Teriyaki

At thirty-three years old, office worker Yoshiko Kume thought she had finally found someone she could marry. Instead, her disastrous search for marriage ends in betrayal, despair, and a fatal fall from a cliff. When Yoshiko next opens her eyes, she has become Chloe, the beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter of a marquis in the magnificent Kingdom of Florence. It sounds like the beginning of a luxurious second life. It isn't. Behind the glittering dresses and extravagant estates lies a deeply corrupt aristocratic society, one where status and power matter far more than justice and the people beneath the nobility are routinely exploited. Fortunately, Chloe isn't really a sheltered fifteen-year-old noblewoman anymore. Inside her is a thirty-three-year-old Japanese working woman who has already learned what happens when she allows an unreasonable world to push her around. And Yoshiko brought one particularly useful thing with her: the knowledge she gained working as an administrative scrivener. Rather than accepting the injustices surrounding her as simply “how things work,” Chloe begins applying her modern knowledge of law, administration, contracts, and human rights to the problems of her new world. Her unusual intelligence eventually attracts the attention of Leonie, a diplomat from the neighboring nation of Britique. Recognizing both Chloe's abilities and her strangely modern sense of human rights, Leonie begins secretly working alongside her. With the Kingdom of Florence approaching collapse, the two form an alliance that neither can openly acknowledge, covertly supporting relief institutions, inspecting markets, and confronting the corruption eating away at the country from within. A political reincarnation fantasy about a thirty-three-year-old office worker reborn as a teenage noblewoman who discovers that surviving aristocratic society may require the same skills she once used navigating bureaucracy in modern Japan.