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.