a more lengthy list of korean stories

[kaigou]

Last week or so, I had a post (now withdrawn pending editing for linkage-consumption) that prompted several folks to give me recs on what-to-read and a few on what-to-watch in re Korean history and folklore. Since other folks asked what I've read and watched already, here's a hodge-podge of fiction & non-fiction read and liked. Some of it's thick academic non-fiction, so maneuver at your own speed; the rest are manhwa.

• Nelson, Sarah Milledge: Shamanism and the Origins of States: Spirit, Power, and Gender in East Asia
  
  Occasionally meanders into speculation in re women's roles/influence as a result of shamanism, but for the most part tries to stick to an archeology-based interpretation of shamanism's role in the development of city-based (state) political power. Nelson veers off when it's socio-cultural re-construction, like trying to deduce what influence ancient Korean women had, by studying what imported Confucianism attempted to deny/remove. If nothing else, a good starting point for learning a little about several topics, and then you can jump into something meatier from here.
  
  
• Kendall, Laurel: Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman: Of Tales and the Telling of Tales
  
  This is an in-depth anthro-study of a single person (who also makes appearances in Kendall's other book). Like Mahoney, Kendall sometimes veers into connecting too deeply/personally with her subject... but that's not something that bothers me (then again, I'm also not an academic in this field, so I may be less critical). What I found interesting are the extended autobiographical passages, because they're not just one person's history of life before and during the Japanese Occupation, the Korean War, and the aftermath, but rife with little stories.
  
  
• Kendall, Laurel: Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life
  
  I love the quiet humor in the title, and it's reflected in the women interviewed in the book, too. A rather wry, if vibrant and steadfast, perspective from the interviewees about their roles and rights in modern Korean culture -- ritualistic as well as public, private, political. Again, lots of interviews and notes so also a good -- if thickly academic -- source for older/surviving little stories.
  
  
• Kim, Bongryol: The Secret Spirit of Korean Architecture
  
  Note: I'm fairly certain the professor's surname is Kim (as Bongryol looks like a personal name, and Korea is like China when it comes to limited common surnames), but the book's cover, and the Amazon listing, present the author's name in Asian order (surname+personal). Just FYI, if you go looking, because the author might be listed as "Bongryol, Kim" if whomever did the data entry wasn't aware of the flip.
  
  Okay, this one you might skip if you're not into the concept of ritualistic or ritualized space... but it's pretty amazing if you have even the least bit of interest. Most architecture books give you shots of interiors, maybe a few establishing exterior shots, and at most an introductory paragraph with the glossiest of histories. Professor Kim is a professor of architecture, but prior to his academic time, he was a real-live-architect who designed stuff for real-live-people! (And if you know much about academic architecture, you'd be aware this isn't really that common.) But it puts Professor Kim in a rarefied group of architects who can write not just about what curiosities a building has, but about the experience of the space, and a design's affects upon people, and even the political environments that influenced a building's adaptations or continued use.
  
  Which means, basically, that it's not a book about architecture so much as it is a book about experiencing these specific instances of historical (mostly political/public) architecture. That means a whole lot of history, too, because the interpretation and value of space and the voids between established spaces is something that's shifted over time... and so far, it's clear Professor Kim doesn't stop at the introductory paragraph, but goes into depth on what that "over time" encapsulates.
  
  Sigh. It's a gorgeous book, with floorplans and diagrams, even!, but it makes me a little sad that there's no indication Professor Kim lectures in English. On the other hand, this is his first book translated into English, so I'm hoping the publisher plans to bring out the next two in the series.
  
  (Eh, also note: 'new' copies will run you upwards of 75USD, and used copies run even higher... but you can get a reasonably-priced copy directly from the publisher, for about 33USD. Honestly, when I ordered, I was wondering if I was only going to get the dustjacket, seeing how it was only a quarter or so of everyone else's prices. But, nope, it's the entire book in pristine condition. Order from publisher! Money goes to author!)
  
  
• Ilyon: Samguk Yusa -- recommended by troisroyaumes, who said: "It tells the mythology/folklore of the Three Kingdoms period (Silla, Baekje, Goguryeo)... Plus, it has most of what we know about Queen Seondeok and the other queens of Silla." I'd add that it's easily available on US-Amazon, but it's dense reading if you don't already have some basic idea of Korean history and chronology. The translation may be solid, but it really could use some clarification/outlining for the sake of unfamiliar readers, or at least short introductions to give a sense of place/time to each section. What's there is, well, scanty.
  
  It doesn't help that it looks like it was printed by Lulu, and that's actually a bit of an insult to Lulu's quality. The book desperately needs a copy-editor and a type-setter. At minimum, I'd've appreciated an actual index or table of contents -- what's the point of having chapters (and even mentioning them in your scanty introduction) if you never designate anywhere what the start/stop or subject matter is of each chapter? If you can overlook those presentation-issues and don't mind running off to other history books to regain your frame of reference for stories, it's a worthwhile and informative read.
  
  
• Lee, Ki-baik: A New History of Korea -- another from troisroyaumes, who said: "I can't comment on whether this is necessarily the best-written/most comprehensive history book, but it's translated from a book by a well-known Korean historian, and it's always worth reading something that's not from an outsider perspective." This one is still hanging out somewhere in the postal system, so no comments from me, yet.
  
  
• Two other history recs from troisroyaumes are the english translations of Yi Sunsin's diary, Nanjung Ilgi, and The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyeong. Unfortunately, I swear these must be from academic publishers (or they assume you have to be really hardcore to want a copy), because the former's used prices start at 90USD (and 300USD for 'collectible), and the latter starts -- new! -- at 118USD. That's highway robbery -- or library-robbery -- if you ask me... and puts both way out of my range when it comes to my budget for entertainment-reading. Still waiting to find out if the local university has copies, in which case I'll bribe CP to check them out for me.

That's the academic/historical... and this next chunk are the manhwa. I should probably add here (before you get into the descriptions) that I tend to distinguish between 'cross-dressing' -- where one wears clothes of the opposite sex but does not necessarily internally adopt an identity of the opposite sex -- and 'genderbender' -- where the issue is focused more on the character's internal sex/gender identity, and simple clothes-wearing is either marginally superfluous or treated as increasing the ambiguity.

When I've come across it in (Japanese) manga, the former is often used for humor purposes and the latter signifies a deeper issue, ie Yuki badgered into wearing a girl's dress in Fruits Basket versus Ritsu's genderbending in the same manga. That said, the latter -- actual consideration within the text of what it means to "be female" versus "be male", and the social and personal implications of changing that role (or having an alternate role foisted upon you) -- is not something I've found a lot of, in manga. Overall, the predominant approach in manga seems to be to use cross-dressing as humor (especially when it's a male character dressing in female clothing) or as a plot-point in girl's romance, where the girls dresses as a boy for the purpose of entering boy-exclusive territory, as the only way to access the object of her unrequited love.

Even in manga that ostensibly give the girl some 'other' reason for cross-dressing (ie Boku ni Natta Watashi), she never seems to lose her identity as 'a girl', maintaining girl-associated interests/reactions despite her outward appearance. About the closest most of the manga storylines will get is for the girl to feel alienated from her girl-ness because of the male-styled treatment she gets, but even that usually pivots on the disappointment that her love-object doesn't 'see' her as a girl (view her as attractive). The one place cross-dressing starts to verge into genderbending is when the mangaka pushes the tension harder -- that access to the boys-only environment requires 'dressing like a boy' but that the very fact of 'dressing like a boy' automatically disqualifies the girl-character from being an object of attraction. (The rare times there's attraction towards the cross-dressing girl, it's treated as a kind of odd joke, and mostly upon the male student expressing such apparently 'gay' tendencies.) Even with that tension present, it's still true that generally what drives that internal conflict is that the girl's primary motivation is to attract, and obtain, the male gaze.

The shorter version of the following manga: the Korean manhwa I've found -- even in a rudimentary scan for the biggest/most-popular titles (well, popular as judged by 'there are scanlation groups willing to put in the effort to get, translate, clean, typeset, and distribute') -- are much closer to genderbenders than simple dress-as-a-boy stories.

One other note: I've been finding there's a common style to manhwa, one that I find visually rather fussy. It reminds me of the kind of over-attention to detail style you find in stereotypical girl's drawings of early adolescence: very particular lines, drawn without boldness but also without a sense of sketching. Hard to describe, but Bride of the Water God is a less egregious example; The Summit and most of Han's works are more extreme examples. Bodies tend towards elongated but angular shoulders and sharp chins, with hands and feet often proportionally larger than you'd expect. It's almost an unintentional deformation, and the fussiness isn't helped by lips, eyes, and hair getting a lot of attention. When I refer to "common manhwa visual style", this detail-oriented fussy style is what I mean.

That said, if you can learn to look past that visual style -- or it doesn't bother you in the first place -- these stories might appeal to you, or at least interest you.

• Lee, Young Ran: Click [complete]
  
  This is not your average crossdressing storyline. For that matter, it's not even your average genderbending storyline, because it actually asks -- although it doesn't necessarily definitively answer -- what it means to "be male", what it means to "be female", and whether who you are, identity-wise, is altered by your sex, or if it's your gender that shifts to mesh with your internal/private identity.
  
  The premise is one I'm sure I've seen in manga: Joonha, unbeknownst to him, has inherited a genetic condition whereupon, in adolescence, he'll switch sex. It's not unlike the body-switch trope you'll see in manga (and Hollywood movies), and Joonha's characterization reinforces this expectation: when we first meet him, it takes barely a page and it's pretty clear he's a self-centered, conceited, arrogant, spoiled, chauvinist bastard of the first degree. I'm not exaggerating, either; I've met plenty of the above but none that incorporate all the features of every male chauvinist pig in a single fictional package. That makes Joonha rife for the "hey! now you're a girl!" trope... and if this were Hollywood, I'd expect at the end that he'd return to boyhood with a Better Appreciation for the opposite sex, thank you, after-school-special.
  
  Except he doesn't. What's set up as though it'll be a humorous treatment of Joonha having to swallow his comeuppance after sixteen years of ridiculing and dismissing girls... turns serious, very quickly. Because Joonha is never turning back, and this effectively makes him -- and what he goes through is very similar, I'd expect -- a child raised as one sex, who discovers at adolescence that his physical/genetic sex is not the same as how he was raised. Rather than a situation where the child "feels" himself a girl, despite physical presentation (or was surgically altered to 'choose' a sex after birth, and the doctors 'chose' wrong) -- in this case, Joonha "feels" himself a boy, but is undeniably, inextricably, now a girl.
  
  It's eight volumes, and it pulls no punches. Joonha attempts to 'become' a girl, while feeling no 'inward' change (in terms of identity), and struggling therefore with just what -- other than the physical -- defines him as one or the other. Not to mention, of course, the damage to his self-esteem and self-image not just by being a girl, but by being something that he'd previously dismissed as expendable and useless. While he never (that I recall) comes outright and amends his former opinions about women -- in fact, a lot of his interactions with women reinforce his notion that women are obsessed about appearance, flighty, unambitious, and generally shallow -- he does have to question whether he is also like that, due to his (new) sex. His preconceptions also become his stumbling block in that if he can't get past the idea that women shouldn't be ambitious ("be graceful and wait", as the example-image has, above), then this means he, too, must also discard his ambitions. In other words, his change-of-sex renders him hypocritical -- something he's aware of and disgusted by, in himself -- and a lot of the story focuses on his struggle to gain the maturity he needs to reconcile and change.
  
  There's his difficulty with a former crush, who feels betrayed to discover Joonha is a girl (and the retconning-implication that Joonha in fact was only cross-dressing for the first sixteen years of his/her life, as if playing a joke on his/her peers); there's his closest childhood friend, who really is Joonha's soul-mate, and a rough gang-leader who turns out to be something else entirely, and while baffled by Joonha, is also attracted. Joonha, meanwhile, swings from dressing-as-a-girl to dressing-as-a-boy and is frequently mistaken for one while dressed as the other (and vice versa), sometimes dancing around and sometimes tackling head-on the questions of what this means in terms of who-he/she-is, in terms of continuity, personality, identity, sex, and gender.
  
  Also, expect death-related angst. It's a happy ending, manhwa-style. Well, it's actually a happier-than-usual ending, seeing how the death-related angst is somewhat minimal. Comparatively. And no hot pokers or sudden and inexplicable insanity. Unless you count Joonha himself.
  
  
• Han, Yu-rang: Boy of the Female Wolf [ongoing]
  
  
• Han, Yu-rang: Love in the Mask [ongoing]
  
  
• Han, Yu-rang: My Boyfriend is a Vampire [ongoing]
  
  In the first story, Eun-soo had a chip on her shoulder as a girl (abandoned by her mother, left to live with her grandmother), and that chip developed into excellent fighting skills and a disinterest in being seen as a girl. She dresses like a boy, refers to herself with masculine terms/slang, and uses masculine-style nicknames for her male classmates (hyung instead of oppa, for instance). She considers herself -- and expresses it loudly -- the best-looking 'guy' among her friends, and has no problem attracting, and cultivating, fangirls. Then her grandmother dies, and she has to move to Seoul to live with her mother and her step-father. Naturally, hijinks ensue, because now she's surrounded by people who (excepting her step-brother) don't realize she's biologically a girl. The one time she discusses her boy-girl status with another girl, her only given reason for dressing/acting like a boy is that it's "more comfortable". It's not a result of trauma, or even because she hates herself or her body; she's just more comfortable interacting with the world with a boy's freedom. (This story is ongoing, so no idea yet whether it turns sharply heteronormative. It might, it might not.)
  
  The second, Love in the Mask, approaches gender as something that can be constructed -- in this case, the stakes are life-or-death high enough to make it worth the effort. Hyun-bin was a street rat who called herself by a boy's name as a way to stave off unwanted attention. When her little brother dies, she's taken in by suit-wearing men who are looking for a little boy of about her age... and it turns out the purpose is to raise that little boy as a bodyguard for the grand-daughter of a near-mafioso CEO/bigwig.
  
  Basically, Hyun-bin -- at the age of maybe five -- is facing being thrown back on the streets in the dead of winter, solely because of her sex. That's the choice: be a believable boy, or die as a useless girl. When the CEO decides to keep her on -- with requirement that she continue to hide her true sex, and 'be a boy' and bodyguard -- it's with the ongoing, sometimes stated baldly, expectation that her true sex/gender be secret. Her life is literally on the line, and if that means burying her identity, it's her choice of the lesser of two evils.
  
  Like Joonha (and unlike Eun-soo, for the most part), Hyun-bin grapples with what seems to be two conflicting 'parts' of her: the feminine and the masculine. Add in a classmate's discovery of her true sex, another classmate's baffled but growing interest, her lifelong charge's crush, and it's a love polygon, with genderbending. What makes it work is that the stakes are high enough to warrant Hyun-bin's refusal to let anyone know, and her fear when one person does find out. (It's at 17 volumes and still on-going, and the plot is only getting thicker. Han doesn't go quite as harsh as Soo-Yeon Woon did with Let Dai, but she gives it a fair shot, considering it's classed as girl's romance.)
  
  The last is... well, it's genderbending ramped up. It feels like it's riffing off Vampire Knight, in the 'vampires go to school and have lots of politics and competition for coolness' way, but not so much bending as outright flipping. Basically, high school student so pretty he's often mistaken for a girl (and comes out with the fists swinging at anyone who calls him or treats him like a girl) is bitten by a vampire. And wakes up... as a girl.
  
  What's odd is that at certain, sometimes unexpected, points, he switches back to being a boy. (There may be a consistent trigger, but the story only has thirteen chapters scanlated so far, so not enough text to deduce any patterns... but if Han's other stories are any indication, expect at least ten volumes, possibly more.) So basically, you have a character who's trying to maintain his identity despite near-regular reversal of his physical sex.
  
  Sometimes it's humorous due to his reaction, sometimes the humor is situational, like his penchant for an immediate violent reaction if he's treated like a girl... and the full-stop of realizing that suddenly, he really is a girl again. (And the full-start when later he realizes he's a boy again.) Since this is Han, I expect plenty of complications, but so far the overall tone has Love in the Mask's gang/corporate political undertones, but Boy of the Female Wolf's general light-heartedness.
  
  One note about Han: the drawing style is very reminiscent of late 80's Japanese shoujo, with the multiple light-points drawn as stars in the immense irises of characters both male and female. If you stop and pay attention to the affectation, it may drive you bonkers. If you can look past the overall fussiness of the style, and the fact that the author-illustrator's style is stiff and sometimes awkward in terms of drawing action or attempting (and failing) on an odd angle, then the first two stories are definitely worth it, and the third is looking to be enjoyable crack. But the author will never be a Hiroaki Samura (Blade of the Immortal) and frankly, we'll be lucky if she ever reaches Eun Young Lee's level of workmanlike fight-scene illustrations. Then again, at least Han's fight scenes are easy to follow, unlike some *cough*Katsura*cough*Hoshino*cough* people.

Since those are all shoujo titles (what is 'shoujo' in Korean?), have some boys-love to spice things up. All three works are completed and licensed by NetComics -- you can read them online for small subscription fee per chapter (like a quarter a chapter, IIRC), or get them in hard-copy at your local bookstore.

• Woon, Soo-yeon: Let Dai
  
  Mild spoiler: the protagonists do survive the story. Barely. Aaaaaand that's about the happy ending you get, but after fifteen volumes of major tragic soul-sucking (but so very very good) angst, you take that Korean-style happy ending and you are THANKFUL for it. (It's shonen-ai, but I'd rate the story as PG, not even PG-13 but only in terms of sexual content -- it's everything else in the story that deserves a severe R-rating.) Note: the art style is not the common manhwa style, but tending towards lighter sketch-like lines. It fits the story perfectly.
  
  
• Yoo, Hajin: Totally Captivated
  
  Pure and total, unadulterated (but still PG-13 censored) gangster-land bad-boy-meets-worse pretty-boy crack. Absolutely crack, from start to finish. (The story also knows it's crack, and it LIKES IT -- do not expect Shakespeare. Unless your version of Shakespeare involves haute couture, random extreme violence, and pretty boys being molested on name-brand sofas.)
  
  
• Na, Yeri: U Don't Know Me
  
  This one doesn't really stand out for having an original story -- boy falls in love with best friend, tries to hide it, is found out by best friend who's fallen in love with him right back, tru wuv ensues. It has a slight detour mid-story that keeps it from being totally pat, but it's not like even that detour is all that unique. It's more of a footnote to the main story, but it's a good example of what I've found a great deal more in manhwa than manga: the family's reaction. I've been finding that parents -- as shown in manhwa -- are active in the lives of the adolescent-protagonists, or at the very least, still alive. The dead/missing-parent syndrome is less common in manhwa, and even when the parents are absent, there's often still indication the parents think of, or care for, the child.

A last note about comparing manhwa to manga: in manhwa, city-kids are more likely to be shown as mini-gangsters, when you get right down to it. They form gangs, range the hallways, have mid-class fights (against which all teachers are apparently rendered utterly useless to stop any of it), break up class so everyone can rush out to observe a hallway or blacktop fight, and generally rule the school in a very literal way. (Plus, if a character is male and the scion of a chaebol, he's automatically a gangster of the top degree, with fighting skills to go along with it. It's like lower/middle class kids don't get to run gangs, and aren't even all that big on being in gangs. Working class = respectable, average kid; upper class = total spoiled, conceited, arrogant hellion. It's not just a trope anymore, it's a full-blown character template, it seems.)

Honestly, if you assumed pop culture always told the truth, you'd have to conclude that Seoul must be one scary place to send your kids to school.

I'll continue on with historical manhwa & dramas in a follow-up post.