Publisher's Synopsis
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 40 manuscript and printed versions, long and short, in the vernacular and literary Chinese. Peter H. Lee provides a 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.
