azdak

The Tale of Nokdu is a really enjoyable piece of fluff that I gobbled up at a rate of two episodes a day. It opens with a young man, raised in poverty on an isolated island, whose family is suddenly and inexplicably attacked by ninja-esque female assassins on a mission to kill him. In order to find out why, he secretly follows the surviving assassins to the capital city on the mainland (this means he manages to secretly follow them IN A BOAT. One of the things you have to understand about The Tale of Nokdu is that it is not at all interested in the mechanics of things, whether those things be how to secretly trail people, where money comes from, how human bodies work, or what the royal palace’s time-off policy for servants is. This cartoonish imperviousness to the minutiae of reality made a lot more sense once I discovered that it started life as a web toon. Just go with the flow. It’s worth it). We soon find out that 20 years ago the king tried to murder his own newborn son, and that the faithful courtier assigned to bury the corpse absconded with the baby when he realised he was still alive, so we are several steps ahead of Nokdu, who has to make it all the way to the palace before he figures out why an awful lot of people seem to want him dead.

In Hanyang, the capital, Nokdu temporarily loses the trail when he bumps into a young man with a bow and arrow, accidentally foiling his attempt to assassinate the king. The young man is extremely obviously not, in fact, a young man, but no one, including Nokdu, realises it because – well, the kind explanation is that in a highly hierarchical and viciously patriarchal society, no one looks beyond the clothes.


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Note the very professional homemade bow. Nokdu makes a better kisaeng dancer but Dong-ju is the better engineer.

This is Nokdu’s first encounter with the person who will – and I don’t imagine anyone in the viewing audience was remotely surprised by this - turn out to be the love of his life. Dong-ju is the sole survivor of a noble family massacred by the king for suspected treason when she was a child. Rescued by Madam Chun, the head of a famous kisaeng house, she is being raised to be a kisaeng, a sort of Korean geisha but with worse wigs:


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Madam Chun, awesome head of the kisaeng house, courageous fighter against the patriarchy and wig-wearer extraordinaire

Madam Chun faces an uphill struggle as Dong-ju is the world’s worst trainee kisaeng. She can neither sing nor dance and has no interest in entertaining men, instead preferring to spend her free time secretly constructing bows and arrows to kill the king with (she eventually designs and builds the world’s first concealed-carry mini-crossbow. And gets to use it). The suicidal aspects of this plan are, to her, a feature not a bug, and she tries very hard not to get emotionally involved with the people around her because she has no intention of being there for long (a lot of her initial relationship with Nokdu is driven by a push-pull dynamic of I-really-like-him versus I’m-going-to-die-soon-so-I-don’t-want-to-get-involved).

Anyway, enter Nokdu, who has tracked down the assassins to the village next door to the kisaeng house. It is inhabited exclusively by widows whose in-laws tried to force them to commit suicide after their husbands died (and also by assassins). Having learned the hard way that the widows take their No Men Allowed sign VERY SERIOUSLY INDEED, Nokdu naturally has no choice but to pretend to be a widow himself and enter the village as “Lady Kim”, where he soon runs into Dong-ju, no longer in drag. Six really very charming episodes of hijinks and budding romance in the widow village ensue.


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Lady Kim

Nokdu does a startlingly good job of playing a woman, neither camping it up nor taking the piss, and then, just when the audience is starting to wonder how on earth they’re going to stretch this plot out for another ten episodes, everything goes to hell in a handbasket, the action shifts to Hanyang and Nokdu (no longer in a dress) and Dong-ju come face to face with the king...

And the rest is spoilers.

But I must mention in passing four things I really liked about the show:

1) Aeng-du, the hilariously obnoxious small daughter of Nokdu’s martial arts master, who has clearly never in her life been told there is anything a girl can’t or shouldn’t do.


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Aeng-du, for once not eating or bossing anyone around

Rude, greedy and fond of issuing relationship advice, she is an absolute force of nature, who derails even the villain, at least temporarily.

2) The king is both sympathetic and heroic (at least in the past) but also the kind of paranoid murderous bastard who is willing to kill any number of people including his own son. He’s not so much complex and multi-layered as a paranoid schizophrenic but the show is surprisingly sensitive to the emotional complexities of being the son of such a man and doesn’t offer up either revenge or forgiveness as easy answers.

3) Nokdu’s idea of his best life is to be the sole man in a female assassin corps who regularly gets to cross-dress in order to beat up widows’ would-be-murderous in-laws.

4) Just when you thought Joseon-era hats couldn't get any sillier, up pops Nokdu's successful-exam-candidate hat adornment. To my infinite regret, I haven't been able to find a picture anywhere on the internet, but I feel the show is worth watching for this costuming detail alone.

In conclusion: it was fluff, but I really liked it.