How The Apothecary Diaries Portrayed Prosopagnosia Through the Character Lakan

The Apothecary Diaries is a popular series set in an imperial palace, adapted into both an anime and a manga. The character Lakan is portrayed as someone who has trouble remembering people's faces, and is instead shown recognizing people through cues other than the face — their role, their abilities, their position.

This article doesn't get into the story's plot or other worldbuilding details — it focuses narrowly on this portrayal of "identifying people through cues other than the face" and what it can suggest about understanding prosopagnosia. This is commentary on a fictional character, not a report on an actual clinical case.

The way Lakan is portrayed reading people through role and ability, likened to shogi pieces, involves exaggeration and stylization for the sake of fiction. Even so, the underlying idea — organizing "who someone is" through a different framework, such as a person's function or attributes, in place of the visual information of a face — overlaps with strategies that people with prosopagnosia actually use.

This is, of course, only a fictional portrayal. It doesn't mean that everyone with prosopagnosia perceives people this way, or that this is a clinically verified coping method. Still, it can be read as an example of a story presenting, in an accessible way, the idea of identifying people through information other than the face.

People with prosopagnosia are known to identify others not through the face itself, but by combining cues beyond it — voice, way of speaking, gait, build, hairstyle, belongings, or the place and role a person usually occupies. These are called compensatory strategies: ways of making up for difficulty identifying faces using other kinds of information.

Lakan's portrayal of perceiving people through role and ability can be read as an exaggerated, easy-to-grasp version of this same strategy of "substituting cues other than the face." While it's fictional exaggeration, the underlying idea — that there are ways to recognize people without relying on the face alone — points in a similar direction to strategies people actually use.

Character portrayals in fiction involve exaggeration and simplification in service of a good story. Lakan's portrayal, too, isn't a faithful reproduction of the difficulties faced by people with prosopagnosia — it remains, first and foremost, a fictional characterization.

That said, encountering a portrayal like this can be a starting point for understanding that "not being able to remember faces" isn't simply carelessness or a lack of caring — it can come with real strategies for relating to people using other kinds of cues. If you enjoy the series and also want to learn about prosopagnosia itself, it's worth consulting specialized sources of information as well.