meganbmoore | manga: Dokebi Bride Vol 2 (Reply)

Volume 2 focuses on Sunbi's first adventures in high school in Seoul, while still flashing back to her childhood with her grandmother, though not as much as volume one did.. Usually in manga (in most fiction, really) when the teen-small town kid or otherwise-moves to the big city-or any new school-one of two things happens: in some cases, the student is hopelessly bullied by every other student and either fights back with incredible spunk, or gains a protector or two to teach them the ropes. In other cases, the teen immediately joins one faction of classmates and finds herself at odds with another faction as a result.

With Sunbi it's different. Sunbi has few social skills and was regarded as odd even in the village she grew up in. She has no idea how to interact with her classmates and even less desire to, and her off-putting, distanced demeanor causes all but one of her classmates, Taehoon, to simply avoid her. Taehoon is interested in Kirlian Photography, a type of photography that focuses on energy waves that can be detected by subjecting the subject of a photograph to high-frequency, high-voltage electricity. The result is a hazy aura around the person. I actually vaguely knew what he was talking about when he mentioned it, so I guess I've encountered it before. When he photographs Sunbi, his photograph picked up a second aura, large enough for another person, except that there was none (in actuality, it was the spirit who had been at Sunbi's desk at school and was following her. Curious, he approaches Sunbi and becomes the closest thing she has to a friend. It's a very tenuous connection, and Sunbi responds to him just like she would anyone she just met who treated her nicely and didn't babble to her non-stop about things she didn't care anything about the second they met (the mistake her stepsister made): with a detached politeness.

Sunbi acquires something of a "cool" reputation with her skipping class, detached, unshakable demeanor, and the rumors that she can see spirits (not to mention her tendency to fall asleep in class but always be able to escape scolding from the teacher.) It is, however the kind of "cool" reputation where no one talks to you because they don't think you want them to, so they simultaneously say you're both interesting and odd while standing 30 feet away.

Sunbi almost literally lives between two worlds. While she lives in the "modern" world, she was raised in a barely modern place, by a woman whose entire life was based on centuries of tradition. Her grandmother raised her to understand and live in peace with the rural spirit world, but did not want her to become a shaman herself and live her entire life as determined by the spirits. As a result, Sunbi is neither prepared to deal with the supernatural world as a shaman, nor does she have any idea of how to interact with other people. Add to that her bitterness with her father for having left her alone is the countryside since her mother's death and his total avoidance of her between then and her grandmother's death, and you have an extremely repressed, distanced young woman with no idea of what to do with the world around her.

It all comes to a head when some of her classmates perform a Bunshinsaba, a ritual for summoning spirits, having no idea that what they regard as harmless fun would summon enough spirits to almost drive a half-trained spiritualist mad (thankfully, random priests with mystic powers are always wandering around in the world of manga. Because of the Bunshinsaba, Sunbi loses her last physical link to her previous life, and is forced to confront her issues about her mother's death (instead of dragging it out for endless volumes like most manga tends to do.)

Sunbi, and her approach to life, are likely best summed up in her encounter with a dokebi expert on a mountain where dokebis supposedly lived. She asks him, in complete seriousness, if dokebi's really live on the mountain, and if so, are the legends he just recounted about dokebi's repelling evil spirits are true. He replies with a longwinded (and interesting from the perspective of those interested in mythology) dissertation about dokebis and Asian mythology and mysticism, then asks her if she really believes that dokebis exists and asks why she would be curious about it. She tells him that she's only asking because she knows they do exist, then asks why someone (him) would devote his life to studying and following around something he doesn't believe in.

So far, Sunbi has largely been passive and struggling to keep up with both worlds, but from the preview and solicit, it looks like she'll be more proactive in the next volume and take measures to protect herself from the evil spirits.