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ryin-silverfish · 1 month ago

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Keisei Suikoden: Genderbent Water Margins

This is probably Part 2 of the "Obscure Vernacular Novels Spotlight" series. Dunno if there's gonna be a Part 3, because most obscure novels stay obscure for a reason. Which is often formulaic boredom. And I'm only picking out the fun ones.

(Also, my main interest is still Ming-Qing vernacular novels, but since I'm doing a final project about Keisei Suikoden for this semester's class, I may as well use the post as Draft 0.)

...

"Is this the Edo Japan equivalent of FGO making historical figures and deities into anime girls?" I thought, when I first came across a Chinese summary of the novel several years ago.

Then I learned that the author, Kyokutei Bakin, has indeed appeared in FGO as an anime girl.

As the title suggests, this fan novel of Water Margins has made all the male 108 heroes into heroines, and the female characters into guys...but the changes go further.

Specifically, Bakin has localized the entire setting, rewriting the storyline so that it took place in Kamakura Japan instead. (Hey, it's even contemporary to Northern Song!) Kinda like how Konami's first Suikoden game put the 108 heroes into a medieval fantasy setting.

Which means:

All the 108 characters got their unique Japanese names, sometimes sharing one or two characters with their original inspirations but not always.

Daoist characters became Shinto priestesses, yamabushi, and onmyoji.

Beef dishes that appeared in the original novel were replaced with poultry and fish because Edo Japan had a ban on livestock meat.

The Genpei War and other rebellions in its aftermath were featured in the backstory of a bunch of female bandits, who belonged to defeated clans, and many of the 108 heroines were associated with the Minamoto Clan.

Almost every character got genderbent. Which means the damsels in distress from the original novel become bishonen in distress, female bandits would kidnap men and force them into marriages, etc.

The rough outline of the story goes like this: an arrogant female official, while trying to find the famous priestess Murokai (fem! Heavenly Master Zhang) in the Kumano mountains to dispel a plague, released the 108 vengeful ghosts of unmarried courtesans mentioned in the Manyoshu anthology, who reincarnated into our 108 heroines.

After a timeskip, in the capital, the Shirabyoshi dancer Kamegiku (fem! Gao Qiu) has gained the favor of Emperor Go-Toba, both of whom were real historical figures.

During his reign, women skilled in various martial arts were selected to train in the Female Warrior Training School, and after offending Kamegiku, one of the head trainers, Ayaosa (fem! Wang Jin) was forced to flee with her aging mother.

During their escape, she encountered the spunky tomboy daughter of a village chief, Fusenryu Komorode ("Komorode the Diving Dragon", fem! Shi Jin), and taught her the eighteen martial arts after defeating her in a duel...

We then got to Otatsu of Hanagara (fem! Lu Zhishen), my favorite of the genderbent characters——A plump, dark-skinned lady with a fierce temper and love for sake, able to effortlessly move a 45 kg mortar around.

She became a fugitive after she killed the mean usurer widow and salted fish vendor, Kaina, with a single punch, to save the male courtesan Yasanosuke and his mom.

Then she was made a Buddhist nun and took on the name Myotatsu, but got expelled from her first temple for acting exactly like the original Lu Zhishen: getting drunk and eating meat, fistfighting a Jizo statue outside the temple gate and bringing the entire small shrine down, and beating up the nuns who tried to stop her.

"I'm adept at explaining the nature of cause and effect: Fuck Around and Find Out." ——Myotatsu, right before rescuing the village head's pretty son from a forced marriage to the local bandit queen

The novel does have a main plot: while Kamegiku was playing the temptress in Kyoto, Hojo Masako ruled as the "Nun Shogun" in Kamakura, and had essentially usurped the Minamoto Clan by placing her son, Yoriie, under house arrest and later assassinating him.

Thus, instead of robbing Cai Jing's birthday present, the 108 heroines were kidnapping Princess Sanze, the youngest daughter of Yoriie, to protect her from the Hojo regents and restore Minamoto control.

Sadly, we don't know how the plot concludes.

Bakin had gone blind in his old age, relying entirely on his daughter-in-law to transcribe his oral accounts, and since he was focused on finishing his most famous epic novel, Chronicle of the Eight Dogs Heroes (Nanso satomi hakken-den), Keisei Suikoden had taken a backstage and is never finished.

Some highlights:

-Sakurado of Torano-o (fem! Lin Chong) got fucked over because Kamegiku wanted to take her husband for herself. Her husband, Nansei, is a pretty twink monk and one of her disciples. He's timid, delicate, and has no interest in women, but loved Sakurado platonically and was in turn supported by her, who never looked down on him.

-Fushishiba (fem! Chai Jin), a.k.a. Oritaki no Sho, is descended from a member of the Taira Clan who owed a debt to Yoritomo, and was granted various honors and titles after the war.

-fem! Chao Gai's name is Kocho, which translates literally to "Little Butterfly". It might be a pun, since Chao and Cho sound kinda similar. And yes, she did lift an entire stone pagoda and carry it to her village to protect the villagers from the local yokai.

-Fittingly enough, "Sasuno Miko Medogi" (fem! Gongsun Sheng) is an onmyoji of the Abe lineage, who can manipulate Shikigami to summon winds and clouds.

-Oohako (fem! Song Jiang) murdering male! Yan Poxi is...surprisingly cathartic, not gonna lie. For context, Yan Po was not genderbent, but she abused Oohako's generosity to try to set her up with her son, a Joruri actor named Gidakichi, in an attempt to leech off her money.

-And while she's unwittingly offering patronage to their performances out of social obligation, Gidakichi was having an affair with her assistant, Adako (fem! Zhang Wenyuan), and being a stain on her reputation.

-After a very awkward and uncomfortable night at their house and Gidakichi being a creep to her, she accidentally left a pouch containing Kocho's letter of gratitude (because she alerted them to an incoming arrest) in their bedroom.

-Gidakichi found the letter and tried to use it to blackmail her into not only approving his marriage to Adako and covering the full expense, but also giving him the 300 gold mentioned in Kocho's letter (a gift she rejected).

-At which point she finally had enough and stabbed the guy to death. As you can see, the plot beats are mostly the same, but I like it better than the original.

-Why? Because 1) Yan Po's intent to leech off their patron is made a lot more obvious, and 2) instead of Yan Poxi (understandably) having no intention of sleeping with Song Jiang due to his cold neglect, and Song Jiang getting pissed at her for that?

-The dynamic is reversed. Gidakichi had no love for Oohako, and the feeling was mutual. Yet when she was pressured into spending the night in the same room by his mom, she was the one who kept a polite distance while he tried to force himself on her.

-Takeyo (fem! Wusong) is said to be 6 ft tall, with a dignified appearance that resembled the famous Tomoe Gozen from the Tale of Heike. Before she met Oohako, though, she was also short-tempered and prone to violence.

-Because Japan doesn't have tigers, the tiger Takeyo killed was a tiger cub gifted to the local lord by emissaries from Joseon Korea, which had escaped captivity upon reaching adulthood.

-Just like Wu Song, she avenged her sister, Butayo's murder at the hands of Kiresuke (male! Pan Jinlian) the abusive freeloader husband and his mistress, Okei of Seimonya (fem! Ximen Qin).

-Not gonna lie, the original Pan Jinlian and her Plum in the Golden Vase incarnation are both fascinatingly terrible people. But, just like Gidakichi, Kiresuke managed to outdone her through sheer creep factor during his failed attempt at seducing Takeyo and pinning the blame on her.

-Bakin generally tried to tune down the gore and cannibalism in Water Margins, as well as the slaughter of innocents and random passersby. Even Rikiju (fem! Li Kui) is slighty less of a indiscriminate murderhobo, and the targets of her killing spree were limited to samurai guards.

-That said, they still killed the corrupt official Ikken (Huang Wenbing)'s entire family by setting fire to his mansion, and preserved his head in a jar of sake after Rikiju killed him.

-Instead of receiving the three divine scrolls from the Mystic Lady of the Nine Heavens, Oohako received a single scroll from Benzaiten.

-Because of the aforementioned lack of tigers in Japan, Rikiju killed 4 giant "mountain dogs", a.k.a. Japanese wolves with unusual stripe patterns on their fur, after they devoured her elderly mom.

Final Thoughts

I'm not a fan of most genderbent AUs because oftentimes, it doesn't add anything meaningful to the original premise, or alter the character personality too much to the point of losing all resemblance to their counterpart.

Keisei Suikoden, however, is a pre-modern example of a genderbent adaptation done well.

The heroines are as badass, colorful, and violent as their male counterparts, the entire premise has been localized in a manner that's both funny and interesting, and the rewrite + deletion of certain story beats have actually removed many elements of Water Margins that do not sit well with a modern audience.

Also, I'll totally play a Keisei Suikoden RPG game, if the heroine designs stay true to the novel and they aren't all made into pretty anime girls.

A two -volume English translation can be found on Amazon, together with the Chronicle of the Eight Dog Heroes. There's also a free digital scan of the original Japanese print by the Harvard-Yenching Library.

#chinese literature #water margin #outlaws of the marsh #shuihu zhuan #FGO #fate grand order #kyokutei bakin #japanese novel #genderbend #japanese literature #suikoden

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