Lakan

Lakan (羅漢 (ラカン) , Rakan^?) is a tactician in the Li military, the head of the La Clan, and Maomao's biological father.^[2] He is a secondary character in The Apothecary Diaries.

Appearance

Lakan is a middle-aged man with dark hair and blue eyes - a trait he passed on his daughter. He wears the typical clothes of an official, along with a monocle over his right eye.

Personality

Like many of those in the La Clan, Lakan is infamously eccentric. He is a genius tactician who also specializes in Go and Shogi, but is incapable in practically every other way; due to his ability to pick highly capable subordinates, he himself spends his time lazing around and gossiping. He dotes on Maomao, whom he wants to be a loving father to, and is strongly opposed to letting her marry Jinshi.

Politically, Lakan is known as the "sly fox"; known to be obnoxious, meddling, and calculatingly vengeful. The popular sentiment in the Imperial Court is that one should have as little to do with him as possible.

Abilities

Perception: He is extremely perceptive and is able to identify people who are talented and what they are talented at just by looking at them. It is because of this that he is able to hire capable people to be his subordinates.

Strategy: As a tactician, he is highly skilled in both military strategy and board games. His specialties are Go and Shogi (or Xiangqi); it is said that the only man who can defeat him at Go is the Emperor's Go instructor, though he stated that Fengxian was better than him at Go.^[3]

Prosopagnosia: Lakan can only perceive the faces of Fengxian and Maomao; those familiar to him take the form of Shogi pieces (or Xiangqi pieces in the manga and anime), while strangers look like Go stones. For instance, he sees Jinshi as an advisor piece, while Gaoshun is an elephant/bishop piece ("the gold general with the promoted silver").

Trivia

• Lakan is an extremely lightweight drinker. Maomao and Jinshi use this to their advantage a few times throughout the story.^[2][4]
• Lakan's monocle does not serve any real purpose, and is just an affectation as it does not aid his vision.^[5]

References

External links

• Official anime S1 character webpage (in Japanese)
• Official anime S2 webpage (in Japanese)