HOW (TO?) CHRISTOPHER GOT HIS GROOVE BACK...AGAIN

although he was hugely influential in the modernist literary movement in japan and counted kobo abe (woman in the dunes is, yes, still sitting unfinished on my night table) among his proteges, jun ishikawa is almost unknown outside of japan, a particular shame considering that ishikawa's own translations were significant to japan's introduction to the french in the 1920s. in 1946, he published "the legend of gold," which is available in english translation in a collection by the same title. japan had surrendered unconditionally to the allied powers the previous year, and large swaths of the country had been bombed into charred wastelands.

much of ishikawa's work was intricately symbolic. in the boddhisatva, for which ishikawa won the akutagawa prize in 1937, the narrator tells the story of a subversive he knows through his struggle to finish his biography of christine de pizan, the female poet who eulogized joan of arc in verse, while simultaneously layering the images of the boddhisatvas samantabhadra and manjusri onto the characters in both narratives. "the legend of gold" is another saint's story, and takes its title from the "golden legend" (both are called the same in japanese), a medieval collection of hagiographies. my copy of the legend of gold and other stories is on permanent loan, powell's has none in its immediately accesible inventory and it's too late for the library, so i've nothing to supplement my failed memory of which character in "the legend of gold" was supposed to be the holy one. i can, however, recap: the story is about regeneration, a possibility that ishikawa, a persistent and oft censored opponent of the pacific war, must have been anticipating with almost near hopelessness.

in the story, there are three personal items of the narrator's that symbolize his personal ability to move on and from out of the ashes, the most easily remembered of which is a broken watch. the two others -- shoes and a hat, maybe? (or not at all, i'm probably just projecting) -- are dealt with over the course of the story and the narrator's interaction with his postwar saint, and in the end, the watch begins again to keep time. (i won't deign to make an out and out explanation, but if you want to be kicked in the dead gift horse with being told the meanings of metaphors, i recommend seeing "black swan.")

sidi makes excellent shoes, but certain replaceable parts of their better offerings must certainly be constructed for failure. the strap for the ratchet buckle on the left of my pair of dragon 2s has been gone from the shoe since it cracked in half six months ago. with two other straps on the shoe, it stilled held sufficiently to my foot while pedaling for me to resist paying the thirty dollar msrp for a pair of "soft arch compression straps" (weakly fabricated plastic pieces with toothed bars for ratchet engagement). so my left shoe, it worked, but when the shoes are going on and coming off at least twice a day, a missing part is an obvious deficiency, the spot that pride won't let you go back to the barber for, even though it was him that cut too close.

there's no saint i can remember in this story either, but a friend just gifted me a single soft arch compression strap replacement -- ripped out of the plastic of a package of two and wrapped only in a desultory "merry christmas." it's black, which my shoes aren't, and the color, combined with the strap's brand new rigidity, make its presence just as glaring as the absence of the strap it replaced, but the shoes are definitely wholer now, even the right one, despite being looser now for its soft arch having been worn in. looking at them now, the newness of the strap looks even more out of place for the flaking of the white surface of the left shoe, which must have given up on appearances after being so long neglected (the finish on the right shoe is dulled but has remained smooth). still though, they both now go on and come off more easily, if only for my knowledge that something nagging has passed and that any ending is, come what may, a new start. and that a whole week before new year's. scoop. now get on the bike and ride.