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Sep. 16th, 2025 09:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI liked the Korean movie Phantom (2023) enough that I decided to hunt down the novel on which it's based, Mai Jia's The Message -- in large part out of curiosity about whether it's also lesbians.
The answer: ... sort of! The lesbians are not technically textual but there's a bit of Lesbian Speculation and then a big pointed narrative hole where lesbians could potentially be. It is, however, without a doubt, Women Being Really Weird About Each Other, to the point where I'm considering it as a Yuletide fandom (perhaps even moreso than the movie, where the women are also weird about each other but in a more triumphant cinematic way and less of an ambiguous, psychologically complex and melancholic way. you know.)
The plot: well, as in the movie, there's a spy, and there's the Japanese Occupation, and there's a Big Haunted House where we're keeping all the possible spies to play mind games with until somebody fesses up. Because the book is set in 1941 China, there are actually three factions at play -- the Japanese and collaborators, the Communists and the Nationalists -- and for the whole first part of the book, fascinatingly enough, we are almost entirely in the head of the Japanese officer who's running the operation and choreographing all the mind games in an attempt to ferret out the Communist agent in his codebreaking division. The result is sort of a weird and almost darkly funny anti-heroic anti-Poirot situation, in which Hihara is constantly engineering increasingly complicated locked-room scenarios designed to get the spy to confess like the culprit in a Thin Man movie, and is constantly thwarted by his suspects inconveniently refusing to stick to the script, even when presented with apparently incontrovertible evidence, placed under torture, lied to about the deaths of other members of the party, etc. etc.
The suspects include several variously annoying men, plus two women whom we and everyone else are clearly intended to find the most interesting people there: quiet and competent Li Ningyu, cryptography division head, mother of two, whom everyone knows is semi-separated from an abusive husband, and who somehow manages to keep calmly slithering her way out of every accusation Hihara tries to stick on her; and her opposite, loud bratty chic Gu Xiaomeng, whom Hihara would very much like to rule out as a suspect as quickly as possible because she's the daughter of a very wealthy collaborator, and who seems moderately obsessed with her boss Li Ningyu For Some Reason.
Both book and movie spend, like, sixty percent of their length on this big house espionage mind games scenario and then abruptly take a left turn, with the next forty percent being Something Completely Different. In the film this left turn involves DRAMATIC ROMANTIC ACTION HEROICS!!!! so I was quite surprised to find that the book's left turn instead involves the author stopping to explain that everything he has written is according to the version of the story that he was told by Li Ningyu's husband, in which Li Ningyu heroically sacrificed herself to get a warning message out to her comrades, but now it turns out that the elderly Gu Xiaomeng has quite a different accounting of events in which she heroically got the message out to Li Ningyu's comrades, so he's off to get her side of the story instead!
Confusingly, the translation of the book that I read says that the original version (ending with the first narrative, before the old-lady-Gu-Xiaomeng section) was completed in 2007 and the sections are listed as revisions with later dates, but as far as I can tell the whole book (revisions included?) was originally published completely in Chinese in 2007 ... this may just be an extra layer of metafiction to confuse the English-language audience specifically. Anyway I do enjoy unreliable narrators and conflicting accounts of historical events, especially when those events involve women getting to spy vs. spy around each other in an emotionally fraught fashion, so broadly speaking I was content with my experience.
(However, I don't really care at all about the third and final amended section which draws out some more side character and villain backstory. I understand that it's making important points about the messy politics and attitudes of the era but also, Li Ningyu and Gu Xiaomeng are not there.)
The answer: ... sort of! The lesbians are not technically textual but there's a bit of Lesbian Speculation and then a big pointed narrative hole where lesbians could potentially be. It is, however, without a doubt, Women Being Really Weird About Each Other, to the point where I'm considering it as a Yuletide fandom (perhaps even moreso than the movie, where the women are also weird about each other but in a more triumphant cinematic way and less of an ambiguous, psychologically complex and melancholic way. you know.)
The plot: well, as in the movie, there's a spy, and there's the Japanese Occupation, and there's a Big Haunted House where we're keeping all the possible spies to play mind games with until somebody fesses up. Because the book is set in 1941 China, there are actually three factions at play -- the Japanese and collaborators, the Communists and the Nationalists -- and for the whole first part of the book, fascinatingly enough, we are almost entirely in the head of the Japanese officer who's running the operation and choreographing all the mind games in an attempt to ferret out the Communist agent in his codebreaking division. The result is sort of a weird and almost darkly funny anti-heroic anti-Poirot situation, in which Hihara is constantly engineering increasingly complicated locked-room scenarios designed to get the spy to confess like the culprit in a Thin Man movie, and is constantly thwarted by his suspects inconveniently refusing to stick to the script, even when presented with apparently incontrovertible evidence, placed under torture, lied to about the deaths of other members of the party, etc. etc.
The suspects include several variously annoying men, plus two women whom we and everyone else are clearly intended to find the most interesting people there: quiet and competent Li Ningyu, cryptography division head, mother of two, whom everyone knows is semi-separated from an abusive husband, and who somehow manages to keep calmly slithering her way out of every accusation Hihara tries to stick on her; and her opposite, loud bratty chic Gu Xiaomeng, whom Hihara would very much like to rule out as a suspect as quickly as possible because she's the daughter of a very wealthy collaborator, and who seems moderately obsessed with her boss Li Ningyu For Some Reason.
Both book and movie spend, like, sixty percent of their length on this big house espionage mind games scenario and then abruptly take a left turn, with the next forty percent being Something Completely Different. In the film this left turn involves DRAMATIC ROMANTIC ACTION HEROICS!!!! so I was quite surprised to find that the book's left turn instead involves the author stopping to explain that everything he has written is according to the version of the story that he was told by Li Ningyu's husband, in which Li Ningyu heroically sacrificed herself to get a warning message out to her comrades, but now it turns out that the elderly Gu Xiaomeng has quite a different accounting of events in which she heroically got the message out to Li Ningyu's comrades, so he's off to get her side of the story instead!
Confusingly, the translation of the book that I read says that the original version (ending with the first narrative, before the old-lady-Gu-Xiaomeng section) was completed in 2007 and the sections are listed as revisions with later dates, but as far as I can tell the whole book (revisions included?) was originally published completely in Chinese in 2007 ... this may just be an extra layer of metafiction to confuse the English-language audience specifically. Anyway I do enjoy unreliable narrators and conflicting accounts of historical events, especially when those events involve women getting to spy vs. spy around each other in an emotionally fraught fashion, so broadly speaking I was content with my experience.
(However, I don't really care at all about the third and final amended section which draws out some more side character and villain backstory. I understand that it's making important points about the messy politics and attitudes of the era but also, Li Ningyu and Gu Xiaomeng are not there.)
no subject
Date: 2025-09-17 03:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-25 12:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-17 06:12 am (UTC)Despite being lesbian-free, that part of the plot sounds amazing.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-25 12:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-25 02:11 am (UTC)Understood! I misapprehended the distribution of the plot.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-20 03:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-25 12:40 am (UTC)