00:01
The type of person who goes on an edible flora hike...
People who are willing to try it.
Are willing to try almost anything, and might also be the kind of person who's like,
What kind of properties does this edible plant have?
Sisqó, out of 10, how excited are you talking about history today?
11.
Beyond 10?
Yes.
I mentioned on Orb's episode that I'm not strong with astronomy.
That's true.
I can't even point stars.
I'm sure you can point at the stars.
I can point at stars.
You might not be able to find any constellations or planets or, like, specific stars.
Yeah.
Could you find the North Star if you had to?
Nope.
What about the Big Dipper?
What the heck is that?
What about Sirius?
Seriously, no.
What about Jupiter?
No Jupiter.
What about...
I can do Moon.
Okay, good.
That was my next guess, was the Moon.
Could you find Venus?
It's a bright one.
What?
Yes, it is one of the bright ones.
Yes, that's correct.
Do you know when to look for it in the sky?
On Friday?
No.
Right?
No.
You have to look for it either close to sunset or sunrise.
Because Venus is closer to the sun than the Earth, it's always, like, following the sun.
So it only shows up near dusk or dawn.
Nobody, like, taught me this.
Okay, cool.
Yeah.
So, bad news.
History is my second weakest thing.
I'm just surprised that you have, well, like, astronomy.
Like, that's not even a subject most people study at all.
Okay, maybe it's not astronomy, just stars.
Okay, all right.
Well, whatever.
So, don't worry, I'll handle the history.
Okay, great.
But you do have some good botanical knowledge, right?
A little bit, naturally, because I grew up in mountains.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, so you can do that side.
Today we are going to talk about...
The Apothecary Diaries.
We will talk about the history behind the Apothecary Diaries.
Medicine and poison appears in the show.
And today's the Apothecary Diaries, word of the day.
Before we start, make sure to support 2amOTAK by clicking the subscribe and the follow button on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
Also, check out our other channel, 3amOTAK, where we speak in Japanese about many of the same subjects and some different ones.
All right, let's dive into it.
Let me introduce about the Apothecary Diaries.
The Apothecary Diaries, Kusuriya no Hitorigoto in Japanese, is a Japanese light novel series written by Natsu Hyuga.
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Since 2011, it has been serialized online on the user-generated novel publishing website, Shousetsuka ni Narou.
In the following year, it was acquired by Shufu no Tomo, who initially published the series as a novel with a single volume in 2012, and then a light novel series in 2014.
An anime television series adaptation produced by Toho Animation Studio and OLM aired from October 2023 to March 2024.
A second season premiered in January 2025.
Can you tell us the plot of the Apothecary Diary?
Yeah, so the story centers around a young girl named Mao Mao.
She's 17, and she works as an apothecary in the Pleasure District, so the red light district.
She seems to have special connections to a particular brothel, the Verdigris House, and she is kidnapped by people sellers.
This is a real thing from Chinese history, and sold into servitude in the rear palace of the…
It just says the rear palace, so I guess of the palace, which is a space where only women are allowed, and the emperor's concubines live guarded by eunuchs.
She gets noticed for her medical knowledge and is eventually upgraded to a poison tester for one of the emperor's concubines, his favorite concubine at the time.
She then winds up having interactions with all four of the major concubines in the rear palace, and a lot of the story centers on her relationship with Sir Jinxi, who's the eunuch in charge of the rear palace.
The plot works a lot like a mystery, or a series of mysteries, where she is solving kind of medical mysteries or applying her pharmaceutical knowledge in order to help people or solve crises, etc, etc.
It's a light novel.
I mean, I think it has some qualities that are pretty common in light novels.
It's not exactly an isekai, but it isn't a real time period or place in China.
It's kind of an alternate history version of China, a dynasty that never existed, that seems to be combining elements from different dynasties in an ahistorical fashion.
I think most notably, the setting appears to be something really close to the Forbidden City, but some of the attitudes and behaviors and stuff feel like, I think maybe the clothing feels sort of Tang dynasty, but then they have access to things from the New World, like chocolate and potatoes, that wouldn't have happened until after the Columbian Exchange.
06:11
And so it's got a lot of Ming dynasty feel to it. It's got some Tang dynasty feel to it. It's not supposed to be a particular year. They're not being bound by what actually happened in history or anything. And so it's a fantasy story about a quasi realistic China.
Yeah, it's kind of similar to the anime we've been watching recently.
Ameku MD, Doctor Detective, I think is the English title. Yeah, so it feels a lot like that show, but set in fictitious, quasi medieval China. And I think, in my mind, it's more entertaining than Ameku, only because the setting is so interesting and kind of fun to be unburdened by historical reality and yet get to examine apothecary sort of herbal remedies.
And I think there's a lot of interest in homeopathic or natural remedies right now, especially in the United States, actually. And that's playing into the popularity of the show.
I really enjoy watching the Apothecary Diaries. They're more like love interest vibe.
In this one?
Yeah, in this one.
Well, to be fair, we've seen a lot more of this show. If we were only on episode five or six of this show, I don't know that we would. I mean, I think they get into the sort of will they, won't they.
I mean, Jinx is like unbelievably beautiful man, eunuch, and everybody likes him.
And Mao Mao can transform into a hotter version of herself by taking off her plain girl makeup and substituting it for her courtesan daze outfits and makeup.
Although the show has more almost fan service than you would expect from a show that feels geared for a female audience.
But because a decent amount of the plot is connected to a brothel with a number of extremely well endowed courtesans, there's a lot of cleavage in the show and a decent amount of people in baths and stuff.
I mean, it's nice that the show doesn't shy away from nudity or sort of the importance of attractiveness and sex, even though that is not really what it's about. And the main character isn't fan servicey at all, which is kind of spectacular.
I like the main character Mao Mao. She is a great apothecary and she's not interested in anything but apothecary stuff.
Well, I wouldn't say not anything but apothecary stuff, but it does seem that her true passion in life is experimenting with poisons on herself.
09:02
She is definitely an otaku.
She's a poison otaku.
Poison otaku, also hentai.
Yeah, she also is.
Because when she tried poison in the food, her face was like, you know, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. She might kind of get off on poison.
And she tries poison on herself.
Right.
Yeah, she loves those things. She's a hentai otaku a little bit.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I don't hate that.
That's really funny.
Also, like, she does foraging.
Yeah, she gathers her own medicinal herbs.
And there are lots of points in the series where she gets kind of sidetracked by finding a bunch of medicinal herbs lying around and deciding to gather them immediately.
I want to do that too.
It's really dangerous. Yeah.
I mean, it doesn't have to be herbs. Like my hometown, everybody do foraging in the mountains.
Everybody forages in the mountains for mountain vegetables. That's true.
Mountain vegetables and mushrooms. And I want to be able to know and distinguish what is edible and not edible.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a wonderful skill.
And in that we've attended a couple of outdoor workshops on edible medicinal plants and edible mushrooms.
I don't know. One of my impressions, and maybe this is just me showing my total ignorance about mushrooms, was that people who get really into mushroom foraging will basically try anything, even when the mushroom is manifestly not really a food mushroom.
To just be like, I wonder what this tastes like.
The guy leading the tour was like, I totally ate this mushroom and was like, oh, this one's toxic, and then spat it out and threw up a bunch.
But it tastes interesting, so I eat it every once in a while.
What are you doing? That's crazy.
I mean, the portion of poison in the mushroom was maybe low, so it's okay to just try to taste it and spit it out.
Yeah, right. Exactly. That kind of thing.
So I don't know how I feel about engaging deeply in that sort of behavior.
I mean, maybe that's how he gets immune for the poisonous mushroom.
Right. I mean, look, there's some value in that, I suppose.
I'm just saying it feels like a thing that it's easy to become a bit of an otaku and maybe even a hentai by engaging in too often.
Yeah. I mean, I do the same thing in the fridge.
I make a lot of things from scratch, and I don't know how long the food lasts.
If I don't know, I smell and try a little bit, and if it's bad, it goes in the trash.
Okay. For the benefit of our listeners, I feel compelled to stress that that doesn't happen very often.
Really?
Yeah.
Because I check.
Okay. Well, yeah. And I don't know. I think among Americans, and maybe this is just my family, I don't think you let things go too long before deciding to get rid of them.
12:03
I don't think that's true. Yeah.
Whereas I feel like both I, myself, and other people in my immediate family have often let things go way too long, where there's really no need to sample any of it to be sure it's gone bad.
Even the visual alone would let you know that would be dangerous to get too close to.
Okay. Just saying.
Yeah. Okay. That's a fair point.
Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, and I wanted to ask, the very first episode of Maomao was randomly kidnapped.
Right.
And then it's like a real thing you said?
Yeah. People sellers, there's a real word for that in Chinese. And that was a thing that happened to people, I think, in many different ages of Chinese history.
One of the things that I thought this show portrayed pretty well was how vulnerable people at the lowest end of the social hierarchy were to exploitation and mistreatment throughout Chinese history.
And I think in the more stable eras of Chinese history, like the Han Dynasty, for example, slavery was less common in that there were rules regarding how many individual slaves people were allowed to own.
Kings could have 100 and dukes 50 or 20 or something, but slavery existed in almost every era of Chinese history.
And in some eras, the treatment of slaves is awful. Like in the Shang Dynasty, people's slaves would be buried alive alongside their masters as literal human sacrifices.
And in the Qin Dynasty, there's quite a lot of slavery because there's so much forced labor happening all over the country.
In the Tang Dynasty, it's less common, but there's still a lot of debt slavery, I think. And what's going on with Mao Mao is she doesn't seem to be a slave, but she is for sure an indentured servant where people are paying money to own her labor for like a term of several years.
And that seems pretty common for the social strata she's at. And the gap between her and the other courtesans in the Verdigris House, who can literally be bought and sold for varying degrees of money, and the nobility living in the palace is really, really wide.
And so I especially like the way this series handles class. And again, even though it's not portraying an actual time period of Chinese history, it's capturing some of that social chasm really well.
And I think it does a great job of humanizing all the people at the bottom of the stratum.
Whereas so many historical shows choose to focus on sort of predominantly the wealthy and like, not give that much consideration to people on the other end of the spectrum. This one's really got a nice examination, not just of people at every level, but also of the way in which the gaps create these tricky relationships between them.
15:02
Also, you suspected from the very beginning that Jinxi and Gaoxun are not eunuch.
Right.
How did you figure that out?
Maybe we should define eunuch just so everyone's totally clear. In ancient China particularly, eunuchs were men who had had their testicles surgically removed.
And so doing that deprives the male body of testosterone, a hormone that triggers secondary sex characteristics like facial hair, larger muscle development, et cetera, et cetera.
So people who are castrated when they're, or men who are castrated when they're young tend to have very high voices, androgynous features, sort of soft, round bodies, other sort of stereotypically feminine qualities, or at least they lack many of the stereotypical male traits.
I mean, their voices, whatever. We're getting voice actors to play these characters, and that's not necessarily a giveaway, but both Gaoxun and Jinxi are physically very well-developed. Jinxi in particular is very muscular.
And you can kind of tell that even before you have to see him with his shirt off, to be like, this guy doesn't look or behave like a eunuch.
And particularly the contrast with the doctor who works in the rear palace and who introduces a character very early on, that guy's clearly a eunuch. I mean, it's weird that he has facial hair.
Maybe he got castrated really late or something, but his body and voice and behaviors all really say stereotypical eunuch.
And so, I mean, it's possible that for whatever reason they became eunuchs and retained some stuff, but I was like, I think it's more likely that that's not what's going on.
And I think there are hints very early on that Jinxi is someone more important than he appears, especially if he's someone important in the royal family or connected to the royal family.
The chances that he would not have actually become a true eunuch seemed to me to be higher.
And with Gaoxun, I think it's really just his voice and demeanor and the fact that he works for Jinxi where I was like, this guy just doesn't strike me as actually a eunuch.
I don't know. I think for most viewers of the show, that's not going to come as an enormous surprise, or it's at least a thing that you wonder about from very early on.
Because Jinxi likes Mao Mao.
Right. Well, I mean, Jinxi also, you know, it would be unusual if he was a regular, however old he is man, for him not to be incredibly tempted by the, you know, just riot of hot women all over the rear palace.
And to be able to be like, no, I'm not interested in women at all. Like, you know, that would be expected of a eunuch. And there's some explanation for that later.
Yeah. But also, this is totally a story about a guy and a girl. And I don't think it's a brave enough story to be about a guy and a girl who have no romantic attraction to each other whatsoever.
18:01
And that's another reason why just narratively, it doesn't make any sense for Jinxi to be a eunuch, for Mao Mao to fall for him and then be like, sorry, I'm just like not interested in girls at all because I have no testicles, right?
And vice versa. So I think the other reason is just like narratively, you know, he's not going to end up being a eunuch. Otherwise, it's gonna like wreck that romance, unless they're like a really brave show that's investigating, you know, what does love mean when you can't feel attraction?
And it was like, yeah, like, this is a cool show, but it's not like that bleeding edge, you know.
Let's talk about medicine and the poison. I'm not really good at figuring out mystery in general, TV drama, anime, whatsoever. But I could kind of figure out the honey episode.
Yeah.
You can't feed honey to a baby or baby who is under one year old.
Right.
I learned it from a book.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, when I was studying. Anyway, honey episode was kind of it was like, oh, I know the answer. Something to do with honey.
I think the mysteries in this show are not particularly complicated. I find them much easier to solve than ameku, which, you know, it's like with ameku, I can often narratively figure out what the answer is going to be, but I don't have any I don't have enough scientific knowledge to explain it scientifically.
In this one, that's probably still true. I don't have enough herbal knowledge to say, ah, this is this particular herb, but I've almost always figured out where the narrative is going to go with the whys and the hows and the wherefores before the show has to spell it all out.
I randomly picked a book from Los Angeles Public Library about poison.
Yeah.
I've been reading to you.
Yeah.
And one of the plant is, I mean, all of the plants in the book are very deadly.
Some more than others.
And one of the plant appeared in one of the episode of the Apothecary Diary, which is thorn apple.
Yeah, that's not the name that I think of this plant as Jimson weed.
Jimson weed.
But this was a plant that appeared on a nature hike that we went on about edible plants.
I don't remember.
Oh, the guy was really.
I'm dead.
Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, it would kill you. He was super clear about, like, never, ever eat this plant. It's super dangerous and deadly.
And I think he stressed it especially because the type of person who goes on an edible flora hike.
People who are willing to try.
Are willing to try almost anything and might also be the kind of person who's like, what kind of properties does this edible plant have?
And Jimson weed can cause intense hallucinations.
And so the guy on the thing is like, yeah, like idiots read up and are like, oh, you can get high by, you know, taking some part of this plant in.
21:04
But it's effects are extremely negative feeling and can often kill you.
So it's a terrible, terrible thing to intentionally ingest.
It also goes by, you know, devil's trumpet, essentially.
It's a pretty flower, but it's a it's a very, very dangerous.
It really looks like morning glory.
Right? Yeah.
And they has a bunch of like different names in this book.
It's called the Datura.
Yeah.
Jimson weed.
Jamestown weed.
Mad apple.
Devil's snare.
Devil's cucumber.
Devil's trumpet.
Angel's trumpet.
Hell's bells.
Stinkweed.
Thorn apple.
Moonflower.
Green dragon.
It's a lot of names.
A lot of names.
Yeah.
In this book, it says also like in like some parts of America, young teenagers tried.
Right.
Eating.
Yeah.
And almost died.
My favorite thing was that in researching this on Wikipedia, it said essentially Jimson weed is unlikely to ever become a popular drug of abuse because the experience of feeling its effects is so negative.
So basically like even if you're dumb enough to try this once because you think it's going to be an interesting high, you will feel so bad during and after the experience if you survive it at all that you'll be like, I'm never doing that again.
Terrifying.
Yeah.
It's awful.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know if it's true.
Really feel stolen from Romeo and Juliet.
And I think there's even a reference to it in the show, like a story from the West or something.
It is the same plot device that's used in Romeo and Juliet of creating the end of Count of Monte Cristo.
Now I think about it has the same.
What face there was really interesting.
I'm pretty sure in the count of Monte Cristo, there's a similar plot device used where someone is made to appear dead for a certain amount of time and then resuscitated later after a certain like, I don't really know how this works.
It must be that it just slows your breathing so much that you appear not to be breathing at all.
But it really stops your breathing.
Then you would die like you can't really last more than about stop heartbeat for.
Yeah.
If your heartbeat or breathing stop for more than about 10 minutes, you start to experience permanent brain damage.
So I think it must just be like very, very slow as opposed to fully stopped.
Or maybe it only stops it for like five minutes where the corner has to come over exactly at that time and be like, oh, you're like dead.
And then later change their mind and be like, oh, you start breathing very shallowly again later.
24:01
So anyway, Romeo and Julia, Julia takes it right is like, you know, appears to be dead from the poison.
Romeo kills himself.
Then she wakes up and is like, oh, whoops.
We like screwed that up.
Right.
So this is the same story told with this woman who faked her own death and then comes back out of her stupor in order to escape.
And it works.
All right.
Let's do word of the day.
All right.
Today's word of the day is kusuri, medicine.
Okay.
So the thing about kusuri as a kanji is that it's written with the kanji for fun, tanoshi, with a little grass radical on the very top.
And so to me, this is just fodder for like marijuana jokes, basically about how like grass is so much fun and that's what medicine is.
But yeah, please explain how we got, I mean, I'm going to make more, but please explain how we wound up with this kanji for medicine.
So the first top part of grass makes so much sense.
Right.
Because in old days, like plants are medicines.
Right.
But the fun part is like a tricky to figure it out because like, why?
The fun part of kanji also has a meaning of chopping in really tiny pieces.
Okay.
And in like a dictionary, kusuri, the medicine, is like a changed form of kusairi.
Kusairi is like displayed like grass and the roast.
It's like a roasted grass.
So when you roast some grass, it's really good for you.
So you roast the grass and then chop it and then consume it.
That's kusuri.
Got it.
So, yeah.
It's so hard for me to like think about this with a straight face, essentially.
Like it sounds so much like an elaborate joke.
Yeah.
Whoever come up with this kanji.
Yeah.
Had a fun.
Had a fun time chopping and roasting some grass.
Yeah.
Yeah, they did.
That's an easy kanji to remember.
It is.
And you see this kanji a lot in Japan.
Kusuri.
Yeah.
Drugstore.
Like drugstore.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
All right.
Anything else?
No, I think just, I really recommend this show.
I think I've been on a little bit of a medieval China kick lately.
Dynasty Warriors Origins came out not too long ago.
I've been playing that.
Netflix released Three Kingdoms Reigns.
Maybe that's been out for a long time.
I don't know.
But it feels like there's a lot of medieval China media going around at the moment.
And I always really enjoy that anyway.
And this is a really fresh take on a lot of it.
And so I think the last thing is that as I was doing like some very, very cursory research about the show,
27:05
I saw some comments on Reddit to the effect that this show seems to be more popular among girls than among guys.
And I think the promotional materials for it, the fact that Mao Mao is not like, you know.
Not a hot girl.
Not a hot girl.
And the fact that Jinshi features pretty prominently.
That makes so much sense.
Really drives this like image of the show as almost a shoujo type show.
And it's not.
There's brothels and courtesans and lots of really good mystery in it.
And so I hope that it manages to break through that perception of like, oh, this is like a shoujo romance.
So that even dudes who, you know, maybe like a little medieval China history start watching it and be like, oh, this is this is quite good.
So that's my two cents.
How about the freckles?
Freckles.
Freckles.
Freckles.
There you go.
All right.
Mao Mao puts freckles on purpose so that she looks ugly?
Yeah, I think so.
And this is one of the things that I, as an American, like cannot understand at all.
Because freckles in America don't make a girl less attractive.
I know.
That's weird.
That's so weird.
So insensitive and mean.
Because like, I'm from Japan.
I mean, it's more beautiful.
I mean, this is what people think.
If you have like whiter skin, fair skin with nothing on it.
Nothing.
Well, and I, I have not seen very many Japanese people with what I would describe as actual freckles.
Yeah.
Like, there are some, but it's it seems to me much rarer than in the United States.
And I think like Japanese people to me also don't seem to distinguish between like beauty marks.
Like you just call these things shimmy stains and freckles, which to me are three totally distinct things.
It's basically the same.
Whatever you have on your face skin.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, so that all that to say, I think again, like Western audiences might look at her, you know,
like the whole point is she's like putting on fake freckles and being like, what the hell?
You look exactly the same.
Like some people might even say you're cuter with the freckles.
I know.
That's what I didn't understand when I came here.
It's like people put it on purpose.
Like some people do like tattoo or like some like light, like makeup of freckles on purpose.
Maybe.
I don't think that's super common, but sometimes.
I've seen like, I don't know why I saw it, but I saw Billie Eilish like putting freckles on her face, but she doesn't have any.
30:01
Why?
Okay.
So cultural difference.
And we're just going to leave it at that.
Yeah.
I know.
Like I think for Asian people like, okay, that makes a lot of sense.
That she's putting on the freckles to try to look less hot.
Yeah.
So that she won't be kidnapped.
Okay.
Check your local library.
If you're interested in reading this week's manga for free.
Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode.
If you liked this week's episode, please give us five stars on Spotify and the Apple podcast.
And leave a comment on YouTube.
Make sure to subscribe and follow 2AMOTAK and 3AMOTAK.
It'll keep us making more fun episodes.
See you next time for more 2AMOTAK.
And don't forget.
Don't try Jimson weed.
