The Apothecary Diaries Review

Maomao is an apothecary's daughter from the pleasure district who is kidnapped, sold into the imperial rear palace and set to laundry. She would happily have stayed. What drags her out is a rumour that the emperor's infant children keep dying, which she recognises within a few pages as lead poisoning from face powder. After that the palace treats her as a resource and she treats it as a supply of interesting toxins.

The series runs on competence rather than on romance, which is why it holds. Maomao tests poisons on herself and keeps a scarred forearm as the record, and she solves court intrigue by reasoning about dosage, humidity and who had access to a kitchen. Jinshi, the impossibly beautiful eunuch official who keeps buying her contract, works as a comic figure precisely because she is immune to him. Cases stay small and self-contained for long stretches, then assemble into a succession plot that has been sitting in plain sight since volume one.

Nekokurage's art carries the rest. The costume work is dense and specific, faces hold a wide comic range, and Maomao's poison face is one of the better recurring gags in monthly manga. Seventeen volumes in, the politics thicken faster than the cast can absorb, and readers who came for the standalone cases will feel it.