Journey to the East

Both works use maps not merely as illustration but as instruments of fantasy world-building: Oh has said that, because the world of her novel ‘felt very big’, she began by drawing both a world map and a city map, later transformed by artist Virginia Allyn for the published book.

This provokes a question: why does this cartographic template feel so closely tied to modern Western fantasy, even when the worlds it maps are shaped by East Asian traditions? A possible answer lies in the very different ways fantasy developed in East Asian and Western literary traditions.

Maps have certainly existed as paratextual objects in East Asian literature. From the late nineteenth century, editions of the classic Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber - first printed in 1791 - could include vividly detailed maps, such as the 1908 edition held by the Leiden University Library. [1]

It is possible to find editions of other Chinese classics such as the fourteenth-century Romance of the Three Kingdoms with maps detailing the semi-historical geography of their narratives. But these are not exact analogues for the Secondary World map associated with the Tolkienian fantasy tradition in the English-speaking canon. They typically depict specific locales – a garden, a city, or a historicised real region – rather than a self-contained, invented world.

It was drawn to accompany a fictitious family history of the Hashihara clan, complete with its mythological origins. The map is so intricate that for many years it was assumed to be a representation of a real place, rather than Norinaga’s creation. Its extraordinary scope was revealed in a recent project of ‘speculative reconstruction’ by the Obayashi construction company, reported on in 2025. [2]

One of the investigators in that project has cited circumstantial evidence to suggest that Norinaga created his castle town and family genealogies as preparation for writing a novel, remarking that ‘if Norinaga depicted a world other than the one in which he lived, I believe he had a story in mind.’ If this suggestion is correct, then Norinaga’s creative process of beginning with a map not only has remarkable parallels to Tolkien’s sub-creation of Middle-earth – with his maps, genealogies, and histories – but, in a wholly different cultural context, anticipates it by two centuries.

This exception, however, does seem to suggest a rule. Before manga, anime, video games, and modern fantasy publishing, it was very hard to find in East Asian literary history a fantasy map that presents a synoptic overview of an autonomous Secondary World. There are many possible reasons for this, but one is that, in Chinese and Japanese literary traditions at least, the fantastical often finds expression within this world, rather than through the creation of a separate one.

The leading Chinese iteration of fantasy as a modern genre has for over a century been wuxia. As academic Stephen Teo explains, the term derives from wu, meaning martial or military (also present in wushu, the Chinese term for martial arts generally), and xia, denoting chivalry, gallantry, knighthood, or heroism. It was originally coined in Japanese as a neologism in the late Meiji period at the turn of the twentieth century. [4]

The word was soon embraced by Chinese visitors to Japan, though in its earliest usage it connoted thrusting militarist modernity rather than historical drama. In China, these origins were soon forgotten with the success of Legend of the Strange Swordsmen, a hugely popular 1920s serial by Pingjiang Buxiaosheng (the pen name of Xiang Kairan, 1890–1957) that helped establish many of the tropes of this still-thriving genre.

James Machin is a writer, researcher, editor, and archivist specialising in Gothic, weird, and fantastic literature of the long nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. James is also the cataloguer for Ex Carta.

He is the author of Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939 (Palgrave, 2018) and editor of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Stark Munro Letters for Edinburgh University Press (2024), where he is also Technical Editor for the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle.

James’ recent editorial work includes The Strange Stories of John Buchan for British Library Publishing (2025). He is a member of the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has taught at Birkbeck, University of London, the Royal College of Art, and the University of Bedfordshire.

His work often explores archives, imagined geographies, lost worlds, strange landscapes, and the material culture of fiction. A lifelong role-playing game enthusiast, he runs long-standing campaigns in Call of Cthulhu and Dungeons & Dragons.