The Nine Cloud Dream

"The Nine Cloud Dream is attributed to Kim Man-jung (although in my own research, I think that’s not as clear as people think it is), and it has all the hallmarks of a very erudite work written by a yangban aristocrat. It’s a Buddhist tale about reincarnation and sin and redemption and so on, which gets a little bit repetitive, but that’s just the way a lot of those stories went – it’s very formalized. There are certain themes that are repeated over and over again, with an emphasis on certain virtues that come straight out of Confucian philosophy, so it’s using a Buddhist framework to talk about Confucian ideals. It’s about a monk who’s trying to gain enlightenment, but at some point he dies and transitions into another life. He leads this entire other life, and during the course of it, he encounters a series of women with whom he has various different kinds of relationships. And then the whole thing turns out to be a classic of the dream narrative genre, because he wakes up and realizes that this entire life that he had was a mere dream. He didn’t die and wasn’t reborn as this man, and the entire thing held a lesson for him about the nature of life and death and reincarnation and so on. It’s way more didactic and repetitive and formulaic than the fun Story of Hong Gildong . But it’s the prime example of fiction that comes from the upper classes. And it is a full-length novel – if The Story of Hong Gildong was written today, its length would label it as a novella. When I was picking these books for you, I left out other stories that I like – The Story of Jeong Unchi , for example. But for the purpose of your readers getting the full perspective of fantastic tales from Korea, I felt obligated to include one from the commoners and one from the aristocracy."