RAGE

Compared to many Great and Important, not to mention Tragic and Depressing things there are to rage/fret about today, this is going to seem incredibly puny and unimportant. But the rage, it is real.
Recap of the circumstances: I go to the grocery store and buy some packaged salad (did I hear mentions of arugula-eating liberals?). I go to the Chain Bookstore in the strip mall (highfalutin name aside, it is clearly a strip mall) and chance upon volume 4 of One Thousand and One Nights, in manhwa form (the Korean rendition of the compound manga, or manhua).
[Spoilers ahead.]
Anyway, this is a pretty well-done piece of work, in terms of storytelling, art, and translation. The major innovation here is that the Scherezad of familiar lore is now a young (male) scholar named Sehara who stands in for his sister's draft slot into the savage, tormented, positively Heathcliffian Sultan's harem (Sultan is depicted in image above). Yes. A cute lad is drafted into this man's harem. So when I say there are some man-love undertones here, no one should be surprised. And for your information , no, that is not the sole factor motivating my sustained readership. The stories are highly and darkly dramatic (which is to say, verging on silly) in the mode of Yuki Kaoru, redoubtable authoress of works that inspire youth to don black wings and white face paint and lie around in puddles of rose petals or jungles of bandages mooning about death and incest and things of that nature.



[Above: Angel Sanctuary, representative work of Yuki-sensei. Below: Our young, sprightly protagonist.]

In this installment, we get more backstory about just why Insane Sultan is in fact Insane, hates women, pokes their eyes out/murders them, etc. Of course the cause (apart from infidelity by his stepmother/wife, which is understandably traumatic) is his deceased mother, who had an affair and was beheaded by her irate husband before the very eyes of her soon-to-be-wacko child. This all comes out, complete with manful tearshed, after our young scholar tells a depressing revision of a classical trope, "The Woodsman and the Angel." The usual rendition has a kindly woodsman chancing upon a pool in which angels come down from the celestial realms to take baths (must be good water in that pool), meets one, marries her, has two children with her, and then defends her from heavenly authoritarianism, often to bittersweet effect. (The myth behind Chinese Valentine's Day on the 7th day of the 7th lunar month is similar.)

Sehara, however, has done his research, and delivers only straight facts. In his less pleasant version, the angel is a noblewoman on the eve of her wedding to her beloved and the woodsman a rapist who is devoted to her and the two kids she helps him raise, but also beats her and refuses for years to give herb ack the clothes he stole from her. On one of his birthdays the older child, from whose perspective the events are more or less recounted, meets a strange, very handsome man in the market who wears the same necklace he's got around his own neck. From there things get ugly quick: hands torn off in bear-traps, strangling, axes in the back, terrified children, et al. Bad end: dead adults, crying children, mother rises to the heavens in angel(?) form.
Terrifying, but logical and fairly nuanced revision (I'm simplifying here. Plus, the ambiguities of the visual medium would require quite a lot more space to translate).

What's irritating, though, is the author's disclaimer at the end of the volume, a mere page or two after he's got Sehara and Traumatized Sultan embracing, the latter crying his face off. Noting that he had been called a feminist after the book was published, he declares that he is not, and that though he likes "equality for women, the push for it has gone too far. Men and women should not fight!" There's also some bits about how God made men and women to lurrrrve each other and, finally, how he approves of Gender Studies over Women's Studies (though he said Feminist Studies, I believe, which I am not sure is the same thing at all), but that was because the problem should be looked at in a "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" way. What?
I thought the author was female, but as it seems it is a gentleman. This still doesn't change the interesting and ragey implications of disavowing one's feminism. I think Amanda at Pandagon sums it up well in this post: "Much of the mainstream media appears to think a feminist is any woman who have ever been paid to do work. This is in contrast to what feminists think a feminist is, as well as the dictionary, which is someone---male or female---who supports women’s full equality."

I've always had what I've felt to be an unfounded view that Koreans are more anti-feminist and anti-LGBT than the denizens of Greater China and Japan (though perhaps from certain perspectives all three might seem pretty bad). But an environment in which deep Protestantism, post-military-dictatorship-technocapital glitz, sometimes jingoistic nationalism, and sustained reverence for Confucian principle (whichever are meant by that phrase) run together, there realy does seem to be rather little space for feminism. And if the writer of a popular manga in the 2000s who depicts possibly--just maybe--feminist themes, then he has to disclaim his own work? That certainly doesn't make Korea's case for progressive views on gender and sexuality.