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The Apothecary Diaries is something of a surprise hit. It’s been going for a few months now; they did a double-season run to kick it off with a short break over Christmas. It’s not a fantasy, it’s basically a fictional historic setting based on imperial China rather than Japan. The unconventional protagonist (pictured above) is Maomao, the daughter of an apothecary who works in the red light district outside the imperial palace. She gets sold as a slave (basically), ends up making herself far too useful in the palace, and gets embroiled in all sorts of mysteries. I’m doing a terrible job of selling it, but if you’re into anime and you skipped it, it’s brilliant.
Now, Maomao has something of an addictive personality. It’s addictive in that it sneaks in and makes you want to watch her adventures, but she’s also the kind of person who gets addicted to things. She has a thing for sampling rare poisons. Luckily, she usually knows how to mitigate them. She also tests curatives and lotions meant for wound treatment by cutting herself to try them out. So, when the Ministry of health, Labour, and Welfare (you may remember them as the bad guys in the last Tatsu book; yes, they are real; and that’s the link to my books to make this sound relevant) were looking to do a campaign about women and addiction, Maomao became the poster girl. Literally. She’s on the cover of the ministry’s monthly health magazine.
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There’s an article on Crunchyroll’s site giving more details. If you’re into anime, want something different, and haven’t tried The Apothecary Diaries, I can highly recommend it. It’s available dubbed if you’re not into subtitles, though it’s still airing, so not all of the episodes have been dubbed yet (over half have). I slept on it for about six weeks, and then ended up binging all the episodes I could when I tried it.
Mostly though, I’m posting this because I think it’s awesome to see a character like this promoting women’s health. It’s apparently the first time the ministry has done anything like this. Maybe they won’t end up trying to enforce a totalitarian legal system in the future.
Witches and Ray-Guns 
Now you just made it mandatory for a totalitarian legal system to be enacted. Shame on you.
Meh. We need to have most of the world destroyed by a Russian superintelligence for that to happen.
Heh… Heh, heh…. Oh bugger.
The light novel of this series is up to book ten translated to English, the anime only covers book 1 and maybe the start of 2. It’s also very addictive.
I have considered taking a look at those novels. I’m a bit conflicted. I really like the Ascendence of a Bookworm anime, but I found I liked the protagonist less in the novel. The Saga of Tanya the Evil was sort of the same; I just didn’t like how the story was written compared to how they had to change it to tell the same story in the anime. OTOH, I’m two books away from finishing An Irregular at Magic High School. Though I admit that finishing the series is now out of sheer bloody-mindedness; it’s become progressively harder to muster the enthusiasm as the series has gone on.
I tried several times to watch some of the recommended anime. Amazon Prime features a lot now. But I really cannot stand the voices of the female protagonists. I can’t believe that Japanese girls have such grating voices. German girls certainly don’t.
So, while I’m really interested in those stories, I think I won’t be able to watch them without injuring my ears and brain.
Depends on the voice actress. I suppose I can see where you’re going though. Japanese voice-overs do tend to follow a pattern and it’s not always to the liking of western ears. If you can find dubbed versions, you may like them more, but Amazon doesn’t tend to do dubbed versions. If you have Netflix, they tend to have dubs available either concurrently or soon after the subtitled versions go live.