“Take a look,” Kozakura said, beckoning for us to come over. She had a spreadsheet open on the monitor beside the one she was programming on. The cells were filled with countless words and text fragments.
“What do you think this is?” she asked.
“Happened to a friend, test of courage, spirit sense, suspicious fire, fallen warrior, pet shop, park toilet, unfamiliar woman, Buddhist altar, disappearance...” I read out some of the cells. “What is all this? At a glance, it looks like a list of vocabulary that’s likely to come up in ghost stories.”
“Yeah, you’ve got it,” Kozakura replied so nonchalantly that Toriko and I looked at one another.
“Kozakura, are you all right?” asked Toriko. “You used to be so scared of ghost stories you’d have sooner died than read them.”
“Well, yeah. But when they’re broken down to the vocab level like this, they’re no big deal. The fear comes from the way the story is told, after all.”
“I agree with you there, but still...” I said.
“Even if that’s true, you never did anything like this before. Why now, all of a sudden?” Toriko was as confused as I was. Go figure. If a scaredy-cat like Kozakura was starting up something like this out of nowhere, of course our first reaction would be to worry.
Kozakura chuckled. “What’s there to wonder about? I always wanted to do this kind of research.”
“This kind of research...” I echoed.
Oh, right. She’s a cognitive psychologist.
“Call it a change of heart... I kind of got over things. Maybe because of Satsuki’s funeral, or because of taking in Kasumi. I’m not even sure what triggered it myself, but at some point, I found myself able to tackle the Otherside as a subject of study.”
“Is it okay for us to interpret that in a positive way?” I asked.
“What’re you worried about? You think I went crazy or something?”
“Well, if we’re being honest, a little...”
“You dolt. I’m just fine. If anything, I may be thinking clearer than I ever have. I dunno. Maybe ending up super busy looking after Kasumi did me some good? Not having the time to get scared of things that haven’t happened yet may have made all those vague fears that were hanging over me retreat. Not that I really get what’s happened.”
Kozakura sounded totally sane as she said all this. She didn’t have crazy eyes, and she was articulating herself coherently too.
“Okay...” I said. “Well then, what are you studying with this list?”
“I’m still only in the middle of it. And that’s assuming the premise that the other world is using ghost stories as an interface is true to begin with. I thought mapping that interface might be possible?”
“Mapping? If you want a map, we’re already making one.”
We were making a map of the terrain and landmarks of the other world, and we kept on adding to it as we continued our exploration and the places we knew expanded. Just recently, we’d drawn in the lake we found at the bottom of the hill road in front of the Mayoiga.
“I’m not talking about a physical map. I’m talking about conceptual mapping.”
“Conceptual...”
Seeing I was struggling with the meaning, Kozakura explained. “I don’t understand the Otherside, but ghost stories are a human thing. They’re a linguistic space made of human concepts, described in human language. If the Otherside is using them, then their vocabulary and concepts are limited to those used in ghost stories. In that range, we can perceive the influence of the other world.”
“Right.”
“And if that’s the case, don’t you think we could define the contours of that linguistic space through analyzing the ghost stories humans have told in the past?”
I thought for a while before replying. “Possibly. How exactly are you going to go about analyzing that?”
“I’m lazy and timid, so I chose a method that minimizes my contact with the original stories. I prepared a simple natural language processing program and then scraped ghost stories from the web at random and stuffed them into it. From that, I extracted the elements of ghost stories broken down to the level of phrases and vocabulary. After some corrections to account for spelling variations and duplicate entries, I was able to collect the fundamental vocabulary that make up ghost stories.”
“The elements of a ghost story... Is that what’s in your spreadsheet there?” Toriko asked.
“Yeah,” Kozakura replied, nodding. “This is the first step, and well, it was simple enough, but from here things get a bit annoying. This material that I’ve extracted from ghost stories, as it is now, is just the raw ingredients. It needs to be given a structure before it becomes a ghost story. Do you know what the structure of a ghost story is, Sorawo-chan?”
“Huh? What do you mean by that? Like, the story that it tells?”
“Yeah, you’ve got it. Could you give me an example of one?”
“Erm...”
“You can keep it simple.”
“Oh, sure. Uhh...”
“And as unfrightening as possible.”
Kozakura’s repeated demands were throwing me off-balance, but I thought about it.
“Well, just as an example, you go to sleep one night and experience sleep paralysis, then when you wake up there’s an old woman you’ve never seen before sitting on your chest...”
“That’s a common one,” Kozakura said, relieved. It was such a cliché that everyone had heard it, and no one found it scary anymore.
“Just when you’ve forgotten about the incident, you visit a relative’s house in the countryside, and one of the photos of your departed ancestors in the room with the Buddhist altar seems familiar. It’s the old woman from the night you had sleep paralysis...”
“Huh? The story’s continuing?”
“Alarmed, you ask who the woman in the picture is, but no one knows, or even noticed that the picture was hanging there before...”
As I continued the story, Kozakura frowned.
“Then, taking the picture down from the wall, you look at the back and find there’s a crude human figure cut out of paper there, and the name written on it is—”
“Okay, that’s quite enough! Thank you!” Kozakura loudly interrupted me. “Yeesh... I let you talk about this stuff, and you just keep on going. Scary.”
“You’re the one who asked me to tell you a story, weren’t you, Kozakura-san?”
“Well, yes, you’re right. Anyway, let’s pull out the skeleton of that story. If we limit it to just the first part for sake of simplicity, during Ordinary Activity A, Abnormal Situation B occurs, leading to the observation of Abnormal Situation C.”
“A is ‘while I was sleeping,’ B is ‘sleep paralysis,’ and C is ‘an unfamiliar old woman,’ huh?”
“Right. A → B → C is the structure of this ghost story. This sort of story skeleton can also be extracted from the original ghost stories, like I was talking about earlier. By doing so, we’re able to create a collection of story templates for ghost stories. By the way, Sorawo-chan, is there a clear origin for the story you were telling just now?”
I had to think about it.
“I wonder... Honestly, I’m not sure. I’ve read so many ghost stories that it’s kind of hazy to me whether there was an original. It was probably a patchwork of stories I’ve read somewhere. I remember the famous ones, or the ones that left a deep impression on me, though.”
“Makes sense. Frankly, you can think of my program as trying to do what you just did there.”
“Mixing and matching material extracted from past ghost stories in order to assemble a single story.”
“That’s the idea.”
“So you’re making new ghost stories out of ones you’ve cut to pieces,” said Toriko. “Is there a point to all this? It just sounds like a lot of extra effort to me...”
“Yeah, I know, right?” I agreed. “And their quality as ghost stories will be lower too.”
“The quality of the individual stories isn’t a problem. The key point of this program is its ability to continuously generate ghost stories.”
“Continuously...?” I echoed.
“Yeah,” Kozakura replied, nodding. “It looks up ghost story material and structures at random, and keeps on mixing them. Nobody needs to read them. In fact, the entire premise is to automatically generate ghost stories that nobody will ever read. I’m going to leave it running around the clock all year, only taking care that the system doesn’t run out of space.”