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The Record of the Black Dragon Year

Author:
Translated by:
Publisher: , 2000
Original title: 임진록
Link to online store *

From the publisher’s website:

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 literary Chinese. Peter H. Lee provides the first accurate and readable translation of this cultural text in English.

In the Introduction, Lee traces the rise of popular storytelling in late Choson times, analyzes ten recurrent motifs shared by the most extant versions in the vernacular, and firsthand eyewitness accounts of Korean captives in Japan along with similar accounts of the war in the records of dream journeys and kasa poetry.

Peter H. Lee is professor of Korean and comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Difficult to obtain except from LTI Korea.

Entry on Goodreads.com here.

* Where the book is available from a number of sources, they are prioritised as follows: (1) Amazon UK site, or Bookshop.org for the more recent uploads (2) Amazon US site (3) Other sites in US or Europe, including second-hand outlets (4) LTI Korea, where the title is advertised as available from there (5) Onlines stores in Korea. Links to Bookshop.org and Amazon UK site contain an affiliate code which, should you make a purchase, gives a small commission to LKL at no additional cost to you.