The Girl Who Fell Beneath The Sea by Axie Oh
(Hodder & Stoughton, 2022)
Reviewed by Ksenia Shcherbino
Axie Oh’s The Girl Who Fell Beneath The Sea is a sweet and neat fairy tale about coming of age through the encounter with the fantastic.
In a village by the sea they have a cruel tradition. Every so often a maiden beautiful, or skilled in crafts, or intelligent and otherwise distinguished, is thrown into the sea to become Sea God’s bride and ensure her people’s safety. Mina is neither, but she is brave, strong-willed and devoted to her family. So, when her brother falls in love with a girl who is chosen for this year’s rite, she secretly follows them to the sacrificial site and jumps into the water to take the bride’s place. This is Mina’s entry into the Spirit world, and for some inexplicable twist of fate, or rather, red ribbon of fate, she is tied to the Sea God. The Sea God is no monster, but a young boy under a deep spell. His sleep is affecting not just the human world, but the Spirit realm as well. Our self-appointed bride is determined to protect her village, but finds herself in the centre of palace intrigues, shape-shifting dragons, shifting identities and shuffled allegiances. She embarks on a journey to break the spell and wake the Sea God, and the truth she uncovers changes her life forever.
There are many layers to The Girl Who Fell Beneath The Sea, and all together they create a magical palimpsest. On one hand, it is a pure and simple girl coming of age story against the background of Asian myths and folktales. Mina descends from the world of brothers and maternal relatives into the world of marriage and battling gods, and ends up winning a handsome husband, in addition to saving her village. As all fairy tales, it is a story of men and money, or, as Marina Warner would put it, a story of “maps and manuals that are passed down from mothers and grandmothers to help them to survive.” No wonder maternal ancestors and female gods would be the main helpers in the story, protecting Mina, providing her with necessary advice at crucial moments and bringing her home safely. And helping her to gain high social status in the world, of course, as there is a certain undercurrent of matriarchy in the Spirit world, despite its male dragons and other warriors. Oh’s passages about family ties and filial duty are filled with kindness and genial feeling, giving her writing a very warm undertone. Somehow it is not dissimilar to Japanese anime, especially to Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, with its chivalrous water dragons, trickster grandmothers and resourceful young ladies. Yet the main difference is that while Chihiro’s family enters the supernatural realm unknowingly, and Chihiro has no option but to engage with its inhabitants to get back to her world, for Mina it is a conscious choice. This active position helps her to overcome all hurdles in her journey.
On the other hand, it is a deeper story about losing and re-gaining both voice and identity. Mina’s adventures structurally follow Turner’s rite of liminal passage, where neophytes lose their identity and are shut out in an in-between space to initiate a spiritual transition from lower to higher status. We see her as a palimpsest of assumed identities, all of them hinting at a deficiency of sorts: an orphan, raised by her grandmother and her older siblings, a sister posing for a bride, a human trapped in the spirit world, a lover finding her love only to lose it and then recover it. The book reads like a tidal succession of rites of passage, each framing a transformative experience for the girl as she matures spiritually and finds her true self. One of these experiences, when her voice is taken from her, is especially symbolic as it stresses her ambiguous self-identification: is she playing out her own fate or the fate of the girl whose place she has taken? The book is loosely based on a famous Korean novel, The Tale of Sim Chong, where a girl throws herself in the sea as a sacrifice so that her blind father could regain his sight. Shim Cheong is the name of the girl whose place Mina takes as the God’s bride. It is her story that haunts Mina—and shapes her destiny and the destiny of the world, as she keeps re-telling the story to others.
Belonging and memory become pivotal not just for Mina, but for other characters as well as they fight together to preserve their world from ruin and form meaningful relationships. There are a few secondary lines that added detail to Oh’s world-building, my particular favourites being the imugi, proto-dragon snakes.
Overall, the book has great potential, but at the same time I could not get rid of the feeling that it is somehow very watery. Most of action in The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea takes place underwater, and that’s how it reads, as if every character were a pebble on the shore, unwrinkled, polished, pleasant, smoothed by the water so that it doesn’t have a single sharp edge. The linear simplicity of characters is disarmingly charming in a childish and open-hearted way. Everything is immediate and forever—love, friendship, fate. It is a world where evil monsters turn sides with a mild reproach from a brave human girl, a world that has refreshingly little gore and violence, where everyone is saved and loved. Yet the villains are paper-cut, conflicts are straightforward and cartoonish, and even romance is rather truncated and schematic. There are no strong underlying currents in the waters of The Girl Who Fell Beneath The Sea, no questionable choices, no psychological believability. And maybe that’s why it doesn’t run as deep, which makes it—at least for me—somehow less enjoyable than it could have been.
Review from BSFA Review 18 - Download your copy here.