Somebody got moogle all over my box!

For practical purposes, let us consider this the 500th Yukihime post. I don’t have a speech or antyhing prepared. I’m glad to have been writing for two years, and I hope to continue writing for several more. I encourage you to leave a comment introducing yourself. Polite feedback is welcome on what you enjoy most about the site and what you’d like to see more of. Thanks for reading!

This is my 500th entry on Yukihime, but this post isn’t about that.

This post is about The Wizard Knight.

I finished reading Gene Wolfe’s The Wizard Knight (two books, The Knight and The Wizard) in December and have been trying to figure out what I wanted to say about them ever since. Every time I’ve updated this site in the past six months, it’s been with conscious neglect that I have yet to write about The Wizard Knight. Wolfe’s book (singular, in two halves) wasn’t just interesting, or exciting, or well-written, though it certainly was all of those things. The Wizard Knight, frankly, changed my life.

I don’t mean “changed my life” in its usual sense, that it affected sweeping changes in my life’s direction or content. My life today is effectively the same as it was six months ago. But the book forced me into an awareness of the way I live my life and an understanding of the consequences of each decision I made. Perhaps it didn’t change my life, so much as change my perception of life; nevertheless, reading it touched me on some deep and fundamental level where fiction usually doesn’t quite reach.

The Wizard Knight is about a boy who finds himself tranported to another, magical world named Mythgarthr. Mythgarthr is the middle of seven intricately connected worlds. Above it lie Skai, Kleos, and Elysion; beneath, Aelfrice, Muspel, and Niflheim. Upon his arrival in this world, the boy is stripped of his name and given a new one: Sir Able of the High Heart. Sir Able goes into this new world a boy, but after a single evening with the Aelfmaiden Queen Disiri, finds himself transformed into a man. Having lost Disiri, whom he loves, he sets out in search of her, hoping to gain enough reknown and respect to earn her love again. People don’t believe him when he tells them his name and rank, but eventually, he grows into the role which he has taken upon himself, or which he has been given, or perhaps both. The story is told entirely as a letter from Able to his brother, Ben, whom he has not seen since he arrived in Mythgarthr.

None of this is really important. I encourage you to visit amazon.com and read the first chapter; it’s only five pages, and it’s quite possible that you’ll find it as revelatory as I did. Go, read.

…back? The writing of The Wizard Knight is one of its strongest points. It’s written primarily in simple and perhaps incomplete imagery; through the eyes of a young boy from our world describing things he’s never seen before. The story may seem to underwhelm at times with its almost flat descriptions of incredible, magical events, yet this constant grounding in poor imagination gives the world and its people a stronger magic. Able is an acute judge of character, and he has the ability to describe people cuttingly in just a few simple words. On Hela, the ugly giantess: “She said she was dumb because she was way too smart to say she was smart.” On Michael, the angel from Kleos, he tells his dog Gylf, “You like him better than me, don’t you. That’s okay. I like him better than me, too.” About Lothur (Loki), the Overcyn from Skai, “The Valfather’s youngest son. You had to like him, but you always felt you could not trust him.” The only time the series falters at all is in the second book, when the perspective changes away from Able’s for a few chapters. Able is the lynchpin of the entire story, and without him, there is nothing.

Perhaps most moving of all are Able’s words for Disiri. What initially seems like it may be a besotten one-night stand is soon revealed to be a deep, abiding, and true love. “She was a shapechanger,” he says, “and all her shapes were beautiful.” I am going to quote a extended passage from early in the first book where Able explains his love of Disiri to Ben.

I love Queen Disiri, always, and nobody else; and if you do not understand that, you will never understand the things I am going to tell you at all, because that was always the main thing. Just about everything else changed as time went on. I made new friends and lost old ones. Sir Garvaon taught me how to use a sword, and Garsecg showed me how I could be stronger and quicker than I had ever known–quiet sometimes, or so fierce and wild that brave men who saw me ran. But that never changed. I loved Disiri and nobody else but Disiri, and there was never a minute in the whole time when I would not have died for her.

There is another thing, and I am going to talk about it, too. I knew I was just a kid inside. Toug always did think that I was a man, even when I told him I was not. His father thought I was a man, too (and so did Ulfa), younger than he was, but a man, and I was a lot bigger. I knew it was not true, it was just something Disiri had done, and I was really a kid. There were a lot of times when I wanted to cry. That time when I was coming up on those outlaws and looking for men hiding behind rocks or up in the trees like Aelf with every step I took, that was one of them. There was another one when I really did cry, and I’ll tell you about it in a minute. When you are a kid and you are in a tight place like I was you cannot ever admit it, because if you ever once admit it everything is going to come loose.

But the main thing was still Disiri. That is how it has always been with me, all through going to Jotunland and the River Battle and everything that happened. I loved her and I wanted her so bad it tore me up.

There are a lot of names and events in that section that you probably don’t understand, but reading the book is the same way: packed full of asides to people and places that aren’t introduced properly for another hundred pages or so. That’s Wolfe for you. The Wizard Knight is the sort of book that devotes three chapters to Able’s stay in a peasant village, and maybe a page-and-a-half to slaying a dragon or an epic battle where thousands clash. For while The Wizard Knight is a mixture of Tolkienesque, Norse, and Christian mythologies, and while Able’s journey is incredible almost beyond belief–The Heroic Quest, Campbellian archetype of archetypes–it is, in its execution, nearly an anti-epic.

Unlike most stories of the fantastic, The Wizard Knight isn’t about plot, but character. At the core of the story, driving every sentence of both volumes, is one single question: what makes a knight a knight? It’s not the horse, the armor, or the sword; anyone could have these things, with enough money or influence. It’s not the title; anyone could receive the name, given the proper circumstances. So what is a “knight”?–or to rephrase the central question, what is a good person?

I said earlier that Able grew into his assumed role of Sir Able of the High Heart, but that was not quite true. Able was already a knight from the moment he entered Mythgarthr. What changes is others’ perception of him, and eventually, his perception of himself. Here’s what Able knows, innately, though not everyone who he meets shares his understanding: a knight treats all others with respect and honor, and a knight always speaks the truth and keeps his word. These two tenets are absolutely inviolate, no matter the circumstances. Always, always, always.

Able’s story takes its strength from his absolute adherence to these traits. Yet the book remains consistently engaging, and Able a complex character, because Wolfe shows the difficulty of consistently following these beliefs in all situations. Or rather, the difficulty of perceiving the correct action, for performing a task, no matter how terrible it might be, is always easy, should it be right. Often, Able does something that seems antithetical to the traditional view of a knight: refusing to aid a friend against an enemy, or abandoning someone who seemed to have commited no great wrong against him. Yet, as the story progresses and the great strength of Able’s moral code becomes apparent to the reader, the justness of Able’s actions becomes obvious, and the reader feels embarassed for having thought black to be white for so long. Most people and most narratives focus on the material plane of “what’s happening,” not the spiritual plane of “what it means.” Surprisingly, Able’s conduct is never rigid, merciless, or aloof. It is simply, at all times, correct. It is the conduct of a knight.

Thus, the simple tautology that answers the book’s central question: a knight is someone who acts like a knight. The corrolary to this is that anyone can be a knight, should they choose. The corrolary to the corrolary is: even the reader. This is the obvious and ultimate lesson of The Wizard Knight, and it never appears forced or didactic. It is simply true, expressed effortlessly and powerfully through the living example of Sir Able of the High Heart.

I claim that the book changed my life because it made me powerfully aware that the person I am, to myself and to others, is the sum total of my individual decisions I make, and that to be a good person is as easy as making good decisions. I try to make good decisions, of course. But The Wizard Knight forced me to see the barefaced truth that everyone hides in the back of their mind: “doing good” is not a means to an end; it is the end. What you hope to be is meaningless if you do not act on those hopes. How you hope to be perceived means nothing, and how you are perceived means everything. For weeks after reading the books, I found myself thinking, subconsciously, “what would Able do?” This question gave me a perspective on my life outside of my own, from where a seemingly complex problem was shown, obviously, to have just one correct answer:

The right thing. Sir Able would do the right thing.

There was a fairly major earthquake (5+ shindou) at about 4:30 this afternoon in Tokyo that completely shut down the JR and Metro lines for about an hour-and-a-half. Even 8 hours later, the trains were still running crowded and on no sort of schedule. This is something of a minor anti-miracle, given Tokyo’s usual clockwork scheduling. Everyone’s fine, it was just odd to see things off kilter for an afternoon.

• People buying tickets at the entrance
• People waiting for the train
• The last train to Yokohama
• One crowded vehicle

It is a common enough cliché that men buy pornography “for the articles.” I plead the same in regards to my recent acquisition of PSP pornography–the difference being, I intend to write said article, not read it.

As I mentioned back in November, I purchased a deck of tarot cards from an artist named Ugyau at the Design Festa. Today, I finally got around to mounting the cards and hanging them up on the wall. I took a distant photo of the lot.

My favorite is The Tower; though not mounted here, at the Spring Design Festa, I got a delux Tower with gilded paint on thick stockboard. It’s like the Working Designs edition.

I hate to stereotype (but will do so now anyway). A lot of Japanese people have a huge mental block about Japanese-proficient foreigners. This mental block is so large that it overpowers all obvious evidence to the contrary. You can monologue for three-plus minutes in Japanese to a sales clerk about exactly what sort of item you’re searching for, and they’ll insist on replying to you in broken, halting, unintelligible English. You can send a seventeen-paragraph e-mail of kanji-stuffed Japanese goodness, and get “sorry, I don’t English,” back in return. Gee, maybe that’s why I wrote in Japanese.

In Star Trek, it never seemed too disconcerting when aliens spoke in English as, well, everyone speaks English. Japan has just-as-strong, if inverted, cultural expectations: no matter what sounds come out of their mouths, foreigners can’t speak Japanese as, well, no one speaks Japanese. It’s somewhat impressive that Japan’s monoculturism is so severe that the inputs “he is speaking in Japanese” and “I cannot speak English” returns “I should speak to him in English.” Still, thank goodness for small blessings; the Japanese culture lacks the loudness-comprehensibility conflation held by most Americans.

No time for an update, so why not enjoy the best Japanese music video ever? m-flo <3 CHEMISTRY’s Astrosexy/Now or Never: it’s a really awesome start-stop rap pop song set entirely to insanely split-second edited, movie-quality Astro Boy footage. This video, like all Japanese music videos found on the Internet, has ridiculously retarded subtitles. Music video groups are never content to just put the words no the screen, no, they have to make each syllable explode into reflectively lit particles or some crap. Fortunately, Verbal’s rapping is SO AWESOME that halfway through the group gives up entirely, leaving you to enjoy the video in peace. So check it out!

I am going to say “Wolf Parade” over and over. That way, when you get sick of hearing about them in November, as they become the biggest indie sensation of the year and media darlings, you can be like, “I love Wolf Parade! They’re my new favorite band! Now where did I hear about them before? Oh, right. Andrew’s blog. IN JULY. If only I had heeded his advice, I would have known the joy of Wolf Parade months earlier! Why did I squander the latter half of 2005! Why!” Therefore:

Wolf parade wolf parade wolf parade wolf parade wolf parade.

Wolf parade.

The main theme song of We <3 Katamari, “Katamari on the Rock,” is being performed by DOKAKA! That is the best musical casting for a cover, like, ever. Life is awesome.