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kaigouI'd promised to explain about me reading girly shoujo manga, which really isn't my normal fare -- normally I'm much happier with violence-ridden, blood-soaked, cussing-filled, series like Jin Ha Yoo's Aegis [don't be fooled by the cover art: it's vicious and brutal on both a physical and emotional level], Naked Ape's Dolls, or Hiroaki Samura's Blade of the Immortal (although my violent streak is satisfied equally by SF-driven, distopic fare like Dolls, as much as quasi-historic violence of Blade). I'd seen several gorgeous images from Bride of the Water God used as wallpaper, icons, etc, but it took a boring rainy day to prompt me to download and at least take a look. The teaser per Dark Horse, which licensed the English-language version:
This would not be your standard Kaigou fare.
I can't even say the artwork is 'girly' so much as it's ornate, even baroque, at times. I know Korean artwork and aesthetics have been influenced by -- or should I say, cross-pollinated with -- Chinese, so there's that familiar element for me, here. But nearly every frame is drawn with this incredibly elaborate care for the graceful details; even the background of Soah's home (shown in some of the chapters) is given the same attention despite clearly being of a significantly lower income/class than the Water God's palace.
Frex, these three pages are from a point in the story when Soah has entered the Water God's kingdom. One of its denizens (not saying who or what, since that's a big spoiler), thinks to drop by and get a glimpse of her while she's unlikely to be aware of the observation -- only as he leaps onto the railing, he discovers she's awake and standing right there.
I've grown used to the images in Japanese manga, where hair and ribbons will often swirl, but the architecture itself is a series of clean, geometric lines -- a sort of constrained, restrained grace that's echoed in the almost architectural lines of the clothing (moreso when characters are drawn in traditional garb). Sometimes you'll get a corner of a garment fluttering in the wind -- the edges of a long sleeve, the fullness of hakama -- but even representations of Heian-era twelve-layer kimono still show a cleanness of lines. It's not that all mangaka draw these exactly the same, mind you, but you look at enough illustrations and you start to see that there is a cultural aesthetic for what is attractive and what is not (sometimes I think many of the Japanese artists would agree with Herrick's appreciation of "a cuff neglectful, and thereby / ribbands to flow confusedly").
This restrictive geometry (or should I say, structured geometry) is so very different, aesthetically, from the Asian continental cultures like Korea and China. The loose thread or cuff neglectful that in Japan raises implications of so much more, is an entire sheaf of ribbons in Chinese and Chinese-influenced artwork; from this outsider's eyes it seems at times as though the same tendencies are displayed in the storytelling styles themselves. One thing I've noticed in Japanese storytelling (illustrated or novelized) is that much of a work's grace is defined by how much it does not tell you. In the hands of a less skillful translator, entire sections of some stories just plain make no sense: much of the information a reader would infer is buried in the language, with shades and verb tenses and implications that just don't really have an elegant equivalent in English. (Not to mention the rather cyclical nature of what is considered 'graceful description' in Japanese literature, an ideal which does influence even its more pop-culture modes, it seems: characters are introduced without explanation, flashbacks are common albeit used in ways that in English would see awkward or amateurish, and sometimes (to English-reading eyes) consistent character motivation seems to be an utterly foreign concept.
When I've muttered in confusion and frustration about being thrown from scene to scene with no setting or forewarning, or of struggling through what is an award-winning Japanese-language novel and yet reads to me (despite the equally top-translation work) like a middle-school novel in language and plot complexity -- I've been reminded by knowledgeable friends, and well-written essayists, that a Japanese reader is no less baffled or pleased by translations of English novels. In the Japanese tradition, the less you explain, the stronger your story is; its novels/storylines are often liberally doused with gaps in explanation, description, emotion, even stated conflict (sometimes to the point of accepting, even applauding, what Anglo readers would consider blatant author ex machina). The reader is expected to work hard at engaging with, in order to comprehend, the multiple levels which are all unstated. In contrast, English-language novels are far too talky, I'm told; our storytelling tradition will lay it all out, delve into every corner, and leave no stone unexplained -- and that includes our emphasis on craftwork like foreshadowing (a skill in itself which Japanese literature appears to disdain as, again, over-explaining to the reader).
The more I read of Chinese and Korean stories (again, illustrated as well as novelized), the more it seems as though there must be something in these languages -- as much as their aesthetics for artwork, design, architecture, fashion, and so on -- that is both aligned with the Japanese preference for inference... and yet aligned equally with the English/European love of layering on detail after detail. So what you seem to get, instead, is a storyline in which you are given, shown, and told, a million details and yet how they connect must be inferred somehow. Think of walking through a Japanese garden, where three plants represent an entire forest... and then walking through a Chinese garden, where half the surfaces are architectural and what's not decorated is painted and there's never a direct line of sight: you're overloaded with details that designed to carefully, subtly, push you in a certain direction. As a gardener, at least, I think of it like this: Japanese gardens wish to have you pause to reflect upon the gracious simplicity in shape, form, and contrast, while Chinese gardens cause you to pause because you cannot proceed without needing a moment to absorb the multitude of shapes and forms, the seeming wildness (however skillfully maneuvered backstage). Maybe it's just me, but I see this in the storytelling patterns, as well.
That's what I think of, as I read stories like Bride of the Water God, and I see these marvelously complex and baroque illustrations -- eventually it dawned on me that the same thing is happening in the story itself, unlike in even those Japanese novels/animanga that I've enjoyed. I've been casting my mind back through all sorts of genres and plotlines in Japanese storytelling, trying to determine just how many storylines have multiple sub-plots, and I've only come up with one or two titles. It's entirely possible that a lot of what I've read would have -- to Japanese-trained reading eyeballs -- a multiplicity of sub-plots, but because I'm missing even the big honking subtleties, there's no way I can catch the teeny implied ones encapsulated in a single line of dialogue.
I've not had that problem with Chinese and Korean stories. It'd be more accurate to say, honestly, that with Chinese/Korean works, the majority of my trouble has been to infer character motivation from what sometimes seems like an excess of information. I'm on stimuli overload from opposing directions as much as I am from the visuals.
I'm explaining all that because if you're reading this because you do like manga, and you've grown accustomed to the ways it's most often told (whether or not you realize the cultural patterns that dominate the storytelling), then you might have to take a minute to readjust when you start in on Chinese or Korean stories, like Bride of the Water God. Like an English novel, there is more explanation, but unlike an English novel, it's not always pared down to only what you need. There is a lot going on in terms of the inter-character conflicts and contrasts, but little is introduced with any clarity, or resolved to any satisfaction (at least very little resolved so far, and it's five volumes in!). By that, I mean: many scenes are like reading an English-language novel but with the first four paragraphs excised. You may have no idea who this person is, or what they want (the few times there's explanation, it's for Soah's benefit and even then is limited; if she's not in the scene, there's usually no explanation at all). But you will get the conflict, and the definite impression of multiple threads tugging on the main weft -- that's not left to be implied. Maybe you'll read such differently, but I can only say that I often ended up a scene with more information than I'd had before... but with no idea how, or where, or why, it fit into what I knew so far.
Which is to say: you won't have to over-read like you may if you're an English-based reader trying to parse Japanese plots, but you still can't wait to be spoonfed like you would from the more explicit storytelling styles of the West. It's a curious mix, but I have no idea whether this is a historical element of continental-asian storytelling, or thanks to the confluence of East-and-West over the past four hundred or so years (an influence Japan did, and does still, do its level best to repel). I suppose someone else will have to call me on it, if I'm judging wrong from what I've read (since obviously I must rely to a large degree not only on what's been translated, but also on the skill of those translators).
The other way this story appeals to me is its lack of self-awareness when it comes to its modern audience. I'm not sure how better to put that, but I'll try. Again to compare to Japanese literature/pop-culture: in Japan, the traditional roles for women are, to a large part, still highly regimented/structured, despite some advances here and there. For a female lead character who is an active participant on the level of what we expect regularly in an West/Anglo novel, in Japanese storylines there does seem to be an authorial self-consciousness that this character is not the norm, may even be so utterly unrealistic as to be totally obvious to its intended audience that this female character is so far into the fantastic as to lose all potential as even a remotely useful role model: because it just wouldn't ever happen outside a book.
I mention Japanese stories in particular half because any on my flist who currently read manga might have encountered this, and half because it's a writing-pattern I see plenty of in English novels, too... but most often in English novels it's when the story is historical. The Western-then and the Eastern-now are chockfull of limitations for your average woman-protagonist; the result is that you can either settle for writing a character who lives within those restrictions (and might be seen as boring by readers no longer so restrained, or as too-familiar by readers who are that constrained), or you can figure out a way to justify writing a character that's clearly ahead of her time, outside her time, just plain unlikely given her environment. (A feminist in the Renaissance, yeah, riiiight.)
Thing is, when you're writing within a culture/period when a specific societal type is/was bound and limited to a greater degree than the majority, there is often a self-awareness (and an accompanying justification) as to why this particular character is the exception: sure, historical research shows that A and B were true 99.9% of the time, but, no, really, this one character broke the trend!... and didn't end up dead in a gutter for it, either!
That revisionist approach drives me up the freaking wall sometimes; I think the only reason I can swallow it in Japanese stories is because what a Japanese audience considers the exceptional token is a character who I consider, as an American, to be just another normal Jane: the salarywoman, the police officer, the single mother, the savvy college student, the star athlete. I guess in that sort of story, then, I have a constant background hum in my head, adjusting dialogue or motivations or backstory here and there, and part of that is to reduce the author's quietly nervous self-awareness that s/he is writing a character who isn't actually a likely critter in reality.
If you read any historical-fiction, you may have noticed the same nervous twist in the author's tone. It's a peculiar sincerity, an earnestness, almost, to justify the ahistorical characteristics and the sometimes-glaring anachronisms that produces. In other words: when I start reading a female-protagonist in a historical-fiction piece, my first thought is: how long before I catch that tone in the author's voice, the one that says, "okay, I know this isn't accurate for what a woman would've thought/said/done, and you know it's not accurate, but since who wants to read about some spineless oppressed mindless drone, we're all going to ignore that no one would've tolerated a girl acting like this, right? right-o!"
Just so you know. I've got radar for that kind of authorial nudge-nudge.
To get back to the specifics of Water God, it seems as though every culture has some kind of tradition about sacrificing its prettiest girls to please an unpredictable and powerful monster. In the Anglo/Saxon version, it's more often to keep a dragon plump and satisfied with virgin sacrifices; there's no bones made about the fact that the girl will be chained up and left to be eaten. In the Asian traditions, this virgin/beauty sacrifice is glossed with the title of "bride". Additionally, the Western version wants to prevent a negative action (here's a packed lunch and don't burn our town, please) -- the Eastern version is to provoke a positive action (have a wife and please bring us rain). In the end, though, it all amounts to the same thing: some poor girl is bundled off to an unknown, potentially lethal fate to make some monster happy and to keep safe everyone else at her expense.
Thus, although I'm aware of the Asian version of this admittedly somewhat-annoying virgin-sacrifice thread in human history, I still couldn't help but expect to get a bit of revisionism shoved down my throat. There's certainly been enough so-called twists of that ilk in the Western fantasy/epic tradition: the dragon plans to eat the girl, but she's so different! and outspoken! and strong! and whatever that the dragon finds himself rather taken with her, and ends up falling in luuuuve -- or alternately, letting her go (that is, if the dragon himself isn't revealed to actually be a sort of Renaissance Lizard and not the least interested in chomping on virgins).
Soah doesn't get that treatment. She's not spared because she's anything special; she's spared because the Water God, Habaek, is always sent brides in homage (though he's rather disinterested in the entire process, and to some degree in humans themselves), and on whatever whim -- possibly for no reason other than the spot's currently empty -- he didn't let her drown. So she comes to Habaek's country and yet... she's still not anything particularly special. Her survival isn't clocked up to her being remarkable for her time, or even because she's all that pretty or smart or educated or outstanding.
She's just Soah: baffled, lost, not the brightest but stubborn and determined to make the best of it. She's not even that pressed about whether or not the villagers are truly grateful for her sacrifice (or just grateful that it didn't have to be them, or their daughters), though she wants her sacrifice to at least have meaning, and be enough to make Habaek send rain. In some ways, her willingness to accept despite her fear or reluctance is exactly what makes her so intriguing to the Water God: he asks her if she misses her family. She says no, but later she calls out in her sleep for her mother. Habaek concludes that Soah is a liar (which is another riff on the story's theme of duality: Soah speaks lies to 'talk' herself out of her fear, talk big, but knows her own truths, while Habaek keeps silent and thereby doesn't have to face that he's lying to himself the most -- her self-protective lies cause him to realize truth).
At one point, there's a conversation between Soah and her mother. Soah's father is a gambling man and possibly a drunkard, and it's implied that the reason Soah was sacrificed may have been because her father 'sold her off' as the sacrifice in order to have his debts forgiven. Her normal adolescent flares of frustration with her father (mixed with a clear ambivalence given her memories of a happier childhood, before he went down the bottle) escalate into her father's violence -- but not once is there an anachronistic "you shouldn't hit a woman!" kind of public service announcement... Instead, Soah asks her mother how she can possibly love a man like that: how can you be his wife, and the mother to his children, when he's so unreliable? It's a two-faced love, made worse by the woman's lack of say in who she marries, but Soah's mother demurs, saying that she did what was expected, as would Soah, as will Soah's younger sister. It's just the way things are: you marry the man your parents choose, and you are his wife and you love him.
And the logic in that, in fact, isn't something Soah protests. She's now 'married' to (or at least bespoken to) Habaek -- and whether this is right, or not, or welcome, or not, isn't the issue (as it would be to a modern mindset). Her issue is one that's -- to my satisfaction -- transcendent to a certain degree, because it's just equally human. The logic may be backwards to modern eyes: you marry and therefore it follows that you love/respect your spouse -- but it's no less powerful as a conflict. After her first faux-pas-marked meeting with Habaek, she willfully ignores his grumpiness and recasts his complaints into a version that props her up. She'd told Habaek he's handsome, and he replied with the rather snarky (if patently false) observation that she's considerably more manly; later, when her place is questioned, she protests that Habaek's quite taken with her, and that when she'd complimented him, he'd returned the favor saying she was the prettiest he'd ever seen. It could be seen as a childish attempt to bolster herself, or an outright lie, or just a desperate attempt to convince the listener (even when Soah herself is not convinced). I just saw it as human, and something that -- for once -- didn't get a veneer of ahistorical nonsense layered over everything.
Soah's conflict, as it develops, is simply that she's supposed to respect, honor, love her husband... and she doesn't. For as long as she doesn't, therefore, she's not truly a wife. By that logic, to claim any rights -- as a wife -- would be a presumption based on falsehood. This is why she wavers at points during the story, uncertain how to handle an already complex and confusing set of situations (each of which have a lot of backstory that she knows she's missing, which really doesn't help). It's not simply enough to reproduce her mother's behavior towards her father, because she lacks the love that grants her mother the right/ability to act that way. It's also why she so forcefully insists Habaek is falling for her. She can at least insist that he cares for her -- and Habaek's relative silence allows her this leeway.
Now, if this were Japanese manga/novel, I'd expect a couple of storytelling patterns for this otherwise simple storyline. First, it would stay simple: the focus would be solely on Soah and Habaek, and all other characters would exist to either get the two together, or keep them apart. The second is that any extensive backstory would be told in separate stories: a prequel for what happened in the past, and perhaps a side-story or a sequel for handling a relationship between Soah and another character, or Habaek and another, etc. There's a strong focus (again, from what I've read) in the Japanese literary tradition to choose unspoken tension over verbalized conflict, to internalize to a significant degree, and to focus on a single relation-interaction and let other characters fade. (That is, often secondary characters are no more than props or plot-points, if well-written ones sometimes.)
Yoon, I'm finding, is writing with a story-complexity that I've also been finding in the other manhwa I've been reading. Characters are going in every blooming direction, they've all got conflicting motivations (and for some, the main characters' relationship is not just irrelevant, but sometimes dismissed outright), and you can not count the number of subplots on one finger. Bride of the Water God has a dangerous, if ambiguously positive, goddess -- Habaek's mother -- and a tempting but equally ambiguous Emperor, and even the cast staying in the Water Country are not at all perfectly aligned with Habaek. They have their own reasons for doing, wanting, saying, arguing, snarking, and throwing obstacles in the way, and it's not just because the author declared the story needs an obstacle.
In romance, you don't want too much conflict (from what I've gathered) because in a less-capable author's hands, there's the risk that the conflict will override the author's intended goals. The characters will be revealed to be truly incompatible, and damn it, we can't have that, not when the author is determined to get these two together! So conflict gets scooted past, or stomped quickly, or the author's busy inserting eggshells so the characters never get bloody well stoked up enough to actually conflict in any forward manner. But since you can't have a story without conflict at all, romance -- like much of Japanese tradition I've read -- therefore must rely on tension, instead.
That's where the, "oh, does he love me, does he not love me?" angst comes in. Pages and pages, hours upon hours, are wasted in silence as both characters misinterpret the other's silence and/or withdrawal, and it takes forever before someone gets the bright idea to open their mouth and ASK. There's a boatload of suffering in silence going on in the romance world (and if that's our ideal of luuuuurve, no wonder we're a world filled with dysfunctional relationships).
I'm not saying Yoon doesn't work with tension; the story has that, as well... but it's a believable tension in that it's not just Soah sitting around mooning over whether the Water God luuuuurves her forevah and evah. She's trying to work out her new life against the backdrop of her expectations of marriage and being a spouse and having a spouse, and to her credit when she thinks she's come up with a way to resolve the biggest puzzle of all, she doesn't just sit on her hands. She's quite pragmatic about it: if two characters bear the same tattoo, this will answer her question definitively -- given that when she'd asked other characters, their answers conflicted. She doesn't have the 'right' to demand an answer (cf wife's position), so she must be a little devious... and it's in that choice of 'subtle research' that the silence-pattern of tension in romance is retained, but without an authorial-insert forcing the character to be passive at the same time.
That's a rather muddled way to put it, but I'm trying to avoid major spoilers, sheesh! Cut me some slack. Hopefully it'll suffice to say that in most romance plotlines, the tension is maintained only via characters being too stupid to live. The stupidest of all, of course, being the one where someone 'overhears' just enough of a conversation to get the completely wrong impression, makes a whole lot of assumptions, and the other character naturally misinterprets in return, tension, tension, angst, angst, etc, etc, and so on. Soah doesn't really 'overhear' much -- and when she does, she's discovered pretty quickly, enough that she doesn't have time to misinterpret and assume independent of external input. In fact, her wrong assumptions are all based on wrong information -- relayed by the conflicting voices of her Water Country peers, all of whom have murky motivations and long histories she can't begin to grasp (and without a wife's position, doesn't always feel she has the right to ask).
Which means when she's set on a course of action based on her grasp of the situation, I don't see her as too stupid to live. I see her as making what is really a logical and reasonable choice based on what information she could gather; I can hardly expect a character to be omniscient and just know who's telling her the truth and who's lying outright. She trusts what she sees or touches or holds.
The last thing I'll note before (finally) posting this is that one issue in romance plotlines that really bugs the crap out of me is when the male character is All-Alpha All The Time. Ooooooh, that one makes me want to find out whether the circular saw really can cut through two hundred pages of drivel in one go. I don't mean, though, when a character is arrogant or a bastard or rude or domineering; I mean, when a character is an arrogant domineering bastard for no apparent reason.
I'm sure you've read this at some point -- it's done for both genders. The love interest is friendly and welcoming one day, and the next day is cruel for no apparent reason. Much wangsting on the part of our point-of-view character, must misunderstanding, and then later we discover (depending on the author's skill) that the love interest had a reason for that abrupt two-faced behavior. It was a bad day at the office, it was being reminded of a lost love, it was being reminded of a lost train pass, whatever. Point is, it makes no sense from a reader's point of view not because we're not given insight into a character's head but because the author wants some kind of tension to hold the two characters apart, and when both really do 'like-like' each other, and you can't write them not knowing they like-like, then you need to write them not knowing the other one also like-likes.
Boy, oh boy, it's late, because that is one seriously whacked sentence.
But I hope you get the meaning... and that's where I like Yoon's work better than a lot of romances. Soah's baffled over Habaek's behavior, sure, but he's not inconsistent with her: he's always that grumpy and dismissive. Whether he like-likes her, or doesn't, isn't nearly as much of an issue for her as that of whether she like-likes him: because, by her mother's logic, if Soah loves her husband, then what he chooses or does or says is secondary. In some ways, it's a more functional mindset: she can't control what Habaek says or does, but she can at least police her own perspective/mindset.
From Habaek's side, his grumpiness and indifference aren't that hard to figure out, though Soah's given near-blatant explanations early on after her arrival: she is one in a long string of brides, and the only bride Habaek ever loved was his first bride. It's not that he's indifferent so much as he's just tired of the repetition; she's nothing extraordinary to him (and the few hints otherwise are just that). It makes him a believable, and consistent, character: he's not being an asshole because the author demanded that if he's not then the story will wrap up too soon and there's a wordcount on this puppy -- he's being an asshole because he is, to some extent, just plain misanthropic (and I mean that in a very specific human-disliking sense), and to an equal extent because he's not seeing a reason to risk his heart on one more human who'll die in too short a time. They come and go, come and go, and he'll keep to himself and pay this current bride no mind.
Naturally, he's a little surprised when Soah isn't willing to just fade into the background. She has a role to fulfill, damn it -- that ever-present spousal obligation of loving one's spouse, basically -- and she's going to figure out a way to do it, as best she can. She's stubborn like that, and the blunt disconnect in her lies catches him off-guard. She denies she misses her family, but she calls for her mother. He's insulted her, but she claims he's falling for her. He just plain can't figure her out, really... and despite himself, he's maybe, just maybe, a little bit of wanting to.
However, I'll just let my rambling commentary end with that, and conclude:
It's a far more satisfactory storyline than any I've read in a long time -- and I'm including a lot of the Western novels I've read recently in that, too. Certainly it's satisfying enough that I've got the English-language volume one already, planning on the rest, and will probably hurt someone badly if I don't see at least a summary of what's going on in the raws coming out of Korea. Damn it! Knowing simplified Mandarin only gets you so far in this world, because the Korean raws are all Greek to me.
Out so far:
Bride of the Water God, vol 1
Bride of the Water God, vol 2
No indication on Dark Horse's pages when the next volume will be released, and no pre-orders available yet, but Dark Horse is usually pretty consistent/reliable about these things. I'd expect vol3 to probably be available possibly in the next month or two.
When Soah's impoverished, desperate village decides to sacrifice her to the Water God Habaek to end a long drought, they believe that drowning one beautiful girl will save their entire community and bring much-needed rain. Not only is Soah surprised to be rescued by the Water God -- instead of killed -- she never imagined she'd be a welcomed guest in Habaek's magical kingdom, where an exciting new life awaits her! Most surprising, however, is the Water God himself... and how very different he is from the monster Soah imagined.Here, then, are the first two pages of the first chapter, as example... (Note: Korean manhwa and Chinese manhua are read left-to-right.) Click on the images to jump to the full-sized scanlation version.
This would not be your standard Kaigou fare.
I can't even say the artwork is 'girly' so much as it's ornate, even baroque, at times. I know Korean artwork and aesthetics have been influenced by -- or should I say, cross-pollinated with -- Chinese, so there's that familiar element for me, here. But nearly every frame is drawn with this incredibly elaborate care for the graceful details; even the background of Soah's home (shown in some of the chapters) is given the same attention despite clearly being of a significantly lower income/class than the Water God's palace.
Frex, these three pages are from a point in the story when Soah has entered the Water God's kingdom. One of its denizens (not saying who or what, since that's a big spoiler), thinks to drop by and get a glimpse of her while she's unlikely to be aware of the observation -- only as he leaps onto the railing, he discovers she's awake and standing right there.
I've grown used to the images in Japanese manga, where hair and ribbons will often swirl, but the architecture itself is a series of clean, geometric lines -- a sort of constrained, restrained grace that's echoed in the almost architectural lines of the clothing (moreso when characters are drawn in traditional garb). Sometimes you'll get a corner of a garment fluttering in the wind -- the edges of a long sleeve, the fullness of hakama -- but even representations of Heian-era twelve-layer kimono still show a cleanness of lines. It's not that all mangaka draw these exactly the same, mind you, but you look at enough illustrations and you start to see that there is a cultural aesthetic for what is attractive and what is not (sometimes I think many of the Japanese artists would agree with Herrick's appreciation of "a cuff neglectful, and thereby / ribbands to flow confusedly").
This restrictive geometry (or should I say, structured geometry) is so very different, aesthetically, from the Asian continental cultures like Korea and China. The loose thread or cuff neglectful that in Japan raises implications of so much more, is an entire sheaf of ribbons in Chinese and Chinese-influenced artwork; from this outsider's eyes it seems at times as though the same tendencies are displayed in the storytelling styles themselves. One thing I've noticed in Japanese storytelling (illustrated or novelized) is that much of a work's grace is defined by how much it does not tell you. In the hands of a less skillful translator, entire sections of some stories just plain make no sense: much of the information a reader would infer is buried in the language, with shades and verb tenses and implications that just don't really have an elegant equivalent in English. (Not to mention the rather cyclical nature of what is considered 'graceful description' in Japanese literature, an ideal which does influence even its more pop-culture modes, it seems: characters are introduced without explanation, flashbacks are common albeit used in ways that in English would see awkward or amateurish, and sometimes (to English-reading eyes) consistent character motivation seems to be an utterly foreign concept.
When I've muttered in confusion and frustration about being thrown from scene to scene with no setting or forewarning, or of struggling through what is an award-winning Japanese-language novel and yet reads to me (despite the equally top-translation work) like a middle-school novel in language and plot complexity -- I've been reminded by knowledgeable friends, and well-written essayists, that a Japanese reader is no less baffled or pleased by translations of English novels. In the Japanese tradition, the less you explain, the stronger your story is; its novels/storylines are often liberally doused with gaps in explanation, description, emotion, even stated conflict (sometimes to the point of accepting, even applauding, what Anglo readers would consider blatant author ex machina). The reader is expected to work hard at engaging with, in order to comprehend, the multiple levels which are all unstated. In contrast, English-language novels are far too talky, I'm told; our storytelling tradition will lay it all out, delve into every corner, and leave no stone unexplained -- and that includes our emphasis on craftwork like foreshadowing (a skill in itself which Japanese literature appears to disdain as, again, over-explaining to the reader).
The more I read of Chinese and Korean stories (again, illustrated as well as novelized), the more it seems as though there must be something in these languages -- as much as their aesthetics for artwork, design, architecture, fashion, and so on -- that is both aligned with the Japanese preference for inference... and yet aligned equally with the English/European love of layering on detail after detail. So what you seem to get, instead, is a storyline in which you are given, shown, and told, a million details and yet how they connect must be inferred somehow. Think of walking through a Japanese garden, where three plants represent an entire forest... and then walking through a Chinese garden, where half the surfaces are architectural and what's not decorated is painted and there's never a direct line of sight: you're overloaded with details that designed to carefully, subtly, push you in a certain direction. As a gardener, at least, I think of it like this: Japanese gardens wish to have you pause to reflect upon the gracious simplicity in shape, form, and contrast, while Chinese gardens cause you to pause because you cannot proceed without needing a moment to absorb the multitude of shapes and forms, the seeming wildness (however skillfully maneuvered backstage). Maybe it's just me, but I see this in the storytelling patterns, as well.
That's what I think of, as I read stories like Bride of the Water God, and I see these marvelously complex and baroque illustrations -- eventually it dawned on me that the same thing is happening in the story itself, unlike in even those Japanese novels/animanga that I've enjoyed. I've been casting my mind back through all sorts of genres and plotlines in Japanese storytelling, trying to determine just how many storylines have multiple sub-plots, and I've only come up with one or two titles. It's entirely possible that a lot of what I've read would have -- to Japanese-trained reading eyeballs -- a multiplicity of sub-plots, but because I'm missing even the big honking subtleties, there's no way I can catch the teeny implied ones encapsulated in a single line of dialogue.
I've not had that problem with Chinese and Korean stories. It'd be more accurate to say, honestly, that with Chinese/Korean works, the majority of my trouble has been to infer character motivation from what sometimes seems like an excess of information. I'm on stimuli overload from opposing directions as much as I am from the visuals.
I'm explaining all that because if you're reading this because you do like manga, and you've grown accustomed to the ways it's most often told (whether or not you realize the cultural patterns that dominate the storytelling), then you might have to take a minute to readjust when you start in on Chinese or Korean stories, like Bride of the Water God. Like an English novel, there is more explanation, but unlike an English novel, it's not always pared down to only what you need. There is a lot going on in terms of the inter-character conflicts and contrasts, but little is introduced with any clarity, or resolved to any satisfaction (at least very little resolved so far, and it's five volumes in!). By that, I mean: many scenes are like reading an English-language novel but with the first four paragraphs excised. You may have no idea who this person is, or what they want (the few times there's explanation, it's for Soah's benefit and even then is limited; if she's not in the scene, there's usually no explanation at all). But you will get the conflict, and the definite impression of multiple threads tugging on the main weft -- that's not left to be implied. Maybe you'll read such differently, but I can only say that I often ended up a scene with more information than I'd had before... but with no idea how, or where, or why, it fit into what I knew so far.
Which is to say: you won't have to over-read like you may if you're an English-based reader trying to parse Japanese plots, but you still can't wait to be spoonfed like you would from the more explicit storytelling styles of the West. It's a curious mix, but I have no idea whether this is a historical element of continental-asian storytelling, or thanks to the confluence of East-and-West over the past four hundred or so years (an influence Japan did, and does still, do its level best to repel). I suppose someone else will have to call me on it, if I'm judging wrong from what I've read (since obviously I must rely to a large degree not only on what's been translated, but also on the skill of those translators).
The other way this story appeals to me is its lack of self-awareness when it comes to its modern audience. I'm not sure how better to put that, but I'll try. Again to compare to Japanese literature/pop-culture: in Japan, the traditional roles for women are, to a large part, still highly regimented/structured, despite some advances here and there. For a female lead character who is an active participant on the level of what we expect regularly in an West/Anglo novel, in Japanese storylines there does seem to be an authorial self-consciousness that this character is not the norm, may even be so utterly unrealistic as to be totally obvious to its intended audience that this female character is so far into the fantastic as to lose all potential as even a remotely useful role model: because it just wouldn't ever happen outside a book.
I mention Japanese stories in particular half because any on my flist who currently read manga might have encountered this, and half because it's a writing-pattern I see plenty of in English novels, too... but most often in English novels it's when the story is historical. The Western-then and the Eastern-now are chockfull of limitations for your average woman-protagonist; the result is that you can either settle for writing a character who lives within those restrictions (and might be seen as boring by readers no longer so restrained, or as too-familiar by readers who are that constrained), or you can figure out a way to justify writing a character that's clearly ahead of her time, outside her time, just plain unlikely given her environment. (A feminist in the Renaissance, yeah, riiiight.)
Thing is, when you're writing within a culture/period when a specific societal type is/was bound and limited to a greater degree than the majority, there is often a self-awareness (and an accompanying justification) as to why this particular character is the exception: sure, historical research shows that A and B were true 99.9% of the time, but, no, really, this one character broke the trend!... and didn't end up dead in a gutter for it, either!
That revisionist approach drives me up the freaking wall sometimes; I think the only reason I can swallow it in Japanese stories is because what a Japanese audience considers the exceptional token is a character who I consider, as an American, to be just another normal Jane: the salarywoman, the police officer, the single mother, the savvy college student, the star athlete. I guess in that sort of story, then, I have a constant background hum in my head, adjusting dialogue or motivations or backstory here and there, and part of that is to reduce the author's quietly nervous self-awareness that s/he is writing a character who isn't actually a likely critter in reality.
If you read any historical-fiction, you may have noticed the same nervous twist in the author's tone. It's a peculiar sincerity, an earnestness, almost, to justify the ahistorical characteristics and the sometimes-glaring anachronisms that produces. In other words: when I start reading a female-protagonist in a historical-fiction piece, my first thought is: how long before I catch that tone in the author's voice, the one that says, "okay, I know this isn't accurate for what a woman would've thought/said/done, and you know it's not accurate, but since who wants to read about some spineless oppressed mindless drone, we're all going to ignore that no one would've tolerated a girl acting like this, right? right-o!"
Just so you know. I've got radar for that kind of authorial nudge-nudge.
To get back to the specifics of Water God, it seems as though every culture has some kind of tradition about sacrificing its prettiest girls to please an unpredictable and powerful monster. In the Anglo/Saxon version, it's more often to keep a dragon plump and satisfied with virgin sacrifices; there's no bones made about the fact that the girl will be chained up and left to be eaten. In the Asian traditions, this virgin/beauty sacrifice is glossed with the title of "bride". Additionally, the Western version wants to prevent a negative action (here's a packed lunch and don't burn our town, please) -- the Eastern version is to provoke a positive action (have a wife and please bring us rain). In the end, though, it all amounts to the same thing: some poor girl is bundled off to an unknown, potentially lethal fate to make some monster happy and to keep safe everyone else at her expense.
Thus, although I'm aware of the Asian version of this admittedly somewhat-annoying virgin-sacrifice thread in human history, I still couldn't help but expect to get a bit of revisionism shoved down my throat. There's certainly been enough so-called twists of that ilk in the Western fantasy/epic tradition: the dragon plans to eat the girl, but she's so different! and outspoken! and strong! and whatever that the dragon finds himself rather taken with her, and ends up falling in luuuuve -- or alternately, letting her go (that is, if the dragon himself isn't revealed to actually be a sort of Renaissance Lizard and not the least interested in chomping on virgins).
Soah doesn't get that treatment. She's not spared because she's anything special; she's spared because the Water God, Habaek, is always sent brides in homage (though he's rather disinterested in the entire process, and to some degree in humans themselves), and on whatever whim -- possibly for no reason other than the spot's currently empty -- he didn't let her drown. So she comes to Habaek's country and yet... she's still not anything particularly special. Her survival isn't clocked up to her being remarkable for her time, or even because she's all that pretty or smart or educated or outstanding.
She's just Soah: baffled, lost, not the brightest but stubborn and determined to make the best of it. She's not even that pressed about whether or not the villagers are truly grateful for her sacrifice (or just grateful that it didn't have to be them, or their daughters), though she wants her sacrifice to at least have meaning, and be enough to make Habaek send rain. In some ways, her willingness to accept despite her fear or reluctance is exactly what makes her so intriguing to the Water God: he asks her if she misses her family. She says no, but later she calls out in her sleep for her mother. Habaek concludes that Soah is a liar (which is another riff on the story's theme of duality: Soah speaks lies to 'talk' herself out of her fear, talk big, but knows her own truths, while Habaek keeps silent and thereby doesn't have to face that he's lying to himself the most -- her self-protective lies cause him to realize truth).
At one point, there's a conversation between Soah and her mother. Soah's father is a gambling man and possibly a drunkard, and it's implied that the reason Soah was sacrificed may have been because her father 'sold her off' as the sacrifice in order to have his debts forgiven. Her normal adolescent flares of frustration with her father (mixed with a clear ambivalence given her memories of a happier childhood, before he went down the bottle) escalate into her father's violence -- but not once is there an anachronistic "you shouldn't hit a woman!" kind of public service announcement... Instead, Soah asks her mother how she can possibly love a man like that: how can you be his wife, and the mother to his children, when he's so unreliable? It's a two-faced love, made worse by the woman's lack of say in who she marries, but Soah's mother demurs, saying that she did what was expected, as would Soah, as will Soah's younger sister. It's just the way things are: you marry the man your parents choose, and you are his wife and you love him.
And the logic in that, in fact, isn't something Soah protests. She's now 'married' to (or at least bespoken to) Habaek -- and whether this is right, or not, or welcome, or not, isn't the issue (as it would be to a modern mindset). Her issue is one that's -- to my satisfaction -- transcendent to a certain degree, because it's just equally human. The logic may be backwards to modern eyes: you marry and therefore it follows that you love/respect your spouse -- but it's no less powerful as a conflict. After her first faux-pas-marked meeting with Habaek, she willfully ignores his grumpiness and recasts his complaints into a version that props her up. She'd told Habaek he's handsome, and he replied with the rather snarky (if patently false) observation that she's considerably more manly; later, when her place is questioned, she protests that Habaek's quite taken with her, and that when she'd complimented him, he'd returned the favor saying she was the prettiest he'd ever seen. It could be seen as a childish attempt to bolster herself, or an outright lie, or just a desperate attempt to convince the listener (even when Soah herself is not convinced). I just saw it as human, and something that -- for once -- didn't get a veneer of ahistorical nonsense layered over everything.
Soah's conflict, as it develops, is simply that she's supposed to respect, honor, love her husband... and she doesn't. For as long as she doesn't, therefore, she's not truly a wife. By that logic, to claim any rights -- as a wife -- would be a presumption based on falsehood. This is why she wavers at points during the story, uncertain how to handle an already complex and confusing set of situations (each of which have a lot of backstory that she knows she's missing, which really doesn't help). It's not simply enough to reproduce her mother's behavior towards her father, because she lacks the love that grants her mother the right/ability to act that way. It's also why she so forcefully insists Habaek is falling for her. She can at least insist that he cares for her -- and Habaek's relative silence allows her this leeway.
Now, if this were Japanese manga/novel, I'd expect a couple of storytelling patterns for this otherwise simple storyline. First, it would stay simple: the focus would be solely on Soah and Habaek, and all other characters would exist to either get the two together, or keep them apart. The second is that any extensive backstory would be told in separate stories: a prequel for what happened in the past, and perhaps a side-story or a sequel for handling a relationship between Soah and another character, or Habaek and another, etc. There's a strong focus (again, from what I've read) in the Japanese literary tradition to choose unspoken tension over verbalized conflict, to internalize to a significant degree, and to focus on a single relation-interaction and let other characters fade. (That is, often secondary characters are no more than props or plot-points, if well-written ones sometimes.)
Yoon, I'm finding, is writing with a story-complexity that I've also been finding in the other manhwa I've been reading. Characters are going in every blooming direction, they've all got conflicting motivations (and for some, the main characters' relationship is not just irrelevant, but sometimes dismissed outright), and you can not count the number of subplots on one finger. Bride of the Water God has a dangerous, if ambiguously positive, goddess -- Habaek's mother -- and a tempting but equally ambiguous Emperor, and even the cast staying in the Water Country are not at all perfectly aligned with Habaek. They have their own reasons for doing, wanting, saying, arguing, snarking, and throwing obstacles in the way, and it's not just because the author declared the story needs an obstacle.
In romance, you don't want too much conflict (from what I've gathered) because in a less-capable author's hands, there's the risk that the conflict will override the author's intended goals. The characters will be revealed to be truly incompatible, and damn it, we can't have that, not when the author is determined to get these two together! So conflict gets scooted past, or stomped quickly, or the author's busy inserting eggshells so the characters never get bloody well stoked up enough to actually conflict in any forward manner. But since you can't have a story without conflict at all, romance -- like much of Japanese tradition I've read -- therefore must rely on tension, instead.
That's where the, "oh, does he love me, does he not love me?" angst comes in. Pages and pages, hours upon hours, are wasted in silence as both characters misinterpret the other's silence and/or withdrawal, and it takes forever before someone gets the bright idea to open their mouth and ASK. There's a boatload of suffering in silence going on in the romance world (and if that's our ideal of luuuuurve, no wonder we're a world filled with dysfunctional relationships).
I'm not saying Yoon doesn't work with tension; the story has that, as well... but it's a believable tension in that it's not just Soah sitting around mooning over whether the Water God luuuuurves her forevah and evah. She's trying to work out her new life against the backdrop of her expectations of marriage and being a spouse and having a spouse, and to her credit when she thinks she's come up with a way to resolve the biggest puzzle of all, she doesn't just sit on her hands. She's quite pragmatic about it: if two characters bear the same tattoo, this will answer her question definitively -- given that when she'd asked other characters, their answers conflicted. She doesn't have the 'right' to demand an answer (cf wife's position), so she must be a little devious... and it's in that choice of 'subtle research' that the silence-pattern of tension in romance is retained, but without an authorial-insert forcing the character to be passive at the same time.
That's a rather muddled way to put it, but I'm trying to avoid major spoilers, sheesh! Cut me some slack. Hopefully it'll suffice to say that in most romance plotlines, the tension is maintained only via characters being too stupid to live. The stupidest of all, of course, being the one where someone 'overhears' just enough of a conversation to get the completely wrong impression, makes a whole lot of assumptions, and the other character naturally misinterprets in return, tension, tension, angst, angst, etc, etc, and so on. Soah doesn't really 'overhear' much -- and when she does, she's discovered pretty quickly, enough that she doesn't have time to misinterpret and assume independent of external input. In fact, her wrong assumptions are all based on wrong information -- relayed by the conflicting voices of her Water Country peers, all of whom have murky motivations and long histories she can't begin to grasp (and without a wife's position, doesn't always feel she has the right to ask).
Which means when she's set on a course of action based on her grasp of the situation, I don't see her as too stupid to live. I see her as making what is really a logical and reasonable choice based on what information she could gather; I can hardly expect a character to be omniscient and just know who's telling her the truth and who's lying outright. She trusts what she sees or touches or holds.
The last thing I'll note before (finally) posting this is that one issue in romance plotlines that really bugs the crap out of me is when the male character is All-Alpha All The Time. Ooooooh, that one makes me want to find out whether the circular saw really can cut through two hundred pages of drivel in one go. I don't mean, though, when a character is arrogant or a bastard or rude or domineering; I mean, when a character is an arrogant domineering bastard for no apparent reason.
I'm sure you've read this at some point -- it's done for both genders. The love interest is friendly and welcoming one day, and the next day is cruel for no apparent reason. Much wangsting on the part of our point-of-view character, must misunderstanding, and then later we discover (depending on the author's skill) that the love interest had a reason for that abrupt two-faced behavior. It was a bad day at the office, it was being reminded of a lost love, it was being reminded of a lost train pass, whatever. Point is, it makes no sense from a reader's point of view not because we're not given insight into a character's head but because the author wants some kind of tension to hold the two characters apart, and when both really do 'like-like' each other, and you can't write them not knowing they like-like, then you need to write them not knowing the other one also like-likes.
Boy, oh boy, it's late, because that is one seriously whacked sentence.
But I hope you get the meaning... and that's where I like Yoon's work better than a lot of romances. Soah's baffled over Habaek's behavior, sure, but he's not inconsistent with her: he's always that grumpy and dismissive. Whether he like-likes her, or doesn't, isn't nearly as much of an issue for her as that of whether she like-likes him: because, by her mother's logic, if Soah loves her husband, then what he chooses or does or says is secondary. In some ways, it's a more functional mindset: she can't control what Habaek says or does, but she can at least police her own perspective/mindset.
From Habaek's side, his grumpiness and indifference aren't that hard to figure out, though Soah's given near-blatant explanations early on after her arrival: she is one in a long string of brides, and the only bride Habaek ever loved was his first bride. It's not that he's indifferent so much as he's just tired of the repetition; she's nothing extraordinary to him (and the few hints otherwise are just that). It makes him a believable, and consistent, character: he's not being an asshole because the author demanded that if he's not then the story will wrap up too soon and there's a wordcount on this puppy -- he's being an asshole because he is, to some extent, just plain misanthropic (and I mean that in a very specific human-disliking sense), and to an equal extent because he's not seeing a reason to risk his heart on one more human who'll die in too short a time. They come and go, come and go, and he'll keep to himself and pay this current bride no mind.
Naturally, he's a little surprised when Soah isn't willing to just fade into the background. She has a role to fulfill, damn it -- that ever-present spousal obligation of loving one's spouse, basically -- and she's going to figure out a way to do it, as best she can. She's stubborn like that, and the blunt disconnect in her lies catches him off-guard. She denies she misses her family, but she calls for her mother. He's insulted her, but she claims he's falling for her. He just plain can't figure her out, really... and despite himself, he's maybe, just maybe, a little bit of wanting to.
However, I'll just let my rambling commentary end with that, and conclude:
It's a far more satisfactory storyline than any I've read in a long time -- and I'm including a lot of the Western novels I've read recently in that, too. Certainly it's satisfying enough that I've got the English-language volume one already, planning on the rest, and will probably hurt someone badly if I don't see at least a summary of what's going on in the raws coming out of Korea. Damn it! Knowing simplified Mandarin only gets you so far in this world, because the Korean raws are all Greek to me.
Out so far:
Bride of the Water God, vol 1
Bride of the Water God, vol 2
No indication on Dark Horse's pages when the next volume will be released, and no pre-orders available yet, but Dark Horse is usually pretty consistent/reliable about these things. I'd expect vol3 to probably be available possibly in the next month or two.
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Date: 4 May 2008 02:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 4 May 2008 09:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 4 May 2008 02:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 4 May 2008 09:20 pm (UTC)Well, if you go looking hard enough, there may be scanlations floating around the net. Not that you heard it from me... those scanlations are inconsistent, though (some chapters/sections are untranslated).
However, Dark Horse's translation team is one of the best out there from what I've seen, and they've done a really amazing job. It's not just worth it to support a good story, it's also a translation worth supporting.
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Date: 4 May 2008 09:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 4 May 2008 03:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 4 May 2008 09:24 pm (UTC)Hell, it makes a lot more sense than some stupid character wangsting privately for no reason other than s/he just "doesn't want to have to say it out loud". Soah would definitely say things outloud -- if she can figure out what's actually politic to say.
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Date: 4 May 2008 09:43 pm (UTC)But with Soah, it wasn't written that way: it made sense. Well, it was an alien sort of cultural idea of what females were supposed to be and do, but it at least was understandable, once that was taken into consideration. :)
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Date: 4 May 2008 06:57 pm (UTC)he's being an asshole because he is, to some extent, just plain misanthropic (and I mean that in a very specific human-disliking sense)
A guy I can get behind. I'll have to hope his female counterpart doesn't make me want to drown her in the nearest pond. Or strangle her in her (I'm sure) flowing tresses. *snerk*
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Date: 4 May 2008 09:39 pm (UTC)Soah can be very much her age at times: she gets goofy, she gets angry (her temper matches Habaek's, though she tries harder to stifle it), and it's no surprise given her isolation that she also gets lonely and a little mopey at times. But she's not paralyzed by any of this, which is what I think makes the difference, for me: she identifies a problem, tries to gather information and upon getting conflicting answers, she tries to figure out a way to resolve the question on her own.
Without letting out too many spoilers, Soah's secondary (semi-internal) conflict is driven by the results of her attempt to answer one question. All her misunderstandings and confusion stem, to some degree, to this conclusion she'd drawn. If this were a modern (or even Western) drama, I might be frustrated by her inability to slam someone against a wall and drum the answers out of them, but the historical facet reminds me that socially/politically she's not in a secure position to do that. She's direct, yes, but she's not combative; assertive, not aggressive, I might say.
So there is a point, maybe around the 2nd or 3rd volume, in which I found myself projecting onto the story and saying, "no, you fool, can't you see you're causing more trouble when it'd be solved so easily--" and yes, maybe this would be true. If, that is, Soah were an omniscient mindreader or something: but she's not. Once I remembered that fact, then her actions make perfect sense and that in truth if she were to act "intelligently" that this would be a direct negation of her actions up to that point. She can only go on what she's seen/knows.
I guess it'd be like this: a story set during, hrm, the Crusades. Protagonist Joe tries to figure out a means to cure leprosy, but without the knowledge of viruses versus bacteria, doesn't realize that his experiment was flawed not because his hypothesis was inaccurate but because these unknown variables threw off the test results. So he concludes that leprosy is something that can't be cured by "human" means but goes away on its own, and remains baffled as to why sometimes, some herbal remedies do seem to work. Should he distrust his tests and results, when there's no basis for him to intuit additional variables let alone what they might be? Should I consider him a stupid protagonist for not seeing what -- in the construct of the story -- he couldn't see, or do I respect that he does his best to theorize, and test, to get a concrete answer, despite a lack of the all-reading knowledge I have as observer?
If you can get past that point, then I suspect you may enjoy the story. And, no, neither character really mopes about -- none of them do. They may not always talk about what they're up to, but they're all up to something. I just don't know what, yet.
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Date: 4 May 2008 08:25 pm (UTC)*goes to read*
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Date: 4 May 2008 09:41 pm (UTC)"Story good. Go read."
;-)
Unfortunately, I'd started this post about two weeks ago and didn't have time to complete it... so I'd come back, add more, and then come back and add another point I'd thought of, and next thing you know it's another freaking dissertation. I really gotta stop this, or at least come up with a warning tag that indicates post-length. Guh.
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Date: 4 May 2008 10:19 pm (UTC)Heh heh. Whatever, I don't deny I'm a woman of simple... processes.
next thing you know it's another freaking dissertation.
Dude, it is impressive. I'm always amazed whenever you put out something of this length, effort, and depth. I have a hard time remembering to post in the first place... Actually this inspired me to go back and see if I had any analysis-type posts of my own half-written, which, um, try eleventy-billion. My power of concentration, it not so good.
ANYWAY. The point of that was: warnings? Why warnings? I think the plethora of text showing up on one's screen after a cut tag is sign enough of what type of post it will be. In my case, A SIGN TO REJOICE WOOHOO. God, I love it when people get brainy on me.
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Date: 27 Aug 2008 02:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 27 Aug 2008 11:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 4 May 2008 08:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 4 May 2008 09:44 pm (UTC)I just don't spend money on manga the way I used to -- there are a lot of stories I like, but it's one thing to like them and another to actively go looking for them. This is, possibly, only one of three or four series that I'll go out of my way to find, that I can't forget, and that I even have on for advanced pre-order (a kind of delayed gratification that I find really, really hard).
So, uh, yeah. Rambling. Yup.
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Date: 4 May 2008 10:12 pm (UTC)You've made some solid observations about the differences in Japanese and Korean story-telling. I've noticed the trend of conflicting motivations/multiple subplots in Korean movies, which has always been an appeal for me, but I never quite pinged on why certain kinds of manga leaves me cold until I read your review. Your observations left me a lot to think about in terms of anime and manga.
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Date: 5 May 2008 10:03 am (UTC)Our cultural background will always shine through in even the subtlest of ways, I'm finding.
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Date: 4 May 2008 10:12 pm (UTC)That aside, what you wrote about the differences between Japanese manga and Chinese/Korean manhua/manhwa were very thought-provoking. I've pretty much stuck in Japanese manga, but there was a Chinese manga (based on a Chinese video game) that I disliked for the art and the writing, and reading your post makes me want to go back and see if there are any differences you've mentioned.
I'm spending the few precious months of my summer vacation trying to get a webcomic project started. There is a character in it similar to Soah in that she's given as a bride to someone to seal an alliance with her country, and she spends time getting used to her new life, and this has given me some thought on how to write this (though I might wind up failing miserably with another character, because of her outright anachronistic nature--it's a fantasy, though it does have some historical background to it).
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Date: 5 May 2008 10:08 am (UTC)A lot of that, though, is the focus. I mean, there's a difference between a character who wants to achieve X or Y because it's what she wants... and a character who wants to achieve it because she believes all women should have that option. The first is true of people throughout time, pushing for more; the second is really a luxury mindset you can only have when you have enough of what you've got that you can then turn your mind to what others don't got. It really did take the industrial revolution before a middle class could develop (at least in the West) to allow women the free time to start organizing -- let alone to really start pushing an agenda that all women should have these opportunities.
In the contemporary essays and letters I've read of women from the Renaissance through to the Revolutionary War, even the most amazing women never seemed to think that they should make the least attempt to extend what they've gained to other women. That, I think, is the crucial difference. Maybe it's cultural, maybe it's something else, but that's what I've noted. Which is to say, if you keep the character focused on what she wants -- and stay away from the "all of ___ people should band together!" -- then you'll avoid the worst of the anachronistic nudge-nudge factor.
That's my take on it, at least. YMMV, natch.
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Date: 5 May 2008 02:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 7 May 2008 07:23 pm (UTC)If, however, you do like that mythic element, then maybe you would enjoy Bride -- it certainly has that sensibility of the fairy-tale that exists in such mythic stories. Okay, with a dose of a stubborn, somewhat hotheaded female protagonist and a terribly grumpy water god, but hey. Whoever said I liked my characters sweet and cute was, well, WAY off-base.
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Date: 5 May 2008 08:27 pm (UTC)On topic: These books look wonderful.
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Date: 7 May 2008 07:24 pm (UTC)As for on-topic: yes, I've been quite delighted by the series. It's not really my normal fare (duh) but it's a wonderful read despite that.
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Date: 7 May 2008 03:42 am (UTC)I gave up on Korean, some time ago.
It's not hard to read, or anything... (just plain ol' learning another alphabet, which isn't hard---since I've already learned Russian, Hebrew... etc.) but I dunno. It just never really clicked with me. Rather like Japanese. OMG, I don't like Japanese.
Yay for Simplified Mandarin Chinese!
Everything else makes my head spin! D8
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Date: 7 May 2008 07:27 pm (UTC)I'll stick with Chinese. No verb declension! No plural forms! Hell, even the pronouns are the same (at least in Mandarin). I'm not going near Cantonese though. If five tones is enough to make me bonkers, I don't even want to think about nine tones.
Someday I'll do a full rant on the Alpha Male Syndrome. I'll put it on the list. ;-)
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Date: 8 May 2008 11:41 am (UTC)YEAH! I LOVE Chinese. Why can't all languages be so... so... well laid out, and simple? (Well, this is when it comes to the written form. I'm not too impressed with all the tones in Cantonese, or other dialects either. Gosh, my friend is Hakka... and so of course, she speaks Hakka... so basically I am just really glad she's learning English, because, truthfully-----no. I do NOT want to learn a language with what, 16 tones? No thanks.) Mandarin is the win. Simple as that.
Hehe! Yeah. Keep me posted on that! I definitely will drop by to throw in my two cents worth... or just a lot of nodding in agreement. xD
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Date: 31 May 2008 02:30 pm (UTC)Your post is amazing- it's funny and actually enlightening. I never noticed the difference in storytelling, but I have to say that there are some differences, especially with the Japanese lack of information. Which might explain why I struggle so much with translated versions of Japanese novels.
[Why on earth am I in your LJ, you say? I've been stalking people's LJ- I'm bored, and the movie theater's not open yet.]
Anyways, your review makes me want to try out The Bride of the Water God again... I picked up the book but just forgot about it after finding RAW volume 14 of Let Dai.
Er, kudos for great post. :)