River and have another explicitly shojo series to recommend to people...but between the lead constantly being put in peril, apologizing to her family for her impending death, and then being saved at the last minute by a nearby man, it just does not have the juice in 2026 like manga may have in 1995 when damsel in distress tropes were less grating.
Oooooh~ great recommendation! And, if we're winding down this column with mentions of historical series that are rooted in their creator's political beliefs and activism, I'd be remiss if I didn't name-drop Vinland Saga!
Explicitly informed by mangaka Makoto Yukimura's experiences growing up during the Cold War and motivated by the September 11th attacks that would act as the catalyst for the next decades spanning global conflict, this adaptation of Nordic historical myth is as much a critique of tribalism and jingoism today as The Crucible was of McCarthyism when that play premiered in the 1950s.
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