Writer Wander 039 - Backlog Obscurities: Guin Saga the Leopard Mask

Wander takes a look at the first volume Guin Saga, a landmark work of Japanese Heroic Fantasy that is unknown virtually everywhere else in the world

Transcript

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I don't want to Rider Wander thirty-nine. This week's obscurity is Gwen Saga. And once again, as we've often talked about on this podcast, I am accustomed to recording long in advance, such that almost virtually every episode you have heard, all episodes you have heard of Rider Wander up until this point have been recording oftentimes several weeks in advance. But let me tell you folks, this is the exception, okay? Because starting today, and I don't know for how long it's gonna be, the gap between episodes is roughly gonna be between a week or so. And that's because uh I must say that I allowed the massive gap that I created initially to catch up to me. And I figured something like this would happen eventually, right? You know, sometimes you just grow too comfortable and you fall back on the reality that you have a bunch of content already created, and before you know it, that content runs dry like crazy, but we're good. I have a plan. Not really, it's not that I have a plan, it's just not it's not too difficult to record these. As you know, I deliberately made the structure of this podcast such that it would be able to fit basically anything that I was doing, right? And I have not ridden in a very long time, and that is not customary toward me, but there have been a lot of crazy stuff that has occurred to me of recently, and uh in particular uh for reasons that I will probably delve into in the near future. I am in a sabbatical that I expect to last for a year after I was unexpectedly told that my contract role was gonna run out in the place that I was currently working in. Now, some of you might be sad to hear that news. However, when I received that news, it actually came as a breath of fresh air to me because I was actually quite excited to enter this period of time where I would be able to reclaim an unstructured form of existence, a form of existence in which for my life was not dedicated to the nine to five structure, and sort of a return to childhood, so to speak, you know, to this idealized period of time in which I didn't measure time at all. I still have very vague memories of what it was like when I didn't understand the exact length of time that five minutes was, and I'm sort of startling to starting to settle into that, right? And uh it's been a slow going as of recording this. I'm roughly I'm almost, I want to say like two or three weeks into my sabbatical, and based on you know what I've been told, generally speaking, uh, that's the amount of time that it takes for the body to truly accustom itself to the new rhythms of the life that it is acquiring. And in light of this, I decided that I wanted to start engaging in a lot of the things that I didn't do before, right? Or a lot of the things that I really love doing that on paper were part of my identity, but ever since I had entered the workforce, I had had a very difficult time integrating into my life, despite the fact that these are activities that form the core of my identity. And among these is reading, and this is an embarrassing admission to basically everyone listening to Writer Wander, but despite this being a writing podcast, it's not about writing, but it's still a writing podcast, try to square that in your head. But despite that, Wander has had a very difficult time with his reading habit ever since he has entered the workforce. I have had a very rough time of it. I I am embarrassed at the fact that what is essentially the genre that I own the most books of epic fantasy, the genre in which I write the most, and the genre which, you know, in on paper I enjoy the most, it is the genre that in the last few years I've had a very difficult time getting into because these are stories that often involve a great deal of patience. They often take a slow burn approach to storytelling, and they require a lot of time and commitment in large chunks, right? And I'm not saying it's impossible to read epic fantasy while having a full-time job, but I think that as far as books and and novels go, there was a particular reason why I found myself often gravitating towards sword and sorcery fiction or other shorter forms of fantasy, because aside from the fact that those forms of fantasy are super cool, super rad, and super fun for their own right, they are much more digestible for someone who had as hectic of a schedule as I did. And I'm even talking about the fact that I was having a hard time reading in general, but I was having a pretty chill job. But now, with that chill job over, one of the things that occurred to me that I knew that I wanted to do was that I wanted to start to chip at that backlog of used books that I keep picking up from bookstores and that I barely keep reading, among which I have a lot of just amazing epic fantasy volumes that I haven't given the time of day, novels that I keep staring at on my bookshelf, and then I'm just like ah, maybe I'll I'll get to it later, or something like that. And I'm proud to say that I was able to finish one of these, and I was able to finish it in two days, and it's the first time in a while that I've been able to finish a novel, well, two to three days, right? But that I finished a novel in less than a week. It's been a very long time since I done that, and we're talking about basically it's a 300-page book, it's not not the largest fantasy book, but the book that I'm talking about is the book that's the subject of today's podcast, and it is volume one of Gwen Saga. So I want to say that memory is hazy. I think I bought this book when I was swinging around an old used bookstore that came up in my unexpected trip to Delaware last year, where I was just there for like a day or something, and it turned out that we were actually right next to a massive bookstore that was literally better than anything I have in the place that where I'm from, so I had to start looking for it. And before I stumbled into this novel, I had already known a little bit about the backstory of it because I'm a huge fan of the manga and anime called Berserk. This is, you know, it's a very famous manga in anime. Highly recommend it, very graphic, very, very dark fantasy-esque. But I remember when I was first getting into Berserk, one of the first little tidbits and fun facts that I learned was that uh Kintara Mura, the author of Berserk, was actually inspired by the woman that wrote this book, uh, this long series of fantasy novels. We're talking like a hundred and thirty plus novels, of only five of which have been officially translated to English. There may or may not be uh another hundred novels fan-translated through um through machine AI, but uh I I don't I uh I plead the fifth on that one. But there's only five that are officially available to the public, right? And these are books, these are books that are massively influential in Japanese science fiction, the fantasy speculative fiction. And this is again, I love reading these kind of foreign classics because one of the things that I find very interesting is how oftentimes the literary canon across different cultures and across different places varies so significantly, right? You know, this 130-plus volume series that is still ongoing to this day, even after the author has died, this is a staple of Japanese fantasy, yet, virtually in every other part of the world, it is it is unknown. Nobody, nobody knows about this. This is a very localized Japanese phenomenon, and I just find it very interesting because imagine if we could say the same thing about some of the classics from our genre. Imagine if we could say the same thing about the Lord of the Rings or Conan. I actually don't know how far Conan's international reach is. That's actually an interesting question to make, but Gwyn is essentially a character on that level in the Japanese consciousness, and yet it is a deeply insular phenomenon. But that's enough backstory, right? What are we getting at with this book, right? Well, Gwyn saga, to put it bluntly, and as the first volume of the entire series uh alludes to, is a story about a muscular swordsman that mysteriously has attached to his head the head of a leopard. He, you know, think about like this really buff dude, and he's like this perfectly sculpted Adonis. It's very interesting. The book goes out of its way to point this out that you know this guy would be like the perfect, the platonic form of a Giga Chad, with the exception of the fact that for some mysterious reason that is not revealed in any of the five volumes that are available in the West, this person has been affixed with the head of a leopard, and it's it's clearly a mask, it's it's clearly not something that's part of his body because he has an otherwise human body. However, in all attempts that are made to detach that head from his torso prove completely unsuccessful, right? And Gwyn, the first we hear of him, he just random he's just randomly dropped into into a forest, and he has zero memory of anything. All that he remembers are his name and the word that may or may not maybe a nation, it might be a name, it's called Aura, right? Later on, we're gonna talk a little bit. I I did some digging on Japanese Wikipedia. We I don't know why I said it like that. I did some digging on Japanese Wikipedia, yeah, on Japanese on the Japanese internet, there's some little neat tricks and trick uh tips and tricks that I like to do there, and I was able to find what I think is a little more extra information on that because again, as I said in a prior episode, I don't care about spoilers. If you care about spoilers, then you're listening to the wrong show because I I will proceed later on to spoil a lot of stuff. But the main plot of this first volume basically follows around the fact that you know Gwyn wakes up in this forest, and coincidentally, he is stumbled upon by two twins that are the princes of a fallen kingdom called Paros, and Paros is sort of like this this theocratic monarchy. I've only read the first volume, so I don't know too much about the overall world building, but the impression I have is that this is a world in which there is a middle land, and in this middle land there are three major powers, right? The the book calls them three kingdoms often, but it's not really correct to call them three kingdoms because there are many sub-nations in each of these kingdoms, and I suppose it's more proper to say there are three empires. There's Paros, which has recently fallen, and there's I think Mongol. I know I think Mongol is a sub-nation of uh I think Gora or something like that. I think it's the nation is called Gora, but Gora is divided into three archduchies that are kind of independent from one another, and the archduchy that has invaded Paros is called Mongol, right? And there's a third country called Chironia, which doesn't figure too much into this volume but becomes very important later on because Gwyn becomes king of that place. I haven't gotten to that, but uh like I just said I did a little bit of snooping, and we're gonna go back to a little bit to the subject of spoilers because this is a very important example of how looking up the spoilers to a storyline actually made me more interested in continuing the whole thing, right? But more on that later. And basically, these two twins they stumble upon Gwyn and they're being chased by Mongol, uh and it's clearly the Mongol are clearly inspired by the Mongols from our history, at least in naming. And they're being chased down by these black knights that belong to the Mongol armies who are trying to, you know, they're trying to capture the princess because the local lord of the castle who serves Gora, uh, he's he's she he wants to do something with them. Uh he thinks that they the Kingdom of Paros has access to ancient technology, and this baron he wants to capture them so that he can harness that understanding. And obviously, a bunch of stuff happens, and they as they stumble upon Gwyn, Gwyn naturally allies himself to them, and he proceeds to beat the crap out of all the people that are chasing them down. And then after they defeat the initial uh the initial forces, right, and they sort of like walk away, and they have this period where like the entire forest that they are in falls into dusk, and then they're basically ambushed by ghouls. And you have this really cool sequence, and this book has amazing illustrations, by the way, that come up with it. And you have like this really cool sequence where Gwyn and the children have to set fire, they have to set up a massive forest fire to simultaneously defeat the swarm of ghouls that is encroaching upon them, and an additional set of um of soldiers that are tracking them down so that they can escape uh with their lives, right? And something that I really liked about this book in particular is the setting, right? You'd think that this is just some like generic forest that, oh, what's the what's the big deal, man? What's up with this? Uh it's just that they're just stuck in a random forest, it's like a random frontier, it's the kind of place that you would typically open up a D campaign. But what I really like about it is that you can feel that this forest really is on the edge of civilization because the the story goes out of its way to point out the fact that there's something very otherworldly about this particular region of the world that they're in. Because, as we can see, there are there are ghouls, there are monsters lurking about, and in the description of the natural wildlife around them and the flora surrounding them, you can tell that there's there's just an eerie undercurrent, there's just something that's not right in the things that the our characters are experiencing and seeing, but obviously they have to they have to keep pushing forward because they don't really have uh any other direction in which they could be headed. But eventually, long story short, our characters are captured. They're captured and they're taken to a to the the keep in which we meet the main antagonist of this this volume who is the the baron or the the count that controls this particular castle. And he's described as this dude that is encased in deep black armor, and according to the local legends and what people are telling themselves, uh the reason he's encased in that armor is because if he takes off that armor, uh he will unleash a pestilence and a sickness that he's carrying with him that will spread fumes across the entire castle and will basically kill everyone. And I have to say that as far as the first villains of a series go, you know, this is I think this is a very refreshing taste. This was a series written in like the the 80s, but you know, it's very common for these kind of fantasy stories for the initial bad guy to be like this evil, evil minor nobleman who is just kind of like an asshole, but he's also like a pathetic dude. And what I found really refreshing about this is that he's not he's not a pathetic dude, right? He he is genuinely menacing, and you can tell that uh even though he rules with fear, you know, that fear is well warranted, right? It's not like some ugly, like bald dude that is overly decadent and uh is ruling based on name alone. No, it is a dude that is genuinely fearsome, and he's basically holding the entire castle hostage, right? And basically, Gwynne and the two the two the two siblings, Rinda, who is the sister who is more mature of the two uh compared to the brother, and Remus, who is the crown prince, he's kind of immature, they're taken to jail, but Rinda is pushed away separately. And uh while they're in jail, they meet another mercenary there who's locked on the other side of the cell. He doesn't do much, his name is Istvan, he doesn't do much in this volume, but according to what I've looked up, he becomes very important later on, naturally, because you know, if you're given a name, and especially if you're given a cool name, you're probably gonna be pretty important in the long the long-running story of a fantasy, but that's just me, right? And you know, skipping over a lot of stuff, right? Um, Rinda basically befriends another prisoner while when she's taken away, who's like this tiny, like monkey girl who comes from this barbaric people who speak like an incomprehensible uh language, who are called the SEM, and they live like on the border of this of this keep, and they start befriending one another. Gwyn, he's eventually taken to like this place where in like this very classic sort of sword and sorcery scenario, he is forced to fight like a giant ape. I don't know what obsession like 80s fantasy had with like fighting giant apes. You could probably do some racial commentary about that, but uh, I'm not I'm not gonna get into that, but uh do do as you as you wish. I just know that there was a Conan pastiche where he fought a giant ape for some reason in in the desert, and uh, I mean the like the scene is is is fucking red, like it's it's cool, like this gigantic, like evil demon ape, like looming over like this Giga Chad uh strong guy, and obviously Gwyn prevails over uh over this ape, and then a bunch of stuff happens after after those things happen, and eventually uh more people from a different tribe of the SEM start to run over and they do like a sudden assault upon the walls of the castle, and it is here where the entire plot starts to starts to climax because that's that's another thing. If you're noticing this book actually moves very quickly. One thing, one thing that I appreciate about Japanese light novels, and that I also don't like simultaneously, is that the text is very breezy, right? You can you often read the text and it's usually written in a very simple style. Sometimes I wonder if it's a translation issue because in a lot of light novels that I read it it can often feel like it's even bad writing, but it it that's just that's just me, right? But the advantage of that is that um you don't focus so much on the prose, but it goes very quickly. In this, in Gwyn saga, I felt that the prose was reasonably well done. It was relatively had a pretty good artistic merit, but it was still very breezy. It didn't lose that breezy quality, so it's still read with that quick-paced sword and sorcery, um, sword and sorcery style. You know, epic fantasy sword and sorcery style. And you know, before long, we're having like this super cool sequence where you know these the SEM and I have the SEM are like this these tiny three foot monkey people that are just they're just conquering the entire the entire keep. And then uh Gwyn and Remus manage to escape their cell and they go to save they go to save Rinda and they meet up with Rinda and the little monkey girl, and they do like this haphazard escape. Uh where the monkey girl can't really parlay on behalf of them because the SEM that are invading the keep are from another tribe that actually hates her tribe. So talk about luck. And basically just Gwyn just starts like splitting apart like all these tiny monkey people, and it is it is super cool, and uh it's pretty it's kind of funny when you're thinking about like this you know, this tall, like six-foot like leopard man just crushing like these man-led monkeys uh in a in a superior display of masculine dominance, something like just visceral about that, and eventually they go and they're about to escape, but they run into the count once more in the final showdown, and this is what I feel is the highlight of this volume because it actually pulled off a very cool twist that I was not expecting. And the twist was that the person that was the count all along, it wasn't the count, the original count had actually died of his disease a very long time ago. And the earlier in the story, I didn't mention this, but there was an apparition that appeared to Rinda and to the the little um the the little uh SEM girl, I think her name is Cinny, and uh it was an apparition of the Count, but it didn't do anything. And basically, what the characters later on realize is that that is actually the old spirit of the count that is still lingering in the halls of the of the castle, and it's sort of like mourning the fact that it has been taken over by an evil spirit uh a wraith that inhabits the the forest, right? You know, the there's speculation that maybe one one on one occasion in which the count had sent out a a scouting crew to find a cure for his uh his ailment, one of the scouts had been possessed by this evil wraith entity, and then this wraith entity eventually completely consumed the count before. And you know what's revealed is that once they take off the armor of the count, uh it's not that a disease spills over, there's just like this this complete darkness that is inside of the armor, it's not even a person that that is there, and that that's just a that's a very cool twist, right? It's very cool because it it reinforces the atmospheric storytelling that was going on with the you know, with the sort of swampy wilderness area that they were in, right? You know, these people are you know this this surrounding this is no longer just like a cool place that the evil fortress was about, but rather you are seeing how the you know the the atmosphere and the location in which the keep was placed in is having an active effect on the antagonist as such that it created the antagonist that they that we see now. Now, obviously, with a creature like this Wraith, there's nothing that their physical weapons can do. So the only thing that's left for them is to literally just run away and let the Wraith go crazy on destroying the Sen that are invading the uh the fortress, right? I don't know if the Wraith is gonna make a comeback in the rest of the story, or there's gonna be another antagonist that uh that follows them in the remaining four volumes that have been that have been translated. But I think it'll be really cool if the Wraith just like stays in its castle and it's just like it's just this thing that it's just part of the environment now, and it's like this self-enclosed, like cursed castle. But again, it was a twist that I wasn't at least personally, I was not expecting. I just thought that this count was gonna be like some generic one-off first volume baddie that was gonna be dispatched with uh you know by Gwyn being Giga Chad, but it it was a pretty it was a pretty good twist. And the story ends with our characters like going to the top of a tower and jumping into a river in which they have finally solidified their their escape, and that was the first volume of Gwyn's saga. And I have to say I was surprisingly impressed. I was not expecting this to be a particularly unique story, you know, it was a an 80s fantasy book, it inspired Berserk. I I guess I was kind of arrogant for not expecting the thing that inspired Berserk to be to be good, but this was a lot better than I thought it would be. Um, a long time ago, I started to watch the anime that this was based on. However, I think uh I don't know if I got bored or something, um, but I I wasn't able to finish it. Uh but I think that the book definitely does a lot more justice to the story that's being presented here and makes it a lot more interesting. But as I've alluded to before earlier in this discussion, what actually is motivating me to want to continue this story is the fact that I went ahead and looked up the spoilers. Now, you people can keep criticizing me and keep like judging me and stuff. Um, I'm speaking as if there's like a concerted effort of hatred against me, but it's not that at all. I just know that the popular opinion is that, oh, spoilers, bro, you need to respect spoilers. But let me tell you, the more information I look up about this story, the more I'm interested in continuing to read so that I can understand how these things work out. And on that point, I mentioned earlier that one of the few things that Gwynn remembers, aside from his name, is the word aura, right? And basically, I I did some snooping on Japanese internet, and it's very easy to do that. You just uh get a Japanese translation of whatever question you have, and you post it into Google. And what's very interesting about that is that when I started looking up information about Aura, I started learning in the Lord that later on it is revealed that the way the reason in which Gwyn has his leopard mask, it's not due to fantasy reasons, it's due to sci-fi reasons because Gwyn originally came from an advanced civilization that predated all of the entire medieval world in which this story is currently taking place in, and for some reason he was left adrift in this setting by his original masters, and uh it's speculated that Aura, and I'm not too sure about this because the the AI summaries kind of gave me some conflicting evidence, and uh, I am you there's there's like very vague details in the Wikipedia and the forum posts that I was able to find from the from the Japanese side, but what's very interesting about this is that um it is speculated that Aura might be sort of like a goddess among like a group of like five goddesses that is fighting off a demonic entity that become comes to prominence later on in the story, and so we're we're reaching like you know cosmic level stuff, right? And I just find it very interesting because that kind of like sci-fi fantasy mixture, that kind of trend, it's very cool to see that it wasn't unique to the West at the time. For those of you who are not aware, very early on in the genre's history, the distinction between science fiction and fantasy was very blurry. It was very common for you to have a story like uh, you know, like someone like Jack Vance's Dying Earth, which is a story that seamlessly melds sci-fi elements with uh with fantasy elements, and you have other things like Dragon Riders of Pern, which is a story that masquerades as a fantasy story, but when you look into the backstory, it is actually a sci-fi story, and the setting that it takes place on is like a sort of colony. So I just I find it very interesting that when I looked into the lore of Gwyn Saga, it turns out that in the deep past of Gwyn Saga, there was a catastrophe triggered what by what historians in the contemporary time considered to be a meteorite, but which in practice was actually a spaceship that fell from Gwyn's home planet. And that kind of detail, that's one of the things that I I love about like these vintage books, right? One of the cool things about early fiction, and this is why I absolutely recommend you to read old books, is because we often assume that old books are gonna be very boring because they're very by the numbers, they they follow the old formulas the way that they were expected to follow, but oftentimes it's it's the opposite, right? Oftentimes, what usually happens is that when you go far enough in a genre's history, you start running into books that don't neatly fit the mold of what that genre is supposed to be. You start running into books that are doing some weird stuff, but back in the day, it's not so much that it was weird, because the entire genre in and of itself was very weird. So, since the genre was new, and since there were no expectations or genre conventions upon which to play on, authors were able to experiment with very interesting ideas and very cool, very cool approaches to things, right? And you know, and I kept reading about Gwyn saga, basically, um Tyronea, which was one of the three great nations I mentioned earlier, Gwyn eventually becomes the king of that country, right? And uh he's uh you know, eventually the story shifts from a sort and sorcery style of genre, and it starts becoming into a more political um army fantasy um with bigger stakes and and bigger, you know, bigger things at risk. And that is that that you know, I I really like that kind of like epic narrative. And uh when I was looking into some research on the author of these novels, it is it is a woman, I think she died of cancer in the late uh late aughts or something or the early teens. I I forget now, but she had the goal for a long time of reaching 100 volumes, and oftentimes what you will hear in writing circles is that uh dude, you shouldn't you shouldn't aim at a given set of books because you're just going to artificially extend the story, and that's probably what what ended up happening here based on some of the information that that I saw. There's a lot of people that feel that um after a certain amount of volumes the stories were not as good as they as they used to be, though they still they still do say that they were they were overall good. But what's very interesting is that um plain devil's advocate, right? Sure, you are artificially extending the story, but there's just something cool about having a story that spans so many volumes, the scale, and the kind of attachment that you create to a story just based on the fact that it has that many values and that many volumes, it is something that something you know there's something to that. There's really something to that because when you're when you're spending so much time with a character and when you have so many volumes of content to play on, you can do so many things. Like I feel that you know when you give yourself the goal of writing like a hundred volumes to a story, you you get to a point where you you almost you might also have almost have to force yourself to start like doing random shit uh just to keep things new. And it forces you to you know just keep keep escalating things as as much as possible, and that's super cool. And that's something that I was thinking about with my with my brother a few days ago because we were playing a JRPG together, uh Tales of Rebirth, and and you know, it was a pretty solid game, but I've played a lot of Tales of Games before, a lot of games in that series, and I personally think that it was one of the weaker ones. However, despite the fact that I find it to be one of the weaker ones, I was reflecting on the fact that I'd spent a total of 45 hours cumulatively playing through that game, and even though I didn't feel the character work in that game was as strong as the other entries in the series, I still found myself missing the characters because um, you know, they were well written, they weren't as well written as other characters, but the fact that I had spent so much with those characters just wandering around, it almost created like this bond between them. And I think something similar could be happening in Gwyn Saga where you have so many books and you have like this this static character that's sort of like a rock that you can moor yourself onto and this you know this ongoing storyline because it's it's not finished, by the way. You know, you might think that she died and it's over, but no, it's all the contrary. She in her last wish, she she she asked for the story to be continued, and basically, to my understanding, the novels are they're they're by volume 149 by now, and it's being continued by different authors, and she's doing something very interesting with her setting. Well, she did, she's dead. But what she did is that basically after finishing her story, she she you know gave it over to all these authors so that it's functionally becoming almost like an expanded universe. And I just think that's a very it's a very interesting approach, right? Very similar to what happened with Conan with Robert E. Howard, where after he died, a bunch of other authors came in, and because the character was so iconic, they just started doing their own stuff with it. And I know there's a lot of hate toward that kind of pastiche work, but I kind of I kind of like it because a lot of people feel that it diminishes the the original character. But typically, what I've noticed with Conan is that uh usually um what ends up happening is that you know since Robert E. Howard's original work is so good, it still stands apart from all the other pastiche stuff that was created concerning concerning Conan, right? But uh that was my very long and rambly way to say that uh I do recommend that you should read read Gwyn Saga if Berserk interests you. Um, you might be interested in picking up the five volumes and potentially looking if in some capacity official or unofficial, you may or may not be able to access uh the approximately the rest uh 130 volumes that may or may not have a translation somewhere out there. Wink wink nudge nudge, just kidding. Uh um but I I do I do recommend it. It's definitely it's it's worth a shot, it's a very interesting character, very compelling, and it's a very good look into what uh the Japanese culture behind fantasy fiction uh what it was formed by. So this is write or wander, keep wondering.