Biography: Takani Megumi is from the Aizu region, now Fukushima Prefecture. Like the rest of her family, Megumi is adept at “rangaku” medicine, although she mixes this Western learning with Eastern medicine as well. The fact that Megumi bore the last name ‘Takani’ spoke of her family’s higher class level – peasants during that time were forbidden to carry family names. Megumi was portrayed both in the anime and in the manga as having long, dark hair and dark eyes. In the anime particularly, she usually wore a blue haori worn over a lavender kimono. Like Kaoru, Megumi is a strong-willed woman, but she is also depicted as a more mature and cunning compared to the younger Kaoru.
Background: Megumi’s family were a well-known family of doctors throughout Aizu, though were considered unusual because every generation of the family went into medicine and allowed both women and children to study medicine as well. They were highly ranked doctors in the social hierarchy, but despite the fierce discrimination present in the Edo period, they believed in equal treatment of all sick patients and were devoted to their treatment regardless of social status. The family’s ideals was that the true purpose of medicine was life and found rigid system preference for the samurai class offensive to their profession. Takani Ryūsei, Megumi’s father, was an extreme believer of this ideal and courageously left Aizu with his family to Nagasaki to study western medicine. When the family returned through special permission, the province was at war. Megumi’s family left her behind to serve as doctors on the battlefield. Her father died on the front while her mother and two brothers disappeared.
Being educated in herbal and Western medicine (renguku), Megumi eventually became an assistant to a prominent physician with the intention of training to become a full-fledged doctor herself. However, it turned out that the man she worked for was not the best of men. He was in turn working for a crime lord named Takeda Kanryū who ran an opium syndicate in Tokyo. Takeda commissioned the doctor to produce a new kind of opium which they then called “Spider’s Web.” The formula for the Spider’s Web was different in that it uses half the normal dose of poppy juice but is twice as effective as the regular drug, allowing it to rake in four times the profit. While working for the doctor, Megumi learned the secrets of the formula and later, when Takeda killed the doctor during an argument, he forced her to use the formula to make more opium.