Much can be gleaned from what we’re told of the Ohtori family. We know the family controls the school and passes that control down generations to the men. This is an almost embarrassingly traditional approach to the family business, given that while time is a vague dimension in Shoujo Kakumei Utena, there has been at least enough progression to bring about cars and cellular phones. All modernization is thrown out the window for this clan; they still use arranged marriages to obtain male heirs to the family fortune, as it clearly never occurred to anyone that Kanae would inherit her father’s position.

   The central themes of the show considered, it’s hard to see the school as a family owned business so much as the property of a royal family. Their approach to running the school is so antiquated that the only place you really often see it anymore is in royal families, though admittedly one of the few places where it does still happen in business is Japan.

    Position of Power
    Thou shalt not commit adultery...
 

   Mrs.Ohtori, for her part, we naturally assume is in the feminine position of power. She holds no official title in the school, but is nevertheless able to throw a little weight around. As the Chairman’s wife she would have his ear, and in a case like Kanae’s, where the marriage is arranged but never quite explicitly noted as such, the social arrangements and finer details would likely have fallen to her. Circumstances would certainly suggest Mrs.Ohtori was the prime mover in the planning Akio’s engagement to Kanae, since the Chairman was ill at the time and in no condition for such political maneuvers.

   Another factor that would have decided the distribution of power in their relationship would be which of them was married into the family. We don’t know this either way, but Mrs.Ohtori’s behavior with Akio, her willingness to throw even empty threats, suggests she is aware of and accustomed to having some measure of power. This is a contrast to her daughter, who has none and doesn’t let it trouble her. Was Mrs.Ohtori this way at her age, or is it a difference in their personalities? It’s hard to imagine Kanae having the will and even the little guile it takes Mrs.Ohtori to carry on her clandestine affair with Akio, but who knows what a few decades of being in Mrs.Ohtori’s position would do to her?

   There’s no way to deduce from the circumstances how Mrs.Ohtori and Akio got involved or when. Was his relationship with Mrs.Ohtori the means used to get engaged to Kanae, or did he work his way into the Chairman’s, and Kanae’s, regards only seduce her mother after the engagement was announced? In the Nemuro elevator, Kanae suggests that her father chose Akio, but this is hardly reliable. Mrs.Ohtori’s pull as his wife would have been the suggestion of such a choice, and Akio could have easily wormed his way into the position he’s in through the approving sentiments of either parent. Still, it would seem more reasonable to assume it was Mrs.Ohtori who ultimately put him where he is. She is the one he continues to interact with, and it would appear he has the more ‘intimate’ relationship with her, whereas the Chairman is out of sight and out of mind. The only consideration Akio gives him is as a cruel jab at Mrs.Ohtori.

   With the Chairman out of the picture and Kanae kept at a safely ignorant distance, Mrs.Ohtori is Akio’s primary link to the family. There’s a no-nonsense honesty about the sexual relationship between him and his soon-to-be mother-in-law; despite the rather complicated foreplay they engage in, there’s no confusion between the two as to why she is there, or whether she’ll get what she came for. This all suggests a familiarity with the situation born from repeated offenses. There’s no telling how it started, but it’s been going on for a long time. And if it hasn’t been Akio all along, it’s been others; Mrs.Ohtori seems very accustomed to the finer points of adultery, she dresses for it, she slips around, she schemes to get to her man. Guilty though she may feel, it’s not a new thing for her.