Foreword to the artbook for The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity
I'm slowly going through this book for fic (and fun, lbr) purposes, so here's an attempt at translating the foreword, which contains a few interesting details. Note: This is machine translation with human revision. Parenthetical and / additions are mine in order to clarify the terms, e.g. the Japanese terms from the original stories and the Chinese terms from this film. I'm not fluent enough in Chinese to firmly say that the translation is accurate—if I were, I would've just translated it entirely by myself—so please take everything with a grain of salt.
The original Chinese is pasted at the end.
阴阳师之晴雅集影视设定集 杨巍
The Art of The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity by Yang Wei
This World Is Worth Protecting – Director's Message
I was already a reader of the Onmyouji (The Yin-Yang Master) novels and have always really liked these stories. When the opportunity to direct an adaptation arose, I felt both happiness and immense pressure.
Master Yumemakura is a novelist who is a national treasure in Japan, and his works have had a significant influence around the world. At the time, the film Legend of the Demon Cat,* adapted from his novel Samon Kūkai, had already been released in China. Onmyouji is one of Master Yumemakura's most iconic works, so when I received the invitation to work on it, I was filled with both anticipation and pressure.
I'm very interested in the Onmyouji stories and the relationships among its characters. This work is filled with legendary tales and stories of the supernatural. Beyond these imaginative elements, what truly moves me is the emotions between humans, between humans and their shishen/shikigami, and between human and demons (yao)—emotions that are both unique and deeply touching.
During the adaptation process, we encountered two major challenges.
First, the original work of Onmyouji consists of a series of relatively self-contained episodes, with a concise and compact writing style. A single story on its own can't sustain a 120-minute feature film with the necessary setup, development, climax, and resolution. This was the primary challenge that we had to overcome.
In the end, we chose the core of one of the short stories, "The Eight-Hundred-Year-Old Nun" (Yaobikuni). This story tells of a woman named Yaobikuni who, at regular intervals, visits Seimei to ask him to help slay the Calamity Servant growing in her womb. But the serpent cannot be fully eliminated, as it is manifested from the obsessions and desires scattered throughout the human world. The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity (Qingyaji) expands upon this core to build the entire film, additionally incorporating elements from stories such as "The Hair Demon" and "The Mysterious Biwa of Genjou."
In short, we took the character relationships from the original and constructed a completely new story based on the existing premise and dynamic.
Second, the original is a Japanese-style story, and during adaptation we had to properly localize it so that the audience could better believe in and engage with it. So how did we preserve the essence of the original? We kept the set-up of the yin-yang master/onmyouji Qingming (Abe no Seimei) coming from Fusang (T/N: a mythical location sometimes identified with Japan), but transplanted the entire story's setting to ancient China. Boya, played by Deng Lun, represents a Chinese master (fashi), who both clashes and communicates with the onmyouji from Fusang. In the original, Minamoto no Hiromasa (Boya), as Seimei's close confidante, is consistently in a protected state and rarely takes the initiative to drive the plot forward. In the film, Boya's characterization inevitably had to change—this is the most significant departure from the original, but it makes Boya's character more appealing.
The concept of shikigami (shishen) is an intriguing element of the Onmyouji world. In the film, we chose to portray these creatures with actors, rather than employing full CG to simulate their inhuman appearances. However, presenting a shishen as simply "a human"** wouldn't be very creative, so figuring out how to make real humans look inhuman was another significant challenge for us.
Yumemakura Baku's original work is a novel characterized by a strong classical Eastern aesthetic. The greatest reward of this project was the opportunity to work with the creative team to transform every angle of this mysterious and elegant, yet dangerous and challenging, Eastern world from the written word into visual reality.
I believe that what audiences most want to see are emotions that resonate with Eastern sensibilities. This film focuses on a central theme—the idea of spending a lifetime, with unwavering devotion, waiting for one person. This is the most bittersweet emotional thread within the story. In modern times, devotion as intense as "to protect one person for a lifetime" is rarely seen. Yet precisely because it is so rare, it is precious. This long-overlooked type of emotion has the power to move us deeply, all the more so when set in a magnificent, fantastical world where humans and demons (yao) coexist.
Due to the pandemic, after work resumed our originally-scheduled 24 days of shooting scheduled was compressed into 18 days. This loss of nearly a quarter of the filming time resulted in a grueling experience for everyone.
Towards the end of filming, we were running on nothing but willpower. I recall that during the last day or two before wrapping, Deng Lun's schedule was extremely tight. He might have only two hours of rest after finishing one shoot, only to then shoot for nearly twenty hours straight. At the time, Deng Lun told me that he only needed a quick shower to refresh himself. In the last few days of filming, that's how everyone on the crew was pushing through. We simply refused to let up, and driven by that our conviction, we persisted until the end. If we had left anything undone, we knew we would have regretted it later.
A decade has passed since I made my first film. By the time I shot The Yin-Yang Master, I was no quite as headstrong as I'd been before, and my emotional expression had become more restrained and subtle. If I had stood still for those ten years, it wouldn't have been a good thing. I enjoy growth—growth means I'm not stuck in a rut, and I enjoy the unknown.
I hope that, through the film The Yin-Yang Master, more people can feel the warmth of protection, come to understand that this world is worth protecting, and know that there is always someone quietly watching over you. I also hope that everyone can find their own joy in this fantastical journey.
— Guo Jingming***
*Oddly, the Japanese actor who plays the monk in the Chinese movie "Legend of the Demon Cat" plays Hiromasa in the 2024 Onmyouji Zero (which is basically an "alternate first meeting: school" AU)
**I cannot tell you how much I wanted to translate this as "some guy"
***Yeah I know of the many issues with this director, but here we are
ORIGINAL FOLLOWS BELOW （I used OCR on this so there may well be mistakes that I haven't caught)
~*~Boya Can't Look Away From That Fox-Like Smile ~*~
I recently watched Yin Tang Masters: Dream of Eternity and got a bit obsessed with learning to draw these two - it's always fun to trying and put a real person's likeness into my style and I think I succeeded here with Qingming and Boya <3
Also this movie is fantastic, I cannot recommend it enough for the characters, the story, and the special effects!
I ended up rewatching The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity with a friend who had never seen it this weekend, and I am SHOCKED to report there isn't a single "oh no, the guy I had a one-night stand with the night before I started my new job is here" fic in this fandom.
I recognize that sometimes we simply must cook our own food, but since I don't have time to write such a thing in full right now, here is the vaguely sketched out snack-sized version:
Modern AU
Qingming and Boya have both been hired to work on the TV show debut of an idol/pop star (aka the princess)
Qingming is her stylist
Boya is security
They arrive in Hengdian the night before and meet in a bar
There is a group of stunt performers doing enthusiastic but increasingly drunk karaoke (they appear to be working on some xianxia show, judging by the way they keep calling each other by their character names of Killing Stone, Snow Hound, Mad Painter, etc.)
Killing Stone in particular appears to have just gone through a breakup and decides to perform an overly emotional rendition of a ballad
Boya makes a pained face, Qingming tells him to be more sympathetic, Boya insists if he was truly heartbroken he could at least get the words right
Qingming challenges him to do better
Boya does
Qingming has to, you know, reward him
The next day...
Boya wakes up alone, which he is not annoyed about, tyvm, much less awkward, he can go about his morning routine in peace, etc.
He arrives at the studio and starts getting shown around by the princess-actress's manager and introduced to all the people who will be on her regular team this time...
...including her new stylist, Qingming
Well, now it's awkward
As yet undetermined plot would have to happen from here, but it would definitely have to include:
Qingming in work mode, being extremely flirty with everyone (because he thrives on industry gossip)
Qingming's little disappointed look after Boya calls him scandalous for hanging around in his underrobes with his hair down with a bunch of male spirit guardians has me feeling some kind of way. That was a test of the waters, hey Boya just teasing just joking but haha what if, you know, what if boys, how would you feel if boys?? and Boya is like Why are you in your underwear again. Why are you drinking in the morning again when there's demons to catch and a murder to solve. I know you're teasing me. I'm leaving now. I'm going to go do very important serious things and not examine my feelings on the subject of you and boys at all. And Qingming is like Oh. And he doesn't try to pretend it's funny because Boya's already gone so there's no point and he just sighs and watches him leave. And it's the same way he tests him about the hulijing thing, and there's such a loneliness in it, and they're both trying to protect themselves and neither of them are exactly swimming in friends and they don't know how to let people in. And Boya can't express himself in words well and the only way he can manage to express "I'm letting you in, I trust you" is "here's literally my entire being." Fuck. Who doesn't wish a giant snake monster would show up and give us a good excuse to be emotionally and literally vulnerable to a crush/friendcrush. Don't lie. Having a crush is so embarrassing.
I call this: Boyfriends have an emotional goodbye and forget one of them can teleport
(I’ve been thinking about yym lately and suddenly couldn’t remember if I ever posted this on here? So here it is! I did it the night after I watched this movie for the first time and this scene was just so funny to me, they’re so dramatic and for what? xD I love them)
