Shoutoku: The Man, The Myth, The...Angst?

Who doesn't like some déshabillé period costume ?

Just finished reading Yamagishi Ryouko's epic Hi no izuru tokoro no tenshi [『日の出ずる処の天子』Ruler of the Land of the Rising Sun], which ran from 1980 to 1984. In a sentence, the 10-volume (in Chinese translation; I believe the bunko version in Japanese is 7-8 volumes total) was

REVISIONIST JAPANESE HISTORY, JERRY SPRINGER STYLE.

Maybe that makes the book sound unpalatable to some readers, but believe me when I say that this is not "so horrible it's good." It's so good it's horrifying. At least, enough people thought so that the work won a Kondansha Manga Award in 1983.

First, the art: Yamagishi Ryouko is famed as one of the pioneering female mangaka who jump-started the shoujo manga or "girls' comics" movement--the so-called "Year-24 Group" (二十四年組), or "Forty-niners," who were born in 1949 and were among the first women to enter the Japanese comics-making world. Most of this group's work would thus be considered rather old-school by the aesthetic terms of modern manga. Take this page from Kaze to ki no uta, by Yamagishi's fellow Year-24er Takemiya Keiko:
Major characteristics of classic shoujo from authors in this generation include stylized, glamorous-looking protagonists, cartoony cariactures in the supporting cast, an unironic abundance of flowers, pointillist bubbles, and sparklies, and an earnest deployment of coventions such as vertical lines on the face, which denote shock and/or fear. No CG technology here, folks--all the toner and ink carefully hand-applied. Most of the lines are highly organic and finished, in contrast to some of today's authors, who may strive for a "rougher" or "simpler" look. On top of all this, Yamagishi demonstrated a decided fondness for period costume and, to a lesser extent, other material bits of history (her interiors never as dense as Takemiya's, nor her page layouts as complex and thickly packed). To wit, a page from Hi no izuru:
Now that the aesthetic context is gotten out of the way, onto the juicy part. The story concerns the exploits of young Prince Shoutoku [CE 574-622], known also as Prince Umayado [厩戸]. As most know him, Shoutoku was a promulgator of Chinese culture--Buddhism and Confucian values*--as exemplified in his patronage of temples: Shitennoji, and the magnificent Houryuuji. The "Seventeen-Article Constitution" that Wikipedia so helpfully calls "one of the earliest moral dictatorial documents in history" is generally attributed to him, as well. In case you, hypothetical reader, cares, the moral injunctions were mostly pretty "duh": obeying imperial commands, not rushing to decisions by one's lonesome, etc. Awesomely, until the 1890 Meiji constitution came into effect, this document was completely valid. Even today, the Japanese constitution does not technically override it.*

Anyway, Shou-chan is a very respected figure, indeed almost a saintly one, though apparently some have disputed his existence (not to mention the attributions of various things to him). Even so, he was on Japanese currency until 1984:

Don't make me get all moralistic on your a$$, yo.

Now, go and look at that pretty picture at the beginning again. Yep. Yamagishi intended it to be the same man. The flowers+hair loops visualization has apparently stuck; here's a cover from Ikeda Ryoko's Prince Shoutoku manga, which was published about a decade later [you betcha there have been some debates about Ikeda plagiarizing from Yamagishi]:

Mmm, beefy.

Anyway, here we've got a most efflorescent coiffureal delicious case of historifandom--if the pictures don't do enough to convince you, then the DRAMA better. Not to spoil anybody [warning, spoilers imminent], but if the following plot elements don't reek of TEH DRAMUS characteristic of (histori)fandom, I'm not sure what will:

-Countless plots to horribly murder various important people, quite a few of which succeed

-Quasi-incestuous marriages between step-parents and -children
-Actual incest [which, by the way, the reader sees from a mile away but is like unto a runaway locomotive in its relentless momentum], consummated via deceitful trickery
-Illegitimate children who represent about 80% of the births in the book, the most plot-central of which result from suspiciously endogamous sex
-Nonconsensual sexual acts
-Dream [GHEI] sex
-General homoerotics, riddled with more angst and Unresolved Sexual Tension than a gay Harry Potter "deathfic" and all kinds of gender issues
-Issues of which are mostly manifest in Shoutoku's repeated and highly successful cross-dressing
-Suicidal thoughts and attempts so far up the frigging wazoo that it's probably come out on the other end
-Trippy-as-hell and very distressing dreams, visions, out-of-body experiences, ESP, telekinesis, telepathy...Shoutoku will kill you with his mind

In this delightful melting-pot of freakishness, Yamagishi mixed a beautiful, cold, traumatized Prince Umayado, his [very obvious] love interest Soga no Emishi, various historically recorded folks from the Soga clan, the imperial line, and what feels like everywhere else. The thing is over two thousand pages long, so here I'll just discuss why I think this particular bit of revision is so engrossing quickly.

1. Yamagishi plotted her political and romantic intrigues with great mastery: gripping, intense, but not quite so over the top that one lost a deep engagement with the story. Mostly, she achieved this by plumbing the vast casts' psychologies with consistent dexterity. Emishi isn't just a stupid 6th-century frat boy, though that could have been his lot. His ultimate rejection of Umayado is so devastating because the reader believes that, for one, it might not have been that way "if only...", and for another, Yamagishi gives us so much insight into the human torments of the characters that we feel all the proper mono-no-aware catharsis.

2. The art feels sometimes archaic and a little stiff, but there's something about classic manga's willingness to conventialize and stylize that reveals the medium's parity to other highly formulaic yet nonetheless engaging visual genera, i.e. noh or Peking opera. It's a little silly when Umayado can't seem to put his hand on anything without making it look as delicate as possible, but then again, arguably that's part of manga's heritage from more traditional Japanese art. Where she needs it, Yamagishi makes use of the image's power to "tell all."

In short, the images and words together convey an immense, realistically textured emotional universe for not just the protagonists, but all the major characters. There are not too many absolutes in Yamagishi's world. Just about everyone is capable of making the reader groan in frustration, recoil in horror, or smile.

3. Also importantly, the manga isn't shy about its facts. The machinations of Soga no Umako, Emishi's doggedly conventional father, and virtually all of the characters, are situated with what was a surely considerable amount of research. The politics of 6th-century Japan are not just about sleeping with sisters and cross-dressing to impress, but related to international history: the Paekche-Koguryo-Silla standoff on the Korean peninsula, for instance, is of great import to the cast--and even if the reader didn't have any clue about the situation, its immediacy in the story. On the mainland, the Sui dynasty exterminates the Chen and unites a huge swathe of formerly divided territory. And, of course, the title takes its title from the famous missive Shoutoku wrote to the Sui emperor in 607: "From the ruler of the land of the rising sun, to the ruler of the land of the setting sun, greetings...."

To draw hundred of pages in quest of the legendary creature who wrote those haughty words and coined the phrase "Nihon" is impressive enough, but to give these long-dead folks, often without much more than a name, the dimensionality of people trying to cope with their situations, their emotions, their pasts, is truly the most admirable point of good history as well as good historical fiction. Sometimes the boundary isn't so clear, and verification almost seems unimportant. Yamagishi's Shoutoku, with his angelically beautiful androgyny, a boy by turns cruel, vulnerable, brilliant, loveable, domineering, and passionate, is nothing like the moralizing gentleman with a respectable beard whose portrait is printed in history books. But his divergence from that man fails to signify after we pass through the landscape that Yamagishi drew for him. That's the sign of the best kind of historifandom: with enough power that it can stand alongside what is conventionally accepted as "reality," in a strange and attractive symbiosis.

Basically, if you have time to spare and would like to spend it marathoning through an epic of some kind, Hi no izuru is an excellent choice. Have another nice thing to look at, to whet your appetite:

From left to right: Prince Umayado, Futsuhime, Emishi, and his sister Tojikome. Aka Emishi and his harem. Damn frat boys with Mickey Mouse hair always get the fun.

*Yeah, they didn't really have Buddhism in Japan back then. Crazy, huh? They even had a war over it. They didn't even have horses in Yamato until the late 4th century CE. And there was even a time...(hushed voice) when Japan didn't have domesticated rice. That's right. NO SUSHI. It must have been terrible.
**Oh Wikipedia, educational as always.

It's been too long...

...since I've written about sexy things!

One particular component of late imperial notions of gender and sexuality that fascinates me is that of gender transformation: in other words, how and why people (and sometimes nonhumans) move from one apparent gender to another, and what happens to them afterward. Today, I'll present a couple of translations of "weird tales" relating to this subject; afterward, I'll offer some thoughts.

As an undergrad, I wrote on the Zi bu yu [What Confucius did not Speak Of*], a collection of tales by the gentleman-poet Yuan Mei that first circulated in the 1780s. My favorite of the tales was "False Woman," alternately translatable as "Woman-Pretender."** A translation:

False Woman
A beautiful man by the surname of Hong, from Guiyan County [NB: In modern Hunan province], pretended to be a seamstress and traveled in the provinces of Hubei and Guizhou as a itinerant embroidery teacher for women. A licentiate scholar in Changsha named Li invited Hong to embroider, and then tried to seduce him. Hong told him the truth [about his sex]. Li laughed, saying, "If you really are a man, even better! I've always thought it stupid that one of the emperors of the Northen Wei [4th-6th century CE], when he called two beautiful nuns who served at his mother's side for his pleasures, found out that they were men and executed them. What an idiot that Wei lord was! Why didn't he just make them his male favorites, to have them at his pleasure while not hurting his mother's feelings?" Hong eagerly consented after this speech, and Li loved him well.

Some years later, Hong was in the Jiangxia region [in SE modern Hubei] when a man named Du also tried to seduce him. Hong tried to do with Du as he'd done with Li, but alas, the man was not one who knew the way of things, and took Hong to court. Deported back home to Guiyang, Hong was examined by the Provincial Judge: his voice was delicate and soft, his throat lacked an Adam's apple, his hair was so long that it touched the floor, his skin was like jade, and his waist was just one foot and three inches around. Yet his privates were as thick and heavy as a large, fresh mushroom. He said that he'd been an orphan since childhood and had been taken in by a widowed neighbor, with whom he later carried on a liaison. He grew out his hair and bound his feet, calling himself a woman. When his adopted mother died, he became an embroidery teacher; he left his adopted household at seventeen and was now twenty-seven, having encountered innumerable women in a decade. The Judge asked for the women's names, but Hong replied, "Isn't it enough that I'll be punished? Why must you injure those ladies?" Torture was applied, and he could not help but give up a few names. The Governor wanted to sentence him to distant exile [a codified punishment for fairly serious crimes, at distances of, say, 2000 or 3000 li, or about 660 to 1000 miles], but the Provincial Judge, calling Hong a "demon-person," insisted that he be beheaded. The sentence was approved.

The day before his death, Hong said to one of his guards, "I die without regrets, having enjoyed so much of the forbidden pleasures of this world! And that Judge will not be spared, either. I only had consensual affairs; keeping my hair long and seducing people are offenses that don't warrant execution under the law. Those affairs I had with women were all secret things that could be covered up--why did he force me to confess and embarrass them? They had to be called in and beaten; the snowy, jadelike skin of the daughters of rich men in tens of town and counties had to suffer the red sticks, for what?" The next day, he was executed in the market square. Before he died, Hong pointed at the spot where he knelt and said, "Three years hence, the man who tried me will be here, too." Indeed, three years later the Judge was executed for corruption, and all were astounded.

In a sort of postscript, Yuan Mei wonders that this story is similar to that of Sang Chong, a "demon-person" from the Jiajing period of the Ming dynasty. Judith Zeitlin's Historian of the Strange discusses the Sang Chong figure, tracing him to another collection of "strange tales," the Geng Si Bian [庚巳編] by Lu Can,*** published in the late 16th century. This "demon-person" story is a lot nastier than the exploits of our brave pretty-man hero Hong, though--get ready to cringe much harder:

The Legal Case of the Person-Demon
The Central Censorate views reports of men masquerading as women to commit evil deeds as abnormal events. A report from Jinzhou county in Zhending prefecture in Zhili province [modern Hebei] runs: criminal Sang Chong confessed that he is the nephew of Li Dagang, part of a military-affiliated household in Shanxi province, Taiyuan prefecture. As a child, Sang was sold to a man named Sang Mao of the neighboring county as an adopted son. During the first year of the Chenghua reign [1465], he heard that a man named Gu Cai, from Shanyin county in Datong prefecture, had masqueraded as a woman and taught handicrafts to women while secretly sleeping with them for eighteen years without being caught. Sang Chong decided he wanted to emulate Gu, and traveled to take Gu as his master. He trimmed his brows and face, arranged his hair into three parts and put on a hairpiece to pass himself as a woman. He learned, too, how to cut and trace patterns, sew and embroider shoe uppers, cooking and other such occupations. Afterward, Sang gratefully left for home.

Thereafter, men from nearby counties [omitting some details of proper names for sake of brevity] came to visit Sang and ask him to teach them, as well. Sang told them all, "When you go to people's homes, enter and leave carefully. If something happens, don't say a thing about me." So they each went their ways.

In the third month of the third year of the Chenghua reign, Sang had been away from home for ten years, doing nothing but corrupting people. He'd been through forty-five prefectures and counties, and seventy-eight towns and villages. Everywhere he went, he carefully sought word of pretty girls of good family, and then called himself a runaway beggar-wife, first moving into a poor household nearby to help with chores. In a few days, Sang would then make up pretenses to enter the girl's chambers to teach her womanly crafts. At night, he would retire with her, cajoling and joking with her while having his stealthy way. If she were upright and resisted, he would wait until very late and use a little trick. He carried with him an egg, the white of which he removed; also seven peaches, and seven sticks of willow, all of which he burned to ashes. He smashed a new needle with an iron hammer, and adding a mouthful of liquor to all this, concocted a drug, which he then sprayed onto the girl while silently chanting a sleeping-spell. The girl would then be paralyzed and unable to speak. After having his evil way with her, Sang would incant the release spell. Upon waking, if the girl stridently rebuffed him, Sang would plead and wheedle until the girl suffered in silence.

After three or five days of living in one spot, he feared discovery, and would move to a new place. He did this for about ten years, seducing one hundred and eighty-two women of good households, without discovery. In the thirteenth year of Chenghua, at about five in the afternoon on the thirteenth of the seventh month, he came to the house of a licentiate scholar, Gao Xuan, in Nie village, Jinzhou county, Zhending prefecture. Sang called himself the concubine of one Zhang Lin, of Zhaozhou prefecture, and said that he had run away because of his husband's abuse, and begged for shelter. He was settled in the southern rooms. That night, the son-in-law of Gao Xuan, Zhao Wenju, crept into Sang's rooms and tried to seduce him. Sang pushed and hit Zhao, but Zhao pushed him onto the kang [a heated bed platform, typical in North China] and groped at his chest; feeling no breasts, Zhao moved downward and found that Sang had testicles. Thus he brought Sang to court in Jinzhou.


The rest of the account recounts how the case unfolded: Sang's confession was corroborated, and a list of the girls he'd violated was compiled. His "master" and "students" were all brought to court and tried together "to warn those who follow." But the women were spared any punishment, for they had all been coerced with Sang's "trickery"; plus, there were too many of them. In the eleventh month of Chenghua, the emperor himself wrote an edict: "Yes, this fellow has committed a vicious and ugly crime that damages custom. Punish him with lingchi [the infamous "thousand cuts" form of execution, reserved for the worst capital crimes]. No need to submit a reply. As for the other seven, prosecute them strictly and bring them to justice."

Translating these have already taken up a huge chunk of space (not to mention time I was going to spend working), so I'll reserve some observations for next time. Brief note before I go to do "useful" things, though: if you search any of Sang Chong's case on the Chinese Internet (tm), you'll turn up bunches of Reader's Digest-type sensational stories about this "Strongest Pervert in History."

*One of those Classical allusions so well-loved by people of letters even today. The reference is to a passage from the Analects: "Confucius did not speak of oddities, feats of power, disorders of nature, or spirits." [子不语怪力乱神] Thus, Yuan let people know that his book was in fact about all of these things.

** Readers who are just dying to see the text in its original can look here; the story's a little less than 1/4 of the way down the page. Kam Louie and Louise Edwards have done the fullest English translation of the collection, as Censored by Confucius: Ghost Stories by Yuan Mei, and you can read this tale, which they translate as "The Female Impersonator," therein.

*** Enterprising (or masochistic readers not caring about their vision) can see the original here
as part of the Gutenberg Project. The tale is about 2/3 of the way down the page.

On the tragedy of coercion

Can I just tell you how good Watase Yuu's Sakura Gari is? (Yes, the Fushigi Yuugi woman. No, it's not as hackneyed, obviously.*) Warning, may spoil you, though this "sneak preview" color page from 2007 could give some things away as it is.

(On the right, our hardworking protagonist Masataka. On the left, our charming failed hero Souma.)

It combines the best dramatic trademarks of Yuki Kaori's work--gothic houses, hopelessly beautiful psychotic aristocrats, fancy clothes (in this case Taishou-era period wear, which is thumbs-up for sure), violence, and sex. The last is perhaps where some readers would have issues with the manga, because though this is an exceedingly sexy work, not very much of it is warm or fuzzy.

I've been thinking about why I can stomach some types of coercive sex--what I could probably call "non-sex-positive" sex--and not others (for instance, what apparently occurs in the Twilight series). The reason here may be that Watase manages to tread the delicate line between inspiring disgust at sexual violation and cathartic, tragic sympathy for the inability of the characters to escape their pasts. In this sense, the visuality of manga gives it a distinct advantage: it can convey horror and despair even as unspeakably violent, destructive acts are being perpetrated. It can accomplish a degree of psychological revelation that is almost certainly harder for the novelist. And it is that insight into the souls of Watase's dramatis personae that makes this less a suspect piece of rape apologetics than an excruciatingly well-executed piece of tragic drama that is almost Greek in its amounts of helpless self-destructiveness. The best Yuki Kaori manga have also this sense of epic personal failure. Thus we the readers can sympathize.

Another possibility might be that the players of this sad game are male. Some time ago, I read one person's account of how, as a gay man, he felt violated and horribly objectified at Yaoi-Con, "A Celebration of Male Love and Beauty" that happens not too far away from here annually. What if the target of the sexual violence here were a young woman? I suppose that would generate more distaste, at least personally, if only because (a) young women are still by far the target of most reported sexual violence and (b) the biological capacity for childbearing adds another, highly unpleasant layer onto the already problematical physical and psychological domination. In this case, then, I am siding with the explanation for "why is yaoi so popular (especially among female fans)" that attributes it to a leveling of the sexual playing field between partners. The baseline power differential is smaller than if Masataka were Masako. Furthermore, there is certainly physical force in this coercion, but much of it is in manipulative mind-games--just as abusive, but with less potential to viscerally revolt the reader than the kind of purely physical power that is all too often the basis of "normal" (that is, not same-sex) erotic manga.

Of course all this could perhaps be seen as my self-justification, but I truly feel that this work is not a massive attempt to allow prurient readers to revel in sexual exploitation. But maybe I'm the only one who sees the echoes of Classical tragedy--everyone else's just enjoying the power play and admittedly technically polished sex scenes...

*Actually, several of her lesser-known works (Ayashi no Ceres, Imadoki) are supposed to be quite good in contrast to the very, very mainstream and much less challenging FY.

Briefly...

It may be a little less thrilling than sex or monkeys (or sexy monkeys for that matter), but this confirmation of the connection between climate patterns and political situations as derived from Chinese stalagmites (or is it the other? I can never get them quite right) is pretty impressive. That link continues to this day, I would say, but certainly in a less obvious manner.

For the love of monkeys

When Carl "My Inspiration, Basically" Pyrdum at Got Medieval started posting about images of monkeys, I was inspired. Also, I laughed, cried, and gave it many thumbs up. And people should give him a super-duper Medieval Lit job.

But returning to my inspiration: I knew that someone had to do something about Chinese monkeys, and where better to start than with the Chinese monkey, the Great Sage Equal to Heaven齐天大圣, the mighty Sun Wukong 孙悟空, the Beautiful Monkey King 美猴王，the immortal Simian 猢狲himself!*

Behold! My fuzzy cheeks, my rosy glow, my large magical stick. Sorry, I'm a celibate Buddhist, and besides, the dude who created me invested in me the vices of Pride and Anger, not Lust or Gluttony.
(Image from the nostalgia-riffic mid-1980s CCTV show, with the opera star Liuxiao Lingtong as Mr. Sun)

The goal of this post is to take an initial look at some representations of the Awesome Ape** over time and in various media, and to muse about why a monkey, of all creatures, became the uncontested hero of this extremely influential story.*** In general, the trend seemed to be one of "domestication," especially considering that this block-print, dated by the authoritative Wikipedia to the 16th century, depicts a rather more bestial incarnation:

("Pilgrim Sun." Frontispiece from the oldest surviving copy of the Journey to the West, c. 1590.)

I am pretty sure that this isn't His Apeness way back before he learns human ways, because he's wearing clothes and has got his magical staff from the Sea Palace. In fact, this is probably supposed to beSun the Pilgrim (the label in the left margin says as much). So even in his role as protector and disciple of the sutra-seeking monk Tripitaka, Wukong looked a bit more au naturel. He's also blending in nicely with that peach tree behind him. Maybe the hairiness is a side-effect more of printing technology than of any initial visual type, but that would require looking at more illustrations from later copies, which maybe one day I can convince someone to pay me to do.

On the stage, Lord Monkey acquired a more standardized look. Here he is as the Great Sage, with the long partridge feathers of a warrior and the yellow robes of a ruler:

And here he is as a more modest Pilgrim en route to India with his master.

Dramatic****, coded facial makeup is emblematic of Peking opera in general, but note the decidedly nonhuman features highlighted by the contrasting red and white, and the orange fabric balls for extra-large monkey ears. But of course, these bold, recognizable colors and patterns are also a way to "tame" the hairy, bulgy-eyed Ape of earlier times into brightly-colored familiarity for theatergoers.

More recent iterations began to get creative. Witness Sakai Masaaki-san as the Sage in the 1978 Monkey [also Monkey Magic!] (or as I like to call it, "the more politically incorrect Journey to the West TV series"). Compare his relatively more "normal" skin and hair color to the CCTV Wukong, as well as the abstracted monkey-ness of the opera makeup.

Next comes the many faces of Goku from that venerable, ridiculous, and horrifically unattractive anime known as Dragonball***** that I nonetheless watched for lack of anything else (oh, bygone days when no American kid watched weird Japanese shows instead of hearty, patriotic, made-in-the-USA cartoons). The link (as far as I know) between this Goku (the Japanese pronunciation for "Wukong") and our favorite simian are tenuous. Apparently sometimes this one has a tail, and he can fly around on a cloud. Also, he is powerful. More interesting is that his hair grows really long when he enters "Super Saiyan mode"--a kind of lycanthropic (simithropic?) transformation, a bestial reversion maybe.

(AM I PORCUPINE OR MONKEY OR MAYBE A BUNCH OF POLYGONS??)

The tension between Wukong's conformation to Buddhist (or in some cases Daoist) tenets such as mercy and patience and his "wild," impulsive streak forms some of the central conflicts in Journey to the West, the primary one being between Monkey and his master Tripitaka. But how ironic that it seems to be this very "human" weakness of impatience and pride that is contrasted to the virtues of an actual human (Tripitaka)! Plus, as I'll discuss in more detail below, Tripitaka is not the hero of Journey--so it's really these "untamed" qualities of the Monkey King that attract our human admiration, even as his image was domesticated.

But of course then postmodernity and that dang globalized media thing has to go and screw the trend of domestication up (in that annoying half-assed postmodern way). So we got the anomaly of a pretty much human looking beefy hero named Goku who "reverted" by growing long bushy blond hair. Japan of the late 1990s brought us another charming version of Goku:

(Son Goku from the manga Saiyuki by Minekura Kazuya which, though not overtly ghei, is ghei by (many) implications.)

Bushy hair, check. Stick, check. Traveling-clothes, check. You don't know this, but occasional outbursts of violence in a weremonkeyish manner, also check. The weird thing is this Goku's childlike image; indeed, instead of being basically the only competent member of Tripitaka's little party, this Goku is kind of airheaded. It's Sanzou (Japanese rendition of Sanzang, in turn the Chinese rendition of Tripitaka) who's the cool operator. Then again, Sanzou uses a revolver to blast demons away while Hakkai (Bajie/Pigsy) is an emo one-eyed user of "ki blasts." So. Some revisionism here. What meaning does this have, aside from indicating the popularity of dark-drama manga that transcends traditional genre barriers? Unclear. But I should point out that Goku retains something apart from the obvious from the original novel--his asexuality. This is something that'll be important when I take a look at the history of monkeys in older folklore.

Here we have a Jet Li-Monkey from the recent Forbidden Kingdom, which I haven't seen but in which I am mildly and guiltily interested. The armor's been updated--no more tacky yellows and reds! It also has a bit of a Japanese look to it, but maybe it's supposed to be Tang-style. But importantly--nothing really very apelike about this Sage except for the hair. The more "natural" blond hair (as opposed to the heavy-duty goldenrod of the CCTV version), tied in a not-very-Chinesey tall ponytail. This man looks more like what a Chinese person who'd never seen a blond Caucasian might imagine one to be like (hairy, very hairy, with slightly sketchy grin) than an animal.

(Damn, that looks soooo itchy.)

And finally, Sun Wukong (as far as I am aware, he is known by this name and not Son Goku) from the very recently released Musou Orochi 2: Maou Sairin video game by the Japanese company Koei. His attitude resembles that of a surfer more than that of a Buddhist pilgrim, and he allies himself with the (eeeevil) monk Taira no Kiyomori, who takes Tripitaka's place in freeing the Monkey.

(Thanks to http://koeiwarriors.co.uk/ for the image.)

As far as I can tell, the Sage looks like (again) a "foreigner" with weird hair more than he does a monkey, tail aside (even the tail looks like an accessory and not a hint of a deep bestial nature). Perhaps coinciding with a man-objectifying trend I identified in a post some time ago, he's got a really impressive midsection.

To sum it up, from the initial publication of the Journey to the West to the twentieth century, it seemed like the general trend in image/imaginings of the Monkey King was one of codification and concomitant domestication. He was powerful, but not an object of terror. The narrative of the novel also concerns the Monkey's taming, of course. As some people who know vastly more than I will ever know about this have written, the Monkey's journey is one of being appropriated by the strictures of religion and made not only human but holy, rather like a Chinese St. Christopher.****** The Monkey of Journey is, however, the inheritor of two traditions, neither of which is quite as friendly. The first is that of the White Ape, whose legends mostly concern the kidnapping and raping of human women (some of whom apparently could be bestialized by the experience and "forget" their humanity). This obviously threatening figure is a target of men's attacks, and ultimately dies at their hands--a dangerous, racially distinct Other intent on "stealing" womenand subverting human society tameable only by violence. The ethnic quality of the White Ape's otherness seems especially striking when recalling the blondness of several of the images of the Monkey above, and particularly of the recent versions. Monkey-as-foreigner is thus one mode.

The other is that of the rebellious ape, a Titan-like creature born naturally of the earth and locked in battle with a god in the form of a young man. This monkey is not nearly as obviously evil or dangerous as the White Ape, and it's pretty clear that its attempts to usurp a "higher" authority are echoed in the Monkey's pre-pilgrimage exploits. Basically, then, the monkey was a symbol of conflict between chaotic earthly forces and lawful human ones--the pivot being a threatening sexuality, which, as I pointed out, Sun Wukong does not have. That, I think, is an important factor that puts him, and not the actually more human-looking Sandy (Shasen) or the actually human Tripitaka, in the role of the hero.

Sandy's in fact not a very central character in the party, so let me look more closely at Sun Wukong, Tripitaka, and Pigsy (Bajie/Hakkai) instead, because they represent three ways for the reader to identify with the action.

Tripitaka's the only human being--so there's a superficial level of self-recognition for the reader. Furthermore, he's the most spiritually accomplished in the human world-order of Buddhism. Of course, he's a sexual teetotaler, being a holy monk and all, but there's a crucial difference from Monkey's abstinence: he lacks sexual agency. It's not only his being a monk that emasculates him, but his personality (vacillating, credulous) and his looks (effete, and outright "tasty" to the various demons that try to eat and/or have sex with him). Not something a virile young reader would want to fully sympathize with.

(In some cases, Tripitaka has been actually played by an actress, as here in Monkey. Cute, though <3.)

Pigsy, on the other hand, is bestial, even monstrously so, and voracious in both sexual and literal appetite. He's the sins of greed and lust made obvious in a porcine package. His failings also include, however, incompetence at defeating demons/protecting Tripitaka (all of his abilities are explicitly described as inferior to Wukong's), and dishonesty. He's an aspect of human weakness, but the most repulsive one of these three main characters.

(I do recognize that pigs are in fact intelligent, cool animals. But most 16th-century Chinese probably didn't.)

Thus Monkey is the only one left to make our hero, and the fact that the first major section of the novel is actually all about Monkey's exploits only reinforces that link. For a contemporary reader Wukong didn't have the sexual "gross-out" factor of either looking too girlishly feeble or too disgustingly greedy. The motifs of sexual/racial threat are still in the imagination of His Monkeyness, but apparently neutralized into abstract representations of his identity as the Monkey.

It was the Royal Ape's very human self-discipline, capability, intelligence, along with his irrepressible impulsiveness and irreverence that made a perfect hero. Novels and print culture are associated with an early modern consciousness in Europe--though the appellation has only been controversially applied to China, maybe the Great Sage's intense individualism in the face of Confucian authority, along with his presence in a widely printed novel, could be an argument for a similar spirit in the Ming and Qing.


*He is a man(?) of many faces, of many passions, of many Risible and Old-Fashioned Literal Translations... [BTW, I am delighted to note that my Chinese input system automatically supplied these proper nouns. Even the computer is a fan.]
**Not an actual epithet, but one I am sure His Awesomeness would appreciate.
***If you need a refresher, or maybe just a fresher, on what the hell is going on here with the monkeys and pilgrimages and Buddhist satire, here's a rundown.
**** Badummmmp!
*****For sake of simplicity, have omitted other suffix letters (Z, S, etc.)
******See Whalen Lai's article, "From Protean Ape to Handsome Saint." 1994.

Banned Books Week!

So apparently it's Banned Books Week. As you can imagine, dear reader, a vast number of books have been banned in China through the ages, ranging from the dangerously sexy to dangerously political. Here are a tiny selection of things that have in fact been stricken off shelves at some point (though of course, thanks to long-rooted traditions of piracy and under-the-table trade, the texts still managed to survive in many cases).

1. Plum in the Golden Vase 金瓶梅 [1617， 1627-40]
Considered a great literary classic on par with Journey to the West 西游记 and A Dream of Red Mansions/Story of the Stone 红楼梦/石头记. Plum (and a host of other erotic novels, ranging from the 14th-century New Tales of Cutting the Lamp-wick, with relatively tame and allusive depictions of man-ghost liaisons, to far more "hardcore" works like The Carnal Prayer Mat) was banned constantly almost from its first printing. Indeed, it's still none too easy to find an uncensored edition today, though a vogue among those who can afford it for "banned and destroyed" (销毁 ) books may be changing that.

Awesomely, this influential work is actually a fan-novel of another great novel, Outlaws of the Marsh/The Water Margin 水浒传*, which was also banned (by an Establishment concerned bythe glorification of criminals and less-than-lawful activities). Mao's supposed preference for this book becomes ironic in the light of his own, er, unenthusiastic response to potential "deviants" or questioners of his power.

2. Tombstone: A Record Of the Great Famine of China in the 60s [2008]
This book is terrifying. In two volumes, Yang Jisheng describes the horrors of the so-called "Three Years of Natural Disasters" from 1959-61. Gruesome death by starvation and dropsy are only the start; cannibalism--sometimes of one's own children and other kin--is also recorded with unrelenting detail and gravity.
Of course this was immediately suppressed. If you have to ask why, all that talk about how the response to the milk scandal really marks positive growth and change has turned your head too much. The copy I saw came from Hong Kong, but perhaps somewhere out there in the back room of a shady little bookstore one may purchase a copy. There are a host of websites in Chinese discussing the book, but who knows what people inside the coziness of the Great Firewall can get.

3. Death Note [2003-06]
Yes, I mean the comic series. Apparently schoolkids began writing disfavored teachers' and classmates' names in "Death Notes" in imitation of the protagonist of the manga, whose magical notebook could kill the people whose names were written in it. So instead of thinking about why students would 1) hate their instructors and peers so heartily 2) be unable or unwilling to express such sentiments in less puerile ways, the authorities banned the books--only on the Mainland, though. Hong Kong and Taiwanese kiddies can handle the "poison," so no bans there.**

*Call me immature, but I can't help giggling when I see Pearl Buck's title, All Men are Brothers. Smacks of a whole other arena of fanwork.
**A couple of articles I skimmed about this mention the possibility that bans were enforced because of rampant piracy of the DN series. But banning things doesn't usually resolve violations of corporate licensing. Plus, no legal editions were permitted, either.

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.

Grab-bag Post

It's been quite a while, dear hypothetical reader. I bring you a variegated bonanza, or rather bonazette, of things.
1. Bits and pieces from the Internets
-I've been loving a series of videos find-able on Youtube called "The Japanese Tradition." Some are subtitled, some not. Best ones I've seen so far: Origami and Hashi (chopsticks).
-If ever your feminist/reasonable side needs a good laugh/cry/fury session, view this little diatribe at your own peril. Apparently the young gentleman attends Columbia, which is horrid (the fact that he's tainting the university, not the university), but then again I can recall certain incidents from my undergraduate career just about as sordid...

2. Books I am reading, books I have read, books I want
-Reading: Changing Clothes in China (pretty sweet so far), A College of Magics (rereading. As Jane Yolen says on the cover of my edition: "A large step up...from Harry Potter.")
-Read: Red China Blues, China Road, Firebirds: An Anthology of Original Fantasy and Science Fiction (Which one of these does not belong?)
AWK! AWWK!

-Should be reading: Pile of material for first week of class (aieeeeee), stack of two dozen books in the corner
-Lusting to read: Guyland, which seems fascinating, not to mention MANLY.

3. Other news
-Making headway in the fairly well-crafted PS3 game Folklore.

The significant other is playing Ellen (young braid-bearing woman whose lack of assertiveness is a bit annoying), and I Keats (spectacle man). It's very interesting how sometimes Europeanisms seems almost more outstanding in Japanese popular culture/imagination than American counterparts. Perhaps some kind of fairly reductive argument could be made about how Europe has more historical and cultural detritus and is thus more appealing to the Asian psyche, laden as the latter is with all that history and, you know, stuff. But it's also important to remember that, as crucial as the relationship between Japan and the US during and since the WWII era has been, that in the nineteenth century Europe was probably much more important as an Other for Japan, whether it be as a kind of enemy in sonno-joi (Expel foreigners, revere the Emperor) movements or as a role model of sorts in industry, government, and military affairs.

So this is burnout

If I see one more instance of blantant bias in scoring, deliberate falsification, prejudice against one's own citizens, tacky all-we-care-about-is-image pretense, or syrupy enthusing about improvement and progress related to this Olympics thing, I am probably going to explode like a red giant collapsing upon itself.

At least I'm not suffering through the astronomical prices that've been installed for these weeks. Rah rah for foresight in getting the heck outta there.

Contemporary Stuff (gasp!)

A couple of things related to that ol' favorite of business-minded folk everywhere: China Today.

First, I though Professor Baumler's post, "Chinese History sucks," over at Frog in a Well, was spot-on. I guess it's helpful to some degree that I'm less interested in working on the early periods (motivated, I'd say, in not insignificant part by pragmatic considerations exactly in line with the post--more sources, more "relevance," etc.), yet I feel a bit guilty about it. Who knows, change is possible. But I can't imagine trying to read Han-period texts or seal-script steles. Face explode. Then again, even the Ming-Qing's called "ancient" by some folk (cough certain politics professors of my acquaintance cough), since they predated 1949.

Speaking of sweeping, digit-abundant history, Professor Barnett's Q&A in yesterday's NYT answers some burninatin' questions and points that people in forums from Facebook to the NYT itself have been raising. I especially like this bit:

"Q: Whenever we write about Tibet on this blog, we get many comments from Chinese readers that refer to the Dalai Lama as a slaveholder. What is that about?

RB: First, we can see that as just propaganda that lodges in certain people’s heads, because it’s not even what the Chinese government says. The Chinese government uses the word “serf” — it technically imagines that Tibet is full of serfs, but very few slaves. It was a mistranslation that has circulated and gained some purchase with the Chinese public, including intellectuals, and now they’ve got hold of the slave idea, which was never the case.

The Communist Party sees history in terms of a set number of facts, in this case the party says that 5 percent of Tibetans were aristocrats or landowners, 90 percent were serfs and 5 percent were slaves. I don’t think any of these are actually what you and I would call facts.

[...]

But those laws were made in the 14th century or so and had hardly been used for hundreds of years. But the Chinese cite these old laws, which are really horrendous in writing, and use those as the main basis for these histrionic claims about slavery."

The Chinese suppression of decent scholarship--in content or in method--is horrible, but what's truly disgusting is how history has been reduced to a set of fill-in-the-blank factoids, tinged by nationalism and a staunch refusal to consider alternative points of view, not to mention the totally irresponsible use of sources. And then young intellectuals and bourgeoisie today parrot these tidbits with the greatest pride--which merits the proverb “哭笑不得.”

Issues relating at all to gender and sexuality frequently involve enormous hypocrisies, but the sexual hypocrisy of contemporary Chinese-made history and cultural studies is of course complicated by the whole Marxist-Leninst-Maoist line (in case the dear reader, in hir zest for teh cashz, had forgotten that we're discussing a real live unitary authoritarian government) and its concomitant self-contradictions regarding love, sex, and gender. I'm sure someone learned and wise has written on this somewhere, but why haven't we heard more about these things? Where, O Media, are the more probing inquiries into not just the political or economic oppressiveness of the system, but the crushing effects it has had on people's conceptions of themselves and of the past? No, let's publish yet another story about how materially wealthy those elite young Chinese are, yay! And wow, gee whiz, they're really good at science and math and overseeing semi-illiterate people make shoe bottoms all day, aren't they! Okay, I admit that last one's a bit cheap, and probably motivated in part by my personal grievance with most things numerical, but seriously. So tired of history and culture seeming to take a backseat in these ubiquitous discussions of (mythical narrator voice) China.

Enough ignorant rambling for now. Less of that and more sexies next time!

Quick Wish-List

Of a few books that I am kind of salivating over, but will probably have to restrain myself from getting until (1) I finish moving across the country and (2) there are more used copies floating around at less retail-level prices.

-Timothy Brooks, Death by a Thousand Cuts: I've always kind of had a thing for grotesque diseases and tortures. I guess that makes me a creepy person...but my goal is of course to become awesome enough to write whole books about my creepinesses.
-Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Really shouldn't judge books by their covers, but this one's really stylin'. Should I be put off by the back flap adding "Professor" to Dorothy Ko's name...? Clearly the publisher expects its target reader to have no idea who Ko is. But hey, who am I to dis on more accessible writing?
-Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843-1849: The cover (yeah, I'm judging by superficials again) promises exciting things to say about advertisements, of which I am inordinately fond. Especially hoping that Prof. Yeh talks about ads for VD cures--intersection between teh sexays and the market economy, the latter of which would otherwise make me headdesk repeatedly from boredom!

But for now, back to work.

Anal Sex: A 17th-Century How-To Guide

I declared that I would translate a chunk of Bian er chai that describes the mechanics of sodomy in the first post (see below), so I guess I should apologize for holding off so long on it.
[ETA, 19 days later] So I guess I wasn't done being busy. But NOW I AM, so here is the sodomy! Again from the Ming collection by Master Moon-Heart (see below again), more specifically my favorite of the 4 sections, "Chaste Love."

After cleverly weaseling his way into the school at which the lovely but virtuously chaste Zhao Wangsun is studying and falling conveniently ill in order to get the friendly Zhao to join him in his sickbed, the Hanlin scholar Feng Xiang gets his dubious way with the hapless Zhao. After they begin meeting every night, Zhao asks:

"Brother, you say that there's pleasure to be had in doing this, but why is it that I only feel the harshness in it?"
The Hanlin replied, "With you, brother, I'm only going slowly, as if I were water grinding jade. So I only get to enlighten you a little, then must sound the retreat and rest my troops. You've never actually been in the heavenly planes yet."
Zhao said, "There's really a 'heavenly plane' in this?"
Explained the Hanlin, "That place has seven inches that is free of feces. Above these seven inches, there is an orifice, which opens when something enters, or when you are using the bathroom. Otherwise it stays tightly shut. When we're at it, the 'grain tunnel' should be shut tight so that the upper orifice is closed to keep out the filth. In those seven inches, there's also a 'lustful orifice.' After thrusting at it for a thousand times or more, it'll start itching, and the lustful orifice will open by itself, releasing licentious fluids. It's better than words can say. If it hurts, then it must be an amateur doing it. The back door's actually pretty roomy, if you want to see the fun of it, you must go at it a while for the pleasures to start."
Zhao replied, "If that's the case, I must confess my ignorance. I'd like a demonstration, though."*

Whereupon the two lock out the servants and go to it.

For the really curious, everyone in BeC uses spittle for lubricant, and often sodomy is compared to vaginal sex. The phrases "as when a woman tends her husband" or "as if with a woman" come up a-plenty here. There're also a bevy of interesting positions: cowboy, doggy-style, missionary, spoons, etc. And since I heard someone ask the question once, yes, there was kissing, fellatio, and other non-anal activities going on, too. Anal intercourse does seem fairly central, though, particularly in "Chaste Love." (Most of the earlier bottoms were the Hanlin's various servant-boys, and one of Zhao Wangsun's, too.)

But really. A thousand or more thrusts? Are these people 17th-century, nanfeng**-following versions of the Energizer bunny or what?


*My translations are to convey flavor, not necessarily linguistic fidelity, of course. But I gotta say, this is probably the best come-on line ever.
**The pun turns on one of those zillion Chinese homophones. Nanfeng= "Southern Wind (Taste)"/"Male Wind (Taste)"

This is not a post about pornographic novels or video games

And no, I am not making a Magritte joke, as cool as they are.
I interrupt the torridity of the past few posts, hypothetical reader, with some totally sweet entries from Yuan Mei's Sui Yuan Shi Dan (Food Lists from the Garden of Leisures).*

Some of them are almost as complicated/$$$ as the intricate recipes given in Cao Xueqin's The Dream of Red Mansions, with meat broths flying all over the place, crazy ingredients, and whole days spent stewing:
Sea Delicacies: Three Recipes for Sea Cucumber **
The sea cucumber is a flavorless thing, full of sand and fishy flavor, and is most difficult to pull off well. [Begging the question why anyone would want to attempt to eat it.] Its nature is thick and heavy, so simmering in a broth is out of the question. One must pick out those with smaller spines [clearly a sign from nature reading NOT FOR PEOPLE TO EAT in giant pointy font], soak out the mud and sand, bring them to a rolling boil three times in meat soup, then broil them in chicken and meat stock until they are thoroughly softened. For accompaniment use fragrant mushrooms and wood-ears [Auricula judae]; their black color will match well with the sea cucumber. If one is inviting guests on the morrow, then the cooking must start a day before for the sea cucumber to be completely soft. I've often seen them use mustard-seeds and chicken stock to make sea cucumber salad at Qian Guancha's house, which is very nice. They've also had sea cucumber cut into small pieces and stewed with small pieces of fragrant mushrooms and bamboo shoots in chicken stock. Assistant Secretary Jiang's household uses tofu sheets and shaggy mane mushrooms [NB: they probably grow on your lawn] in stews with sea cucumber, which is also good.

Some are a little more down-to-earth and sound even manageable by yours truly:
Snacks: "Dough Mice"
Use hot water [and flour, presumably] to make some dough, then boil chicken broth and use chopsticks to pinch off and drop in pieces of various size. Add some fresh cabbage hearts for an especially good flavor.

Some are flat-out cute:
Sweets: Roly-Poly Candies
Shaped like go pieces, these come in all colors. The people of Hangzhou give them to children, who think them to be treasures.

And some are crotchety, as befitting a seventy-something "I aced the exams but now I live like a king by writing poetry all day"-type hippie:
Sweets: "Persimmon Cakes"
Persimmon cakes are sweet but boring. I've never eaten a good one, and they're far inferior to tangerine cakes.
This would probably cause YM and my father to have a showdown, because latter thinks persimmon cakes are as unto the nectar of the gods.

Finally, there are some very, very strange entries:
Sea Delicacies: Fish Lips
Fish lips are heavy in texture but pure and light in quality. To retain their peculiar charms, lightly stew in chicken stock.
[A helpful note in the source indicates that YM is referring to "dried food products made from the lip areas of sharks and rays." I never knew these possessed lips--maybe someone played a little trick on zoology-impaired YM here for an extra bit of metaphorical dough. But apparently now I'll get to make really stupid jokes involving cosmetics and cartilaginous fishes!]

Conclusion: chicken stock will cure all ills, be they sandy or probably made-up.


*(See here for the original text.) OMG, major discovery. I've only seen this book rendered as the Sui yüan shih tan before--and I and apparently every other native English speaker to look at this thing (I can't imagine there are too many beside Arthur Waley and Herbert Giles himself) totally thought the tan was the nice, friendly 谈, "discuss" or "talk," but no, it's the much more businesslike 单, "list"! Probably the pervasive desire to cast my homie YM as an über-hip Renaissance Man striking again. ***

**A picture of these little fellers for your edification and/or revulsion:

***A perfectly understandable urge. YM be pimpin' it up, yo (Twelve concubines? Hottest boytoy--uh, protégé-- in town? A poetry school for "moth-eyebrowed" young ladies of good family? Mmm-hm, I think so).

Historifandom: Musou (Part 2)

After putting up the last installment, I had a discussion with a friend in which he suggested that perhaps I was overemphasizing the fannish appeal of the Musou games, viz. that the majority of players actually savor the games for the intuitive (read: idiotically easy) controls and mechanics, and the fantastic appeal of slaughtering thousands of polygonal enemies, not the satisfaction of seeing historical figures reduced to a delightful hodgepodge of over-the-top visual motifs.

It's probably true that the initial audience for the Musou series were more into das Hackenslashen than the, um, character-slashin', but over the years the game designers' own fannishness toward their heroes have become noticeably more prominent. As evidence I'll follow the evolution of Lu Xun, a general of the kingdom of Wu, historically married to the daughter of Sun Ce and most prominently known for his role in the capture and death of Guan Yu and his victory at the Battle of Yi Ling in 222 (see previous entry). Here he is in Shin Sangoku Musou, known as Dynasty Warriors 2 in the US (released 2000). [NB: The first Dynasty Warriors was a fighting game of the arcade face-off variety.]


And Shin Sangoku Musou 2/DW3 (note the hint of midriff) (2001):


Shin Sangoku 3/DW 4, a swing toward fuller coverage--possibly in tandem with a sweep of conservatism around the world? (2003):


Only to be countered with a decided turn for the bare-all (!) in Shin Sangoku 4/DW5 (2005 ):

And last, not least but probably fruitiest, I present Lord Lu as seen in this year's Shin Sangoku 5/DW6 for the PS3:
And have a closer glimpse of his tres chic eye makeup and feathers:
Certainly the constant improvements in 3D modeling capabilities have contributed to Lord Lu's image updates over the years, but it seems pretty clear that there's something else at work here, namely historifandom and its participants' concomitant power as consumers to actually mold the "canon" of their own fandom. And, since their canon is actually a bunch of characters from historical record reenacting actual events, they are revamping the understanding of history itself through its icons, re-imagining (or distorting, if you're less kindly disposed) the appearances and behavior of the long-dead for their own enjoyment and consumption. When a fan plunks down in 2008 to write a slashfic, would ze prefer a feathery, tribal-eye-tattooed Lord Lu to insert into hir steamy scenes or something more like this:

...they'd probably end up covering the poor fellow in sparkles and feathers anyway. Just like Nobunaga's ridiculous armor in the previous installment, I think Lu Xun's feathers and braids have some "real" roots--he was known as the pacifier of southern "barbarians," and since he hailed from the Eastern Wu (centered in the Jiangnan area), which was already coded as peripheral in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the whole exotic look kind of makes sense.* So there seems to be a general "fanon" model for Lu, and it looks a lot more like the Koei rendition--youthful, red-clad, associated with all things flaming (literally). In fact, I've got another indicator that historifandom is in fact going backward to influence corporate-produced canon, that in fact the two are becoming well-nigh inseparable in this our age of high-speed consumption:
[Screenshot from the 2007 show Koutetsu Sangokushi 鋼鉄三国志. Lu Xun on left, Zhuge Liang(!) on right ]

So consumers/fans are actively repatterning history to fit their tastes through popular culture, and apparently with more force than in previous decades. I'd call it Japanese popular culture, but a quick browse at your local chain bookstore or electronics joint will demonstrate that North American consumers are becoming a huge force in gobbling up fandom and fanculture. I do, however, think that the progression of Lu Xun's wardrobe reflects but one dimension of historifandom, that resonate with fangirl/腐女子 ("corrupt girl") culture, with its love of fruity men behaving suspiciously with other fruity men. A somewhat different fannishness has also prompted action on Koei's part--witness the case of Lü Bu, henchie of the warlord Dong Zhuo.

A Qing print, in which Lü looks skinny (according to some, a staple of Qing figurative style). But he's got the mandatory long pheasant feathers and the "Great Sky Slicer" halberd (方天画戟).


Shin Sangoku 2/DW3:
Shin Sangoku 3/DW4, beginning to get a bit darker:
And Shin Sangoku5/DW6, which is just wow(I don't think that's what people meant by "halberd"...):

So what, says the hypothetical reader. These crazy Japanese folks have decided to make more exaggerated costumes, big deal. But there are important differences in how the exaggerations have been made--always with some kind of hearkening to an ur-image or set of motifs based in textual record, but manipulated to cater to as wide a spectrum of historifandom's fan-consumers as possible, a spectrum that is no longer (if it ever was) merely a bunch of Hack 'n' Slash devotees who didn't give a thought what their avatars looked like as long as they could rack up KO counts. And the game isn't all nonstop mook-slaying; cutscenes and cinematics are progressively unlocked as the player slice-n-dices through hordes of enemies, and though the narrative merits of said scenes are questionable, they focus heavily on the heroes' character development (distortionment may be a more accurate term), embedded in historical context delivered by a solemn narrator. For example, Saika Magoichi's opening video.


There's a question worth probing here in relation to non-Asian consumption of the Musou games, which is "how much do American audiences 'get' of the historical stuff," and whether that makes their historifandom one that is weaker than Asian fans, who are presumably more in the know. First of all, of course Asian fans are not necessarily more knowledgeable about obscure, short-lived generals of the 200s CE or random daimyo and their henchmen in 17th-century Japan than are American fans, who may have knowledge sufficient for them to recognize Guan Yu or Hideyoshi and be attracted to the games in the first palace.

Returning to the "Americans aren't historifans" point, when the Musou games first arrived in the US, players were maybe as a whole more content to tolerate weird names and exotic outfits--not exactly something stunningly novel in the game industry--without thinking of them beyond the game, in a way accepting them as culturally "odorless" goods. This may still be the case for some. But the Musou games seem to have also prompted a search for, or at least curiosity in, the very much culturally specific and historically rooted "real" underneath the glossy CGI. For example, the large Koeiwarriors fansite forum (http://z13.invisionfree.com/koeiwarriors/) boasts a special sublevel, the "History Realm," dedicated to "various eras of history"--it's actually got more topics than any one of the other sublevels dedicated to specific titles of the Musou series.

While changing demographics and demands in fandom successfully reshape Koei's Gross Historical Distortion, history (with lesser or greater degrees of Gross Distortion) enters into the consciousness of fans and recalibrates their demands. Intuitively it seems kind of terrible to imagine hordes of 18-35 year-olds contributing to the terror that is Shin Sangoku 5's Lü Bu or Koutetsu Sangokushi's Zhuge Liang, but really, is what the "pros" do so very different? There's money, obsession, and distortion involved in the latter case, too, isn't there? Maybe academic historifandom seems more okay because there's less money and more book-reading entailed. Probably the same obsession, though, and distortions are willfully ignored or ruefully acknowledged, not delighted in and paraded around.

(*I'll need to muse a bit on why Japanese pop culture seems to like Wu so much when Shu, which controlled Sichuan, and the 中原, or Yellow River plain, was the narrative focus of RotK.)

Historifandom: Musou (Part 1)

The other day I called home and had a slightly disheartening conversation with my kid brother:

ME: ...so, yeah, I'm doing Asian history.
BROTHER: (shocked) Asian history?
ME: Chinese in particular.
BROTHER: ChiNESE?

If I knew he could understand the joke, I'd call him a 汉奸. Oh well.

Now, kid brother is one of those chilluns who began gaming almost as soon as he could sit up unassisted. He adores RTS (real-time strategy) and turn-based games incorporating historical settings, such as Rome: Total War. But his first reaction, and, I think, that of a lot of people, is that history (and by extension historians) are inherently and irrevocably boring; the older the period, the more boring--yeah, yeah.

ME: But you campaign against the Celts and Germans every night, don't you? Isn't that cool?
BROTHER: (grudgingly) ...I guess so.

Second bias everyone's heard of: historical Asians are totally, like, boring! All Analects and test-taking and repression and famines, not to mention confusing names. Asian history's pretty dull as it's taught in East Asia, too (I can only speak for the PRC of the 90s, but somehow I doubt there's been much progress there or elsewhere in the neighborhood away from memorizing endless lists of names and filling in blanks therewith).

But some fanchildren out there know this ain't so, and in fact revel in making history (even premodern Asian history) their fandom. Of course, Asian historifandom's more common in Asia, but with the rise, especially since the mid-1990s, of North-American "otaku" culture that revels in all things Japanese (a topic that requires more updated research, for sure), there's a brand of unabashedly fannish, distinctly Asian pop culture that's begun to infiltrate the American market, which merges the historio-mythological with the sheer distorting glee of fandom in a whole new way.

In particular, there's Koei's Musou series, which began with the heroes of the Three Kingdoms (Sangoku Musou--Dynasty Warriors in English; the first was released in 1997), then recently added a new line about the Sengoku Jidai (Sengoku Musou/Samurai Warriors, first released in 2004). Unlike the Total War series, the Musou games are far less concerned with historical accuracy--indeed, the whole point of my posting on the games (apart from being obsessed with them, cough cough) is that they sell by deliberately distorting history. Emphasis on deliberately, because the characters are still recognizable, and, like in Total War, the player can choose to reenact documented battles and events. Other than that, at first glance the games seem to have taken rather little from recorded history. Have a look at this picture of Oda Nobunaga, as he appears in Sengoku Musou 2:
For comparison's sake, a more old-school rendering:

There's something fascinating about this contrast, for me anyway. Without knowing that the top image depicted a character named Oda Nobunaga, could anyone actually recognize him? Possibly. The Musou series' heroes are condensed symbols of their historical identities, in the same way that other forms of popular culture have reduced the complexities of heroes of history and myth into distinctive visual archetypes. Take Guan Yu for example. Here's a screencapture from a Chinese serial drama (Lord Guan's on the far left):
And as he appears in Peking Opera:

And finally, as seen in the latest Sangoku Musou game (released in the US just a month or two ago):
He's got the green color scheme, the "beautiful beard," and of course the 800-jin Blue Dragon Knife, just like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms says! Now, Nobunaga's case seems more extreme, probably because Nobunaga's a much more recent personality with less symbolic detritus (no Romance of the Sengoku Jidai)to link his identity to his appearance, or maybe because Koei's a Japanese company more at ease with distorting Japanese historical figures. Nonetheless, his purple-and-black look, the decadent feather ruff, the European cuirass, and the lightsaber do make sense. Missionary Jesuits were active in Nobunaga's time, and he made pragmatic use of them against his rivals, as opposed to his successors Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, who banned Christianity and began persecutions of converted Japanese, fearing the destabilizing potential of this imported faith. This Jesuit connection might explain the armor and cape. Nobunaga's ruthlessness and self-aggrandizement as "demon-king" (魔王, maou), whether factual or apocryphal, contributes to his evil-overlord look.

And does anyone really learn anything from this? Well, for one, that gross historical distortion (henceforth GHD) can show how the mythos of history, particularly that surrounding people, is formed and perpetuated, even in such 'crass" venues as video games. Moreover, the fact that the Musou games are popular and profitable (Koei's up to the 6th Sangoku Musou release in the US, just put out a "tactical" version of Sengoku Musou in summer 2007, and churned out Musou Orochi, a mind- and timeline-boggling combo of San- and Sengoku, last winter) reflects intriguingly on the consumers' side of historical production, too. The "hack-n-slash" gameplay, as most game review sites point out, is incredibly repetitive between new installments of the series; the cast of characters also remain generally the same. So there's something else gripping about the content--its appeal to historifandom's "historifantasies" through its reimagination and repackaging of these "boring" long-dead people into "awesome" heroes.

Sometime in the future I'd like to talk more about the sexualities at work in the Musou historifandom, the "alternate history" appeal of Musou Orochi, and of course more in depth on why and how the Musou characters are "awesome" in a specfically historifandom way.