Journey to the West: a review

That's right, your girl has finally finished this monster of a book after many months of struggle. Man was this a long butt book, usually I am a fast reader but a complicated text like this requires a certain level of concentration and focus on the words that really slows one down when reading.

So, how was it? Really good! If you're not into repetitive monster of the week types of story then you probably will not like this but if you are then this book has you covered. Every little self contained story within the whole of the text had me trying to guess what exactly Sun Wukong would do and most of the time my butt was wrong! The answer usually ended up being needing to rely on a daoist deity I didn't even know existed.

As for our characters, this book is really a meta narrative on the journey to cultivation of The Way and all of the characters are allegories for various parts of the human spirit that needs to be tamed before one can be realized. That said I still had obvious favorites and comments to make on these characters since I've been with them for so long.

Tripitaka/Elder - Idk what to say about this guy other than that he radiates massive pathetic wet cat energy. It feels like he's always about to have a panic attack no matter what happens and is the bringer of his own misfortune more often than not. He also has not nutted in ten lifetimes so the female demons are all really horny for him which is funny because women happen to be one of the things that gives him a panic attack. Overall he is likable and I was cheering for him.

Zhu Wuneng/Eight Rules/Pigsy- He is quite literally the closest thing this book has to reoccuring antagonist and even when Sun Wukong pulls pranks on him out of the blue for no reason I can't help but think he deserves it. Hands down the funniest part of this book comes in the very last chapter,"

'They have all become Buddhas!,' shouted Eight Rules,' Why am I alone made the Janitor of Altars?'

'Because you are still talkative and lazy,' replied the Buddha"

The humor in this book isn't really that laugh out loud funny but something about this line after 100 chapters of Eight Rules being the worst made me actually laugh.

Sha Wujing/Sha Monk/Sandy- He doesn't really do anything? He does more than the horse but for the most part he's just there. Probably my favorite of the pilgrims though, he's just an affable guy and I would be friends with him. Also I think it's funny whenever Eight Rules breaks up the party and tells Sha Monk he can go back to being a cannibal in his river. I'd also like to say that he was done super dirty by the Jade Emperor, he was kicked out of heaven for accidentally breaking a cup.

The horse- so the horse is interesting because my smart brain recognizes how much the horse does in this story in terms of the allegory but my dumb brain is like "it doesn't do anything tho." That's wrong because it does get its butt beaten once and pisses into a cup once so my dumb brain is wrong. In any case the horse is really a non character.

Guanyin/Tagatha- These two are the funniest of the deities and show up quite frequently. I really enjoy the two of them being extremely rude to everyone despite being the personification of compassion and The Way. Makes them feel really human.

Sun Wukong/Pilgrim/Great Sage Equal to Heaven/BanHorsePlague/Monkey- If having tons of names was a job Pilgrim would be rolling in dough. I didn't even list them all. No discussion of Journey to the West would be complete without mentioning Pilgrim, he is essentially the main character after all. I don't think I can effectively summarize his character but if you know nothing about him, he is essentially a massive pest. Constantly stealing things that will make him immortal. Also if you already know of Pilgrim due to the video series by OSP, I'm extremely happy to let you know that over the course of the book he does indeed become more immortal by stealing some ginseng, like 3 or 4 times more immortal. He is always telling Tripitaka to stop talking to strange women and children and every time he is ignored you feel very sad.

I am poorly gonna tell some of the more memorable stories from the book that don't already have their own OSP video since some of these are wild.

So our pilgrims are walking and find a monastary that looks just like Thunderclap mountain (place they are heading) and Tripitaka is all "let's go in!" and Pilgrim is all "no you r-slur its a trap from a demon" but no one listens to Pilgrim so they go in and surprise! It's a trap laid by a demon. Pilgrim escapes just barely but the demon has this bag that sucks everything in. He employs the help of some deities and they are sucked into the bag and imprisoned. So Pilgrim finds another set of celestial warriors and guess what? They too are sucked into the bag. They do this again before Pilgrim finds the correct god. Once they do everything is chill.

So they wander into a kingdom who has a very sick king. Pilgrim decides this is the job for him so he volunteers to make a cure and he makes his cure out of some...unconventional materials. Lots of herbs not usually put in medicine and piss from the horse who, by the way, is very protective of his piss and only pees a little bit. Anyways Pilgrim gives the medicine to the king who immediately has the best poop of his life. Then he recounts to Pilgrim how his wife was taken by some demon and Pilgrim decides to save the day. He fights the demon and finds them to be evenly matched. As he goes to find some divine help, he runs into some dude who is the buddha of the future (I am just as confused as you) anyways he instructs Pilgrim to lead the demon to the field of melons he's about to set up and then turn into a melon so he can offer Pilgrim to the demon to eat. This bizarre plan actually works and the demon is swiftly defeated.

Once again our pilgrims wander into a city but this time they have to disguise themselves because the king had taken a vow to kill ten thousand monks. Disguised as horse sales men, they stay at an inn and sleep in a wardrobe. While they sleep Pilgrim slips out, creates thousands of mini pilgrims, and shaves everyone's heads in the night in order to make it impossible to differentiate between monks. He slips back into the wardrobe which is then stolen and presented to the king. The monks come out, explain themselves and the king takes everything pretty well.

The monks finally make it to the kingdom of India, which is weirdly exactly like China. They stop at a monastery before heading into the city where they learn the head priest is keeping a girl who claims to be the princess captive. He asks the monks to investigate and the group heads into the city where Tripitaka is chosen to marry the Princess. Obviously Tripitaka can't marry but Pilgrim convinces him to go along with it and literally at the wedding he fights the fake princess. Turns out she was actually the rabbit on the moon and the real princess was a reincarnated moon goddess who slapped the little rabbit who was very salty about that. The moon gods come and help and the rabbit is taken back to the moon and everything is good and tripitaka doesn't have to get married.

This is less a story but the monks go over a river in a little boat and when they do they see a corpse and Tripitaka learns it's corpse and everyone starts clapping and saying congratulations. Made me think of Evangalion and was actually pretty creepy.

Anyways if you actually read all of this, thanks it's pretty rambling. !bookworms !classics