Nakcheon deungun - Falling into the Yellow Springs and Obtaining Good Fortune

Nakcheon deungun is a novel in five books and five volumes, for a total of 765 pages, each page consisting of eleven or twelve columns (Vols. 1 and 4: eleven columns, Vol. 5: twelve columns), with eighteen to twenty-two syllables per column. The only copy to survive to this day is stored at the Jangseogak Archives. Nakcheon deungun is built around the adventures of a man (Wang Seokjak 王碩爵) and a woman (DongYehwa), their misfortunes, and how they overcome them to find success. Unlike other classical Korean novels, Nakcheon deungun deals with the topic of sex in an extraordinarily explicit way. The same explicit descriptions are also found with regard to the description of human trafficking and on the details regarding the process of becoming a gisaeng. For all these reasons scholars have speculated that Nakcheon deungun may be a Chinese classical novel, but elements that lead us to conclude that this is a work of Korean origin, such as the reference to the story of Domi,1 the emphasis on blood ties, the interest in one’s own family, are captured within a novel that is strongly influenced by Chinese classical novels.