Spring Bamboo (1989)

Jeanne Tai's anthology, published by Random House in 1989 with a foreword by Bette Bao Lord, translates stories by ten mainland Chinese writers, almost all then under forty, that first appeared in Chinese literary magazines. Zhaxi Dawa's "Souls Tied to the Knots on a Leather Cord", first published in Xizang Wenxue (Tibetan Literature) in January 1985, is told by a writer who goes into the mountains of southern Tibet to find the hero of his own story. (Open Library)

Watches

Seiko (unidentified model): In Zhaxi Dawa's "Souls Tied to the Knots on a Leather Cord", the narrator climbs over the Kalong mountains after his character Tabei. At the summit his watch reads 9:46 and at the foot 8:03, and he concludes that time has begun to run in reverse: the calendar displays of his Seiko, which he describes as a fully automatic, solar-powered electronic timepiece, are going backwards and its hands turn counterclockwise at five times normal speed. When he finds Tabei dying, the watch has stopped altogether at 7:30 a.m., Beijing time, on 29 July 1984 (p. 168). The watch is an object in the narrative, the story's gauge of time. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: That was why the calendar displays on my Seiko watch — this fully automatic, solar-powered electronic timepiece I was wearing — were all going backwards, and that was why its minute- and hour-hands were turning counterclockwise, at a speed five times normal. (Jeanne Tai, ed. and trans., Spring Bamboo, scan cataloged as Random House, 1989, p. 162, in "Souls Tied to the Knots on a Leather Cord" by Zhaxi Dawa, which begins on p. 135; Internet Archive scan OCR)