The 10,000 Spirits Cycle

The 10,000 Spirits Cycle

One day when I was working at the Emille Museum in Seoul the museum owner, Dr. Zozayong, handed me a book and said, “There’s something in here you should translate.” It was a shaman’s song recorded in 1932, telling the mythical tale of Pari Kongju, the “Abandoned Princess.” It was written in old-fashioned dialect just the way the shaman sang it, which made the translating extra hard.

I fell in love with the heroine, a strong-minded girl whose father, wanting a son, sent her to die the day she was born. She survived, and in her teens returned to the palace where her father was king. Refusing to play a princess’s meek and helpless role, she struck out into the unknown to bring the secrets of shaman healing to her people.

Over the years, the Princess would give me no rest until I brought her story to contemporary readers. My original translation took up no more than forty pages, but I asked myself what her world is like, who are her friends and enemies, and how it would be for a real girl of sixteen to walk in her shoes. From that seed Books 1 and 2 of the 10,000 Spirits Cycle grew, and the series is still growing.   

The time is roughly 200 A.D., when Korea consists of many small kingdoms, and Chinese culture and the world’s “great” religions have not yet penetrated deeply into Korean life. Starting with Book 3 and the rise of the next generation, the action moves west into Mongolia, western China, and beyond, and the stories are entirely my own.