Well, to date I’ve been giving myself Sunday off for each week of the write-a-thon, and being sadly unproductive on Monday, at least during the last few weeks, but today, my mind was still deep into the question of geomantic warfare from where I left off last night, so I continued on today, and actually got to an ending I’m semi-confortable with… at least, it’s better than the ones I was working towards before today.
“Geomantic warfare” makes it sound like a story full of exploding volcanoes and earthquakes, but that’s not what I ended up writing. In fact, I have a feeling it’s perhaps too quiet, and it needs a little more excitement and shaking up. But, in any case, I can think that over later. Right now, I have finished a draft and I am going to give myself a little space from the story. The later version might end up being a redraft, or it might end up involving working in some more action. I’m happy to report that all of the action takes place in what is now my current neighborhood, in Bucheon, except that it’s set 113 years ago, in 1894, before Japan’s victory over China in the Sino-Japanese war was secure, and in an early stage of an early cartographic campaign by the Japanese to make accurate military maps of Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan, and parts of China.
The challenge of the story was:
(a) to envision a counterfactual history(*) in which the amusing claim made by some Koreans that iron spikes that the Japanese drove into the stone of various mountains was intended as a facet of geomantic warfare, a kind of “bad acupuncture” directed at the gi — for which we Westerners usually use the Chinese pronunciation of the same word, “chi”— of the Korean nation as a whole,
while:
(b) not writing a story that took for granted the kinds of flat, nationalist, and predictable stereotypes that are likely to appear in such a story, namely, “Korean=good, Japanese=evil.” While I don’t dispute that the Empire of Japan was indeed villanous for Korea at the time, and for the next fifty or so years, having individual characters who are mere extensions of this villany seems to me both boring and all too supportive of the kind of anti-Japanese sentiment that it seems to me is all too widespread in Korea today, crippling any non-negative discussion of Japan in public.
[(*) At least, if you don’t believe in geomancy, it’s a counterfactual history. Those who do believe in geomancy, however, would either regard this as an alternate history — not counterfactual, since they believe geomancy works in the story as well as in the real world, but is used for a slightly different result in this story — or, if they were insulted by it, as pro-Japanese propaganda, which it isn’t, but I’m not expecting people who believe in geomancy to be overly open-minded about nuanced depictions of Japanese characters in a historical Korean setting.
In fact, I like the way this story straddles counterfactual and alternate history. There’s nothing that explicitly demonstrates the geomancy actually works, even if most, or possibly all, of the characters involved happen to believe in it. In a sense, I feel like this is in some way a more science-fictional take on the idea of geomancy, from within a version of the belief system includes a belief in geomancy.]
Writing the ending was a killer — I still don’t feel it’s quite right, though it’s not the twistiness, but rather the execution of the last scene or two that I’m not sure about. There’s also a subplot about a mistake the main character made a long time ago, as a young man, which may be unnecessary or even just clutter, I’m not sure, though I like the plot and I hope I can make it stick.
Anyway, here are the stats:
“The Broken Path
Why were the Japanese (in the actual historical record) driving iron spikes into the mountains of Korea?
Apparently they were using it as part of their land surveys, especially during the Colonial occupation. (Though efforts by the Japanese to use modern methods of cartography to map Korea date back as far as 1894.)
The function of the iron spikes, I’m a bit fuzzy but that’s the rationalist explanation that’s usually offered. It makes sense, considering that rural Koreans, with no experience with such technology, would jump to that conclusion. The analogy with acupuncture is pretty easy to see right off the bat, and it does fit with traditional geomantic beliefs here. Some people even seem to believe, right now, that Japan *did* (successfully) use this method of geomantic attack to subdue Korea and harm the nation, which suggests how strongly the sentiment resonates with those old beliefs, along with the very fashionable anti-Japanese sentiment that pervades South Korean culture today. (As well as how desperate people are to find some excuse for the perplexing fact that Japan managed to colonize/victimize the obviously superior-in-every-way nation of Korea. This allows them to suggest that some evil magic was used, which seems odd to me since most discussions I’ve read suggest a fair bit of blame falls upon the actions — and inaction, and corruption leading to peasant discontent — of the monarchy and the upper classes, as well as an inherited legacy of anti-foreign hyper-Confucianist thought that encouraged isolationism and made the collision with the outside world so much more bewildering when it finally happened. Which, of course, is not to exonerate Japan, either.)
However, when I read such accounts, my first impression was, what if the Japanese HAD believed in this craziness and HAD sent over people to spike the mountains? What if they HAD actually mounted a covert geomancy campaign against Korea? Crazier things have happened in history, and it was a fun thought-experiment, though I have to say at the end of the day that land-surveying makes a hell of a lot more sense.
Mind, it doesn’t explain the iron spikes buried in spots in Seoul like under the Japanese-built government building in front of Gyeongbok Palace, which supposedly was placed perfectly to cut off the flow of energy from the mountains, etc. People acted shocked when nine thousand spikes were dug up after the demolition of the building. But I have to wonder if they were geomantic weapons, or just part of the materials normally used for construction at the time.
Who knows?