Three Apothecary Diaries Adjacent Manga, For Your Consideration

As we all should know well by now, The Apothecary Diaries is an excellent show. It’s got romance, political intrigue, a strong female lead, and it scratches that sleuthy, laid back-yet menacing Columbo vibe. But it's also just one show. Meaning, you’re probably wanting to find more things like it while waiting for a new season if you haven’t broken and read ahead in its manga and light novels already. Luckily for you, my body is 70 percent manga, and I’ve curated three series you can check out that strike a similar chord to Maomao's misadventures as a lady-in-waiting in a kingdom she wants little to do with. 

Light spoilers for those three series’ set-ups.

First up is Eunuch in Empire, a series on MangaPlus, which, after reading the first chapter, I dubbed as The Apothecary Diaries, but for boys—or more specifically, teenagers. You’ll understand why I call it that in a moment. The series, written by Kei Saikawa and drawn by Kotaro Shono (the guy who illustrated World’s End Harem, just so you know what we’re dealing with), follows Jafar, our titular eunuch charged with overseeing three sister concubines in the royal palace’s “secret garden.” While Maomao has an aptitude for poisons, Jafar’s special skill is telling when someone is lying. It’s a trick that comes in handy when concubines in the palace suddenly start dropping like flies with a murderer on the loose in the palace, setting off a bunch of political disorder as women jockey to become the emperor’s favorite amidst the chaos. 

Between buxom panels you can’t read in public, Eunuch of Empire does stay on the even keel just enough to tell a pretty involved murder mystery as Jafar teams up with the three sisters to uncover the truth behind the murders and put a stop to them. Plus, for folks who can’t seem to focus on reading all the back and forth dialogue and procedural walking through the anatomy of the series’ murders and motives, Shono makes sure to draw all those pivotal revelations in a very Game of Thrones style sexpositon kinda way, minus any actual sex, just to make sure you’re paying attention to the moving and shaking of its plot. 

On the upside, the manga is finished, so you don’t have to worry about getting invested only to find the story isn’t finished. The downside is that the series delivers a bit of a rushed ending that feels like one of Maomao’s earliest cases she’d solve at the beginning of her journey. Still, seeing how a eunuch and a trio of concubines have to navigate those same confines is an interesting wrinkle to The Apothecary Diaries’ formula. So if you need a quick, altogether inoffensive read featuring a bunch of beautifully drawn women using their collective cunning and assets in equal measure to help Jafar solve serial killings within a kingdom’s harem, Eunuch of Empire is a pretty decent read.

Next up is Red River, a classic Viz Media shojo series that’s serendipitously due for an anime this year, adding to the whole shojosei renaissance wave the anime industry has decided to add to fans’ all-shonen diets. The series, created by Chie Shinohara, follows Yuri, a high school girl whose life is on the upswing. She’s just had her first kiss with a cute boy from school, and they’re taking their first, awkward steps toward dating. That is, until hands suddenly spring from a puddle, snatching her from the modern day (like Inuyasha) to Anatolia, AKA Turkey, during the era of the Hittite Empire.

Yuri can’t hop into a well and reverse isekai her way back home to flunk at school like Kagome. No, she’s stuck Samurai Jack style, unless she finds the mystic or one of equal power who can send her back home. The problem: the one who spirited her away into the past is the Queen, who wants to use her blood as a part of a sacrifice to ensure her child becomes next in line to the throne. She finds her refuge in a handsome prince named Kail Mursili, despite his reputation as a womanizer who gets around, and he takes a liking to Yuri and sets up the ruse that she’s his concubine to protect her as both a virgin sacrifice and help get her back home.

Yuri may spend every waking moment plotting her quickest route back home, but along the way she accidentally becomes a one‑woman revolution. Armed with the scraps of knowledge she half‑remembered from her history classes, she unwittingly becomes a figure the kingdom hails as the second coming of Ishtar, the goddess of love and war. In reality, her divine insight boils down to modern sensibilities like knowing that horseback riding beats chariots in mobility any day of the week, and being able to spot iron because, well, she’s from the future and at the very least knows what a frying pan looks like. But to everyone around her, these tiny flashes of common sense look like miracles. Slowly but surely, the homesick lovergirl becomes a living legend, willing to run the dozens against men thrice her size to enact revenge against the Queen.

In comparison to Eunuch of Empire, Red River hews closer to The Apothecary Diaries’ overall vibe because its epic is more than one note. Red River’s narrative is rich with action and political meddling that Yuri and Kail are routinely challenged with navigating. Their struggle to overcome every wrench the queen throws at them isn’t made any easier by the fact that they immediately suss out she’s the cause of their misfortune. The real obstacle is proving, beyond a doubt, that the queen is to blame.

That becomes exceedingly difficult when her weapon is black‑magic water that can evaporate and slip away, making its viability as evidence as elusive as her weaponization of it is deadly. Bubbling beneath the forward thrust of their political game of cat and mouse is an allies‑to‑lovers romance between the pair as they counterplot against the queen and fall deeper in love. All the while, they’re locked into a game of thrones with her that’s less chess and more like that John Wick: Chapter 3 scene where Keanu Reeves and Common have a silencer shoot‑out in a public train station without anyone noticing.

And because it’s a shojo manga, its art style has that soft, floaty charm that practically dares you to catch feelings right alongside them—even as the queen keeps trying to drown Yuri with her magic water at every turn. And with only 72 chapters (barring its spin‑offs), Red River makes for a snug read ahead of Tatsunoko Productions’ anime adaptation this spring.

Last up is A Witch’s Life in Mongol, a josei manga by Tomato Soup (yes, that’s their pen name) that the folks at Science Saru are set to animate later this year as well. The series follows Sitari, a muslim girl who is already at her wits' end when we first meet her as a slave putting on a fake smile to get by with the family who just purchased her. But things get worse when she starts to warm up to them, and they’re all wiped out by Genghis Khan’s army, completely glassing her village. Rather than resign herself to being rounded up as captive servants to the Mongol empire, Sitara seeks revenge by infiltrating the imperial palace, taking on the name Fatima, from her deceased mistress, bringing it to ruin from the inside by becoming an indispensable lady in waiting who can read important texts about science and medicine. 

While A Witch’s Life in Mongol is still ongoing, it's also the one series that is most in step with the novel feeling The Apothecary Diaries emanates. For one, rather than having Maomao’s aversion to knowing more than she needs to know, out of fear of putting herself in political danger with all the bigwig royalty she has to deal with, Sitari relishes it to the point that she becomes a spy for many of the folks in the Mongol empire to see her vengeance come to light. All of that outer turmoil, wherein she creates a false bravado while earning her keep in the empire for years, is made all the more vexing for her when she harbors complicated feelings of attachment to the wives who are just as much captives as she is, and her desire to see her revenge through, making her a more complicated and invigorating character to follow than Maomao at times. 

It also doesn’t hurt that the series sings as a piece of historical drama that takes the reputation everyone knows of the Khans as conquerors and puts a spotlight on the backstage of history, highlighting the real anguish and devastation the empire inflicted upon the Iranian city of Tus and their neighbors, whom they dominated and enslaved. Having all that complicated and dire storytelling told in a cutesy, Betty Boop-esque chibi illustration doesn’t detract from any of the height its character-driven story is carrying. A Witch’s Life in Mongol is arguably the best Apothecary Diaries variant you could hope to read, so whet your appetite for the anime by Science Saru come July 2026.