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The Record of the Black Dragon Year. Translated with an Introduction by PETER H. LEE. Seoul and Honolulu: Institute of Korean Culture, Korea University, and Center for Korean Studies, University of Hawaii. 2000. x, 224 pp. $25.00.
Many large gaps exist in what is available in English of traditional Korean literature. Son [zen] poetry of Koryo and Choson periods; the literature of the Imjin War; and the hangul poetry of Chosen period yangban women, just to name a few. A part of one of these gaps has now been filled by Lee's welcome new book,.Imjin nok, The Record of the Black Dragon Year. Lee himself provides a succinct summary of the book:
The Imjin nok, or Record of the Black Dragon Year, is the first popular tale inspired by the Japanese invasion of Korea between 1592 and 1598. As a collection of folk narratives clustered around major events and characters, it exists in some forty manuscript and printed versions, long and short, in the vernacular and in literary Chinese.
The large body of literature produced by the Imjin War includes diaries, memoirs, reports of Korean envoys and captives, stories, and oral narratives. While much of this literature is written in hanmun by scholar-officials and scholars, works composed in the vernacular also survive, the most important of which is Imjin nok, a collection of folk narratives which had probably developed out of oral tales, later redacted into manuscript or woodblock-printed versions.
So Jaeyong, an authority on this literature, lists some 20 principal motifs in all of the extant versions of the Imjin nok. These motifs include the king's dream, the invasion, the king's flight, Li Jusung's efforts to desecrate Korean mountain ranges, and Great Master Samyongdang's triumphant visit to Japan after the war, among others. No single version covers all of the motifs, each focusing on ten or so of them, and each version varying in historical authenticity. The version translated here focuses on ten of those motifs, beginning with the king's dream and ending with Samyongdang's visit to Japan.
The original text abounds in formulaic phrases, stock characters, and descriptions, as well as descriptions of persons and actions which seem fantastic...