Characters are at their best and worst when they don’t come through the text (imagery included) with half-measures; and it’s these characters that possess tremendous power to rattle, narrative effects that aren’t to be ignored, but to be reckoned with.
After completing my re-read of the manga, Killing Stalking (which I’d be referring to as KS), my initial impression of the manga hasn’t changed: it’s somewhat middling in its handling of the narrative urgency, with stabs of brilliance in-between the mundane.
A fan of E.M. Forester, I’m in agreement with his stance on the valueless nature of endings: authors are headfast in their pursuit of marriage or death—or marriage with death, if you go by the lukewarm morbidity as it pertains to KS. I won’t go as far as to comically claim that the manga (Manhwa) was utterly ruined by its ending; however, it didn’t do its structural mishaps any favors.
The issue, as I’ve noticed with most mainstream narratives, is in the infant structure: Koogi (whom I may end up spelling as Kooji, occasionally) isn’t skilled enough to guide the transitional route between electrifying character-study and violently slow plot-driven drama—a mistake that cost the manga the greatness it deserved.
I truly have little patience for phrases such as “slow burn”, “taking its time”, and “setting up the world”: they’re stock phrases that mean very little, given how completely vague they are. (Also, I’d appreciate it if people stopped using the term [phrase?] “world-building” altogether as there are very few authors in the history of literature world-over, who’ve ever built worlds; drawing inspiration from existing content isn’t world-building; it’s the exact opposite; and in my experience, most just greatly enjoy copying others in their race to sound cultured.) Should it be an instance of self-reflection that vagueness, unless the narrative doesn’t warrant it, is the death of originality? Let’s call it novelty as I don’t believe that (almost) anything is original—every author is drawing from something else; and a glimpse at life is anything but novel. This isn’t a slight against Koogi (or the manga); it’s merely an observation; however, when you choose the mundane in every day, there have to be sparks of the extraordinary to bridge the gap between the real and imaginative. Did Koogi span this gap? Well, she didn’t fall into the pit between the two (as it occurred with Death Note’s writer, and it was a parodical mess), but it was hardly … intuitive.
The thing is, a narrative isn’t real-world—a fact that I’ve mentioned many a time. It’s drawn from it; it can inspire it; and it can even alter it; but there’s a marked difference between what’s real and what’s realism. The narratives that go for the former can’t do so without clutching the latter. It’s just the manner in which it’s supposed to work: I don’t need to see every thought in a character’s head; do you? I doubt that; and it’s this over-abundance of thoughts that spoiled the narrative, and the culprit character here is … Yoon Bum (Bum), not Oh Sangwoo (Sangwoo).
A scrawny fella, the othered boy, a social nuisance—Bum is so sensitive, quite selfish, and very withdrawn. All of this is expected given his past with his uncle—a man who considered Bum a surrogate for his mother; and it’s this aspect of surrogacy that defines him … till the very end. He’s always someone else, and that, narratively, creates a veil of disillusionment about him. That’s his character. It’s good enough. Neither extraordinary nor terrible, but that’s how he is to be defined: he illustrates the dull side of life, a life forgotten.
He’s, not unexpectedly, contrasted with Sangwoo’s showy vibrancy: he’s the younger one; the decadent one; the beautiful one. A social butterfly, he’s everything Bum is not, a fact which is compounded by his lithe and lissome physique—he towers over Bum (and others), literally and figuratively. He personifies life’s picturesque part, a part most desire; and that’s what makes it fascinating as it’s but a layer of persona over other personas.
But the devil is in the details: shoes, knives, and skirts—a playtime with mummy. What Bum left behind in his uncle’s playhouse awaits him inside the illusion of all that’s pretty: he’s turned back into a woman—only this time, it’s by a younger man he covets; hence, there’s very little difference between what becomes of him; it’s his bearing, a want, that’s altered; his circumstances are not, albeit he imagines that they are; so he comes back to the same place—a full circle. Like a love-struck naïve girl, he strokes himself at the thought of the unobtainable man (it almost read like an average female Fan-Fiction writer’s pastime; they enjoy projecting their sensibilities onto fictional characters to court the princes, as well; I found this delightfully hilarious). Unsatisfied, he longs to become a part of the life (of his savior) he can’t have; so he steals his way into Sangwoo’s house (of illusions), and that’s the beginning of his slow demise.
However, Sangwoo’s house is quiet, a dungeon of wonders, but they’re either hidden away in walls, basements, or baskets. He keeps tokens of his past, hauntings that he greatly enjoys. (There was an extra chapter in which a joker chased after Bum in his dreams while the labyrinth of walls hemmed him in—further and further; so the “wonderland” aspect is very nicely associated with Sangwoo’s nature, a well-hidden part, that’s at times child-like and at times gaudy.) Bum simply turns into another token for him; and that leads to an expected spiral down into the domain of his mother: he responds to Bum sexually, endeavoring to come to terms with his sexual nature that’s directed at women, a nature he can’t fully embrace; but he despises the pretty ones, for they remind him of his mother, and they’re brutally beaten, dismembered, and disposed of, one at a time. (He mentions that he only likes women with motherly instincts; but he occasionally turns into a mother for Bum, too; that cupboard show being one such instance where he reenacts his past for a joyful murder time.)
There’s an eroticism to Sangwoo’s nature that’s directed at his mother; and his sexuality is very masculine: he’s dominating, forceful, unrelenting; his larger sex organ is also a delightful touch (no one enjoys a man who’s not thick and long; so he’s the true “dream man” in every aspect). As he treats Bum like a needy little submissive woman, he occasionally grabs Bum’s hair and performs irrumation. He’s shown swooning, head in the clouds, imagining his mother, albeit unconsciously; however, it leads nowhere as while he develops a sense of love (not sexual love) towards Bum, it’s hard to imagine it being anything else but surrogacy. His mother is a haphazard blend of events (something Itachi ought to have been had Kishimoto not made the corporate blunder of bringing him back to life, thoughtlessly putting an end to the divide between a dutiful fascist and a loving brother); her past, a lost femininity, but her past isn’t of value as it’s the present (constructed from bits of events that Sangwoo experienced) wherein lies trouble.
Bum’s almost like a hunchbacked woman with softer, whiter legs, lips with occasional hints of lipstick, though he’s still very much a mild female to Sangwoo’s male aggression. This was a curious dichotomy Koogi presented: the beauty lies within flashes of violence, not lull; it exists with the man, not the woman; it defines the masculine, not the feminine. The feminine is illusion, weak, and vile. This isn’t a feminist criticism (I care very little about such things in the narratives); but Sangwoo’s perception overwhelms the narrative, though the narrative itself keeps gleefully lunging at the feminine; and that’s how the structure buckles under its masculine weight, a weight it was meant to carry till the end—and beyond.
While Sangwoo’s playing “house-house” with mummy, the fantastical nature of the playtime is lost when the narrative is aggressively shifted back to the everyday repeatedly. There’s, as I suggested before, a limit to how much of the everyday you can squeeze into the real of the realism. Once the limit is crossed, it starts to feel very dull in that you’re reading something that you’d already know of.
Repetition is not a technique that’s unheard of. Bum’s circumstances are circular, so everything keeps coming back to the same point over and over again. It’s a set number of responses, though human, that become a focal point of the narrative’s plot, punctuated with stabs of Sangwoo’s reactive aggression that puts a dress of “character-driven” on the narrative; but there aren’t enough of them to make this drab-colored woman bleed out completely; and it’s disappointing that the violence against women is not shown in anything but the after-math. Even the incident during which the CEO’s daughter is stabbed, the stabbing action is woefully tepid. I found the “brutality” in the manga to be fairly lukewarm, a facet that’s supposedly its selling point, when it shouldn’t have been.
Now, herein lies a risk in this venture: how long do you withhold the truth behind the persona; either you don’t show it (Sangwoo’s mother) or you conceal it artfully till it manages to ease in-between the mundane and maintains the clash that provides a jolt to wake up the narrative that responds to the overpowering influence that Sangwoo exerts upon it.
Unfortunately, the narrative’s framework is lost. The repetition doesn’t offer a progression or regression, but a stagnation, during which the same incidents of Bum’s “othering” are placed in a loop around events that are as drab as a clerk who’s died before a half-painted grey wall. When you’ve shown something once, there isn’t any need to show the same thematic loop all over again through an event that’s all but pointless without Sangwoo’s outrage. (How many times must I see Bum sulking, complaining, competing?) All of this is expertly handled through Seigen Irako’s enigmatic beauty (and stark viciousness that’s rooted in systematic class demarcations) in Shigurui (Death Frenzy) by the very brilliant Takayuki Yamaguchi. KS has none of that expansive world to complement its duller facets; they just stick out like a bleeding thumb.
While the whole idea of “there’s got to be a point!” is very sophomoric, there ought to be a point to the theme that you’ve undertaken; and if stagnation is the theme, it should come to its conclusion in a decisive manner, not like a sputtering halt of an old truck that’s run out of gas. What Koogi managed was a pile of revelations at the very end like some sort of “well, here’s how it happened, you see?”, and it was very unflattering to see it all unfold. Should I have been shown the comparative panels of Sangwoo’s show before Bum and Sangwoo’s mother’s show for him; was there any need for the silly explanation of “preservation” (it was very obvious that the mother was buried inside the wall of the room on the second floor as this is from where he heard the sounds; the clocks “tick-tock” made it that much plain); should I have been told that the stab wound was not well-placed under the mother’s chin, lending credence to Sangwoo’s story? There was no need for any of this as the narrative never went for the real and unreal that bleed into one another: the dichotomy was always very clear.
The “illusion” trips are a tad bit silly as they’re very easy to set apart from the “real”; and I can say that with certainty that that wasn’t Kooji’s intention. The shoes add very little to the nature of his mother’s influence. (He’s playing dress-ups with a scrawny man and fucking him in all available orifices as though he were a woman in heat; what do the shoes add to this morbidity which is as farcical as it’s delightful?) As the narrative trudges on, unsuccessfully trapped between the uneven crests and troughs of the slow-as-slug plot, it simply turns into a checklist of items that are meant to show that Sangwoo’s being … “haunted”, and the only thing that could’ve made the whole thing interesting was if Sangwoo had hit Bum’s bony buttocks with his mother’s shoe; and you can’t help but feel that this was written for an audience that’d require maps to locate their genitals into the very near future—I can only tolerate this childish spoon-feeding for so long.
The distractions (the detective’s silly past) make up for voluminous clichés that should never have been awarded this much courtesy; and between all this, Sangwoo’s narrative was pushed till the very end; and then it was stab after stab after stab of things that were as obvious as Bum’s dull demeanor.
The mishandling of the title, Killing Stalking, only exasperates the issues. The “killing” is from Sangwoo and the “stalking”, from Bum—very easy to understand; the latter, on the other hand, apparently, also implies the “stalking” of the past, and I can’t help but chuckle at this use of wording (from Koogi) as the narrative doesn’t quite reach even the lower-most heights of personification to provide any weight to this claim; and as a result, Sangwoo’s death feels … quite cheap. Think of it this way: there’s a scene of a rollercoaster ride, and the crest is quite high; let’s call it climax; the reach to that peak is slow, but the anti-climax, naturally, is a violent hurl down to the trough. That is what’s missing in KS; that is the mistake; that is what doesn’t support the ideas in infancy at the start. It just ends on a whimper, for which the narrative had no support (even as a child, Sangwoo was shown wailing). I’d keep stating this with more force: narratives aren’t real life; they merely offer glimpses of it.
Sangwoo’s masculine is meant to stay active; and Bum’s feminine, passive. That’s his theme. To lump him together with Bum’s stagnation solves nothing and drags him down to the same every day, which I found absurd as he, too, has become feminine—but only at the very last chapter? If death was to be his end, why not burn him along with the house? It’d have ended the “house of wonders” theme along with the house. The “full circle” of the karmic “suffocation by the pillow”, a premonition by his mother, adds the salt of didactic “comeuppance” into the mixture that doesn’t define the spice of violence his character is meant to exhibit. It’s simply childish.
If stalking is meant to be centered on Sangwoo’s nature, why isn’t Bum an active participant in killing (that one time wasn’t enough to make a theme out of it)? In fact, he’s shown to shun killing as he was angered by his uncle’s death and he refused to stab the officer to death that sent Sangwoo down a mental breakdown, during which his violence was at its highest. This makes for a very absurd ending that brings to the fore allusions to the “star-crossed lovers” trope (a trope she took a swipe at throughout the tale as Bum was always Sangwoo’s mother’s surrogate, barely his own person), albeit Koogi has denied it; but it’s there and it’s unsavory and it’s silly. (It’s no wonder that many fujoshis cling onto this for little scraps of that “gay” love when both the characters aren’t homosexuals, Sangwoo aggressively so; and Koogi is a lot to blame for this predictable accident.)
In the end, I’d say this: KS is fresh in some aspects, but it’s viciously the same in many others; and the angle of the mundane is just that, not anything more than mundane, though it could’ve been had the masculine stayed while the feminine was forgotten.
P.s: I really liked the fact that Sangwoo whopped the officer’s ass—twice! I don’t know why I’m even adding this, but his strength is fascinating as he overpowered a trained officer with such violence that it was hilarious to watch. No wonder the women were down for the count after a hit or two or three from him.
