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Paper short abstract:

This paper considers how the bicycle—as a prosthesis of the human body, a tool for enhancement of fitness in late capitalist society, a more efficient mode of transportation, and a means to overcome disability—illustrates and negotiates with precarious conditions of urban hardware and software.

Paper long abstract:

In our time, a bicycle ride is promoted—most effectively in regions such as Europe and East Asia—as an energy-efficient, healthy, and environmentally conscious mode of transportation. A historical review of this brand of physical movement may help us assess the socially, politically, and ideologically informed process through which it has acquired such a status. This paper considers how bicycle rides are illustrative of, and negotiate with, precarious conditions of cities, with their hardware (architecture) and software (navigation technology and tactics) that are constantly in the process of being made and unmade. My focus is on the bicycle as a prosthesis of the human body; as a tool for restoration and enhancement of the perceived health and fitness that are threatened by and yet promoted in capitalist society; as a more efficient option for transportation in a culture that prioritizes speed and profit; and as a means to overcome disability and manage the instability of urban infrastructure in wartime. The corpus analyzed consists of canonical modern Japanese authors' quasi-autobiographical works, in which I examine (1) the Japanese male body struggling for greater mobility in London and Wimbledon at the end of Victorian England (Natsume Sōseki, "Jitensha nikki," translated into English as "The Bicycle Diary"); (2) the body of an aspiring author in the developing rural city of Maebashi in Taishō Japan (Hagiwara Sakutarō, "Jitensha nikki"); and (3) a disabled female body enabled by cycling in the air-raid-prone Tokyo of 1945 (Ishikawa Jun, "Meigetsu shu," translated into English as "Moon Gems"). My study reveals how individuality is contested in cities that are precarious for a range of reasons, from air pollution and the traffic of strangers with increasingly less compassion toward each other to law enforcement's surveillance of any unexpected use of public space and residents' communal vigilance toward incidental spectacles in the terrain vague.