Black Myth: Wukong – What Is Journey To The West Anyway?
We are less than two weeks from Black Myth: Wukong being released, and over the last few years a lot of articles have said, with a certain blasé nonchalance, that Black Myth: Wukong is an adaptation of the famous and incredibly old classic Chinese novel Journey To The West. And then barely said another word on it. For most of us in the West (not the same west, that would be India) this usually doesn’t mean a huge amount. Most Western education doesn’t include reading Chinese literary classics, and we aren’t exposed to Sun Wukong the Monkey King constantly in culture, in film, in media, in advertising and in religion. In China, Journey to the West is a ubiquitous text, as well known as something like King Arthur or Robin Hood, or maybe Bible stories here in the West.
This article is meant as a light primer or explanation of some of Journey to the West, to give a bit of cultural background and understanding to those of us, the vast majority, coming to this Chinese export game Black Myth: Wukong with virtually no prior knowledge. It will not be exhaustive, it will not cover every chapter nor every interpretation. The novel has been rewritten, adapted, allegorised and politicised across the whole twentieth century, and many times in the 400 years or so before that as well. Trying to capture all that in a ten-minute article is a recipe for failure.
A Journey To Achieve Enlightenment
So, the summary. Journey to the West is the quintessential buddy adventure – Tripitaka, a pious buddhist monk based on a real historical figure, embarks on a kind of pilgrimage, the aim being to travel west to India and seek out Buddhist sutras in the original language to bring back to China. It’s a fantasy so, the Buddha gets involved, tasking the disgraced Monkey King Sun Wukong (so now you know what the Wukong means) with protecting Tripitaka on his quest, using his famous staff and a host of incredible supernatural abilities. Monkey, or Sun Wukong, is a mischievous immortal monkey and fills the novel with humour, getting himself and his companions into trouble all the way through with his all too human traits.
They are joined by a fallen immortal pig spirit called Pigsy, and a sand/river demon called Sandy, but Monkey is the undisputed star of the show. The novel is really about Monkey’s journey toward enlightenment, detailing as it does, dozens and dozens of escapades for him and his companions to learn and grow from. Its structure is that of 100 chapters, most dedicated to famous battles or misadventures before the party gets back on the road. This structure lends itself incredibly well to video games – constant new areas each chapter on a basically linear quest, a bit of narrative and then a demon boss to overcome or fight to the death. It could also be thought of as one huge escort mission.
Monkey Magic
Monkey has a variety of supernatural skills, and to Western audiences, he is akin to a superhero. He can cloud jump and fly thousands of miles (he could do the pilgrimage in seconds, but it’s about the journey to enlightenment, duh), he knows incredible divine kung fu, his staff can shrink down to the size of a needle he stores in his ear, he can make clones of himself from every hair on his body. He can transform himself into many tens of different animals (72 supposedly) including the cicada we see in one of the early gameplay videos for Black Myth, or the huge crab and fox in the latest.
Black Myth: Wukong will feature many of these transformations and abilities, very familiar to Chinese audiences. Locations throughout the game will be recreations of the lands the pilgrims travel through mostly across Eastern India and Tibet. Famous ones include Fire-Cloud Cave, the River of Flowing Sand, the Water-Crystal Palace and Black Wind Mountain, which we’ve already seen in gameplay trailers. They probably won’t be familiar to Western audiences but these locales have been immortalised in Chinese folklore and myth for centuries at this point. In the same way, enemies and bosses are incredible dark interpretations of well-known demons and supernatural beings from the novel such as Red Boy, Princess Jade-Face, the Monstress Dowager, and all manner of dragons, ogres, wizards, and femme fatales.
I Swear I’ve seen Bits Of This Before
Black Myth Wukong is also an adaptation, meaning it is not necessarily a faithful retelling of all 100 chapters or with much of the irreverent humorous tone of the original text. Internet conjecture based on the many trailers has it that Sun Wukong may not be the monkey we see in the trailers, but in fact one called the Six-eared Macaque, one of his enemies masquerading as Sun Wukong to attain enlightenment himself. It also seems possible that there is no Tripitaka or pilgrimage in the sense that we see in the original text. Until the game comes out we just don’t know.
Monkey can be anything to anyone.
Adapting this text is something that’s been done time and again for centuries, but you may be interested to hear Mao Zedong allowed Journey to the West to be printed in his communist China even while vast amounts of literature were denounced and burnt, and reworked Monkey as a rebel anarchist against the establishment, railing against the Jade Emperor, and becoming propaganda for the communist party’s rebellion.
Monkey can be anything to anyone, it seems. He’s been written as a religious figure by Buddhists and Daoists, as a rebel by Communists, as an anarchist, or as a warm and caring superhero. The character of Monkey has been repurposed as other entirely different characters. In recent memory, the first season of Dragon Ball recasts Monkey as Goku, his quest for sutras as the quest for Dragon Balls, and recreates many of the famous fights from the novel. Season 2 onwards really go their own way, but it started as Monkey.
It’s also already been reimagined into many dozens of video games. You may recognise two recent ones – Enslaved Odyssey to the West back on the PS3 has a young girl called Trip, and you play as Monkey escorting her through a loose futuristic version of the story. Unruly Heroes recently let you play as all four companions and battle demons on your way to find the sutras.
Do You Want To Know More?
If Mao Zedong can reappropriate Sun Wukong as a communist rebel figure, Black Myth Wukong won’t be the darkest version of Sun Wukong there’s been. Come August 20th we in the West will have the best, most expansive, detailed, and interesting take on the character of Monkey in many years. If like me, Black Myth: Wukong has ignited an interest in learning about the original Journey to the West, you can fall down an incredible internet warren of demons and folklore that will or won’t make the game. If you’d like to read the novel, you could take on the full 1000+ page translations that have been around most of the last 40 years, but you might be better served with the most up-to-date and modern retelling to be published.
Translated by Julia Lovell and published by Penguin as Monkey King, this is a slightly abridged version (in that it is 350 pages rather than 1000, but it is written in modern English vernacular and is very funny and well put together. It doesn’t actually lose that much in being abridged because the original is full of repetition of the plot, and many poems and puns that don’t translate well, which hacks off huge swathes of the longer versions and their incredibly flowery exposition.
Black Myth Wukong is due out on 20th August 2024 on PlayStation 5 and PC via Steam.
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