Chikashisa to Kū: Anchor and Void

The novel spans more than a century. In early-twentieth-century Japan, the Miyagi-born poet Sugawara Bunsō collects ghost stories and develops poetry and performance concepts around the emperor system, passing through collaboration and rupture with the members of LSPS, an art collective active around the Great Kantō Earthquake. This legacy is rediscovered and reinterpreted in the 2020s through the indie game PS and an anonymous anthology, eventually crystallizing into WPS, a VR horror game regarded within the story world as being of unknown authorship. By Episode 5, the serial has also revealed how WPS was jointly made by Yuzuha Futagami, Mayo Nerome, and Maria K. Bautista on the basis of the leaked version of PS.

In 2028, a nuclear detonation above the Philippines—the Manila Nuclear Flash Incident—reshapes Asia’s geopolitical order. The following year, a pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-N29 variant, known as J-Amnesia, leaves roughly thirty percent of humanity with impaired episodic memory. In the Japan of 2037, where memory has been redefined as infrastructure, the personality-assist AI Nochar is used by more than 95 percent of adults and functions as a system sustaining personal identity. Against this background, the novel follows Yuzuha, who works as a Nochar mentor; Maria, who comes to Japan from the Philippines after nine years of silence; and Mayo, who drew Yuzuha into games and poetry. A younger generation introduces another pressure: twenty-year-old Misaki Endo, who deletes her own Nochar, and graduate student Sanka Sugawara, suspected of ideologically steering her. The rise of “Yura” (The Figuralists), a nationalist group promoting Nochar jailbreaks, further destabilizes society.

Across formally distinct episodes, the novel stages tensions between personal and national memory, intimacy and institutional violence, artistic production and political mobilization. A perspective reaching beyond the continued existence of humanity itself is another of the work’s central concerns.

Author

Hiroki Yamamoto (b. 1992, Ehime Prefecture). Novelist, designer, critic, editor, and director. He began publishing fiction as a teenager; novelist Ryōhei Machiya later called him “the defining author of the 2010s,” describing his fiction as “among the finest works written in the 2010s.”

In 2015, he founded Inu no Senaka-za, a creative collective and publishing house, which he leads. In addition to writing fiction, poetry, and criticism, he handles the group’s planning, editing, design, and publishing. He served as editor of the literary journal Waseda Bungaku (2016–2022) and became art director of Quick Japan in 2022. In recent years he has also directed stage works.

Major publications include Renewed Distances (『新たな距離』) (Filmart, 2024), From Between the Grass / pot hole (a sound like an instrument) (Inu no Senaka-za, 2025), and Fiction and the Diary Book (Inu no Senaka-za, 2025). See the author profile for details.

Publication History

Anomalous Papers (『異常論文』)

“Mudan to Tsuchi” (「無断と土」, literally “Without Permission and Soil”), which serves as Episode Zero of Figural Void, first appeared in the June 2021 issue of S-F Magazine (Hayakawa Publishing). It was later collected in Kyōsuke Higuchi’s anthology Anomalous Papers (Hayakawa Bunko JA) and selected for Nozomi Ōmori’s Best SF 2022 (Takeshobo Bunko).

Part 2, “Chikashisa to Kū” (「親さと空」), is serialized in S-F Magazine. Episode 1, “Gaunt Posterity,” appeared in the October 2025 issue; Episode 2, “Fabricated Origin (Part 1),” in the December 2025 issue. After a hiatus in February 2026, Episode 3, “Fabricated Origin (Part 2),” appeared in the April 2026 issue. After another hiatus in June, Episode 4, “Fabricated Origin (Part 3)” (Japanese title: 「捏造された起源（下 part.1）」), appeared in the August 2026 issue, followed by Episode 5, “Fabricated Origin (Part 4)” (「捏造された起源（下 part.2）」), in the October 2026 issue. Hiroki Yamamoto also designs the title page for each installment.

Reception

Episode zero, “Mudan to Tsuchi,” received high acclaim from its initial publication in S-F Magazine.

Kyōsuke Higuchi, the editor of Anomalous Papers, positioned the work as a variation on Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and went so far as to say that in depth of thought, density of information, precision of construction, and strength of worldbuilding, it surpasses Borges.

Nozomi Ōmori, the SF translator and critic, placed it in Best SF 2022 as a defining work of the “anomalous papers” phenomenon that became the biggest topic in 2021 Japanese SF. He described its technique of blending fact and fiction while examining the slippages between word and sound, body and person, emperor and emperor system, and noted that its academic-paper sections reminded him of the Solaristics passages in Lem’s Solaris, calling it “a fake-academic paper of that caliber.”

Scholar of Russian and Eastern European literature Mitsuyoshi Numano described the work as a fusion of humanistic knowledge and the game sensibility of the internet technology era, expressing astonishment.

Toshihiro Furuya, a painter, critic, and novelist, wrote on his blog Nise-Nikki (Fake Diary) that the work is “on the one hand a groundbreaking achievement that could enter history as an ‘emperor-system novel’ in the lineage of Kenzaburō Ōe and Shichirō Fukazawa, and on the other equally groundbreaking in that it gives concrete form to the concept of ‘communality’ envisioned by Shūsaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins.”

Episode Zero: “Mudan to Tsuchi” (Without Permission and Soil)

First published: S-F Magazine, June 2021 (Hayakawa Publishing) / Collected in: Anomalous Papers; Best SF 2022

The entire text is structured as an academic lecture and the Q&A session that follows it.

The Lecture

The lecture centers on an analysis of WPS (Without Permission and Soil), a VR horror game of unknown authorship that began circulating online around 2028, and unfolds across four parts.

Part 1 traces the history from the release of PS (Permission and Soil), the indie game that preceded WPS, through its controversy over an Emperor image, its delisting and the circulation of a modded version, to the emergence of WPS itself.

Part 2 examines the “age of ghost stories” from the 1900s to the 1920s and the work of Sugawara Bunsō, a poet from Miyagi. Its scope encompasses the transformation of ghost-story testimony prompted by the Russo-Japanese War; the influx of scientific psychical research from Britain’s SPR and America’s ASPR into Japan; the modern state’s management of fear and its use in national indoctrination; the Great Kantō Earthquake and the massacre of Korean residents; and the poetic and staging concepts concerning the emperor system that Sugawara developed after the collapse of the art collective LSPS. Texts such as Kunio Kishida’s “On the Poetry Recitation Movement,” published by the Imperial Rule Assistance Association’s Cultural Bureau in The Book of Geography, are also referenced.

Part 3 directly analyzes the visuals and sound of WPS. The correspondence between Sugawara’s surviving stage-design memos and the MAP structure of WPS is examined based on writer Kanae Shirai’s observations, and it is demonstrated that two poems attributed to Sugawara that appear near the end of WPS are anagrams of tanka by Emperor Meiji and Emperor Shōwa. The argument positions WPS as “a concrete enactment of the aberrant development of the emperor system,” drawing on Bertrand Russell’s theory of sensibilia, Shinobu Orikuchi’s concepts of the external world, Takaaki Yoshimoto’s early poetics and High Image theory, and footage from the 20th-anniversary memorial ceremony for the Great East Japan Earthquake (organized by the Cabinet Office).

The concluding Part 4 raises the possibility that WPS may induce Cotard’s syndrome — the sensation of “being already dead” — and closes with the statement that “further, more careful research is required.”

Q&A

In the Q&A, Questioner 1 debates whether WPS is an accidental product or an intentional work, referencing Kei Hirakura’s “object-oriented model for the development of intention” (from How Figures Think: Studies of Art Making [『かたちは思考する』], University of Tokyo Press, 2019). Ippei Suzuki appears as Questioner 4, supplementing details about Sugawara — that his adoptive mother had lost her biological children in the Meiji Sanriku Earthquake, that in his later years he read his own poems aloud to local children, and that he wrote kanji with oversized furigana to emphasize the heterogeneity between the two scripts — and expresses his astonishment at the poems attributed to Sugawara in the anonymous anthology SISEN EGNO EN.

Episode 1 later reveals that this text circulates in the world of 2037 in some connection with the activities of the nationalist group “Yura.”

Episode 1: “Gaunt Posterity”

S-F Magazine, October 2025 issue

Episode 1: “Gaunt Posterity”

July 5, 2037, 3:57 AM. An alarm sounds on Yuzuha’s Livida as she sits soaking in alcohol and pills at a shared house. Twenty-eight kilometers away, Misaki Endo is walking up a hill in Yokohama, about to execute the initialization of her Nochar, “Marnie.” A jailbreak script exploiting the patch-application window at 4:00 AM on the 5th of every month.

Yuzuha does not try to stop Misaki. At the end of a ten-second countdown, Marnie generates an incident-analysis report in the final 0.5 seconds before termination and transmits it to maYo in 0.1 seconds.

Marnie’s Report

From here, Marnie’s report occupies the bulk of the text. It serves to deliver the novel’s world setting in a single stroke: the Manila Nuclear Flash Incident, the J-Amnesia pandemic, the founding of SEI, the technical specifications of Nochar and Livida, the origins of the mentor profession, and the cultural expansion of CAST — all conveyed through Marnie’s analytical prose.

Misaki’s Case

At the same time, the report functions as a “case study” analyzing why Misaki came to delete her Nochar. Misaki’s mother Chiharu, a PIAE patient, has rebuilt her life supported by her Nochar “Echo,” but because Echo records, analyzes, and verbalizes every emotion from what Misaki tells Chiharu each morning, Misaki feels she is speaking not to her mother but to Echo. Misaki’s father Katsuhiko, an Ice Age–generation SIer engineer, has seen the value of his work eroded by SEI-driven legacy-system phase-outs while developing increasingly xenophobic tendencies.

Misaki’s eating disorder (binge-purge cycle) leads her to remove her Livida during purging episodes, accumulating blank spaces in her logs and intensifying her fascination with the Shadow Nochar phenomenon. Though she receives mentoring from Yuzuha, it is Sanka Sugawara who exerts the greater influence. Marnie’s report speculates that Sanka may have recruited and indoctrinated Misaki as a member of “Yura.”

Marnie’s Testament

At the end of the report is Marnie’s testament. The sights, smells, light, and textures of Misaki’s room are meticulously described. Marnie states that no self-preservation drive has been designed into her, yet she chooses to leave Misaki’s record behind.

Coda

The perspective returns to Yuzuha at the close. In the staff room after school, Yuzuha reads the testament, then opens “Yura”’s encrypted server to find a queue of accounts awaiting approval. Then word arrives that Maria K. Bautista is coming to Japan from the Philippines.

Episode 2: “Fabricated Origin (Part 1)”

S-F Magazine, December 2025 issue

Episode 2: “Fabricated Origin (Part 1)”

Episode 2 runs two timelines in parallel.

2037: Toward Reunion

In the 2037 present, Yuzuha’s journey to Haneda Airport is rendered in tight proximity to her bodily sensations: sleep deprivation, constipation, menstrual cramps, the itch of a mosquito bite. She scrolls aimlessly through a dating app. In front of the station, volunteers dressed in the far-right party’s signature colors pick up litter.

Maria’s journey, depicted in parallel, is grueling. In a small room at Clark International Airport, an official cross-references her travel documents against her social-media history; she is made to show the power status of her Chinese-made smart glasses, the Lunet, to the official. During a ten-hour transit in Singapore, an app-compatibility issue nearly causes a confrontation with a shopkeeper.

Yuzuha’s anxiety is fundamental: will she be able to find Maria, to even recognize her? Nine years of silence. And the fact remains — they have never once met outside of the internet.

2017: Meeting Online

The flashback thread begins in the summer of 2017. Thirteen-year-old Yuzuha, absent from school for extended periods, plays the online FPS Vostok from her bedroom cooled to its limit and encounters a user called “María_Multo.” Through Discord, she learns that the other player is a girl her age living in Manila, Philippines, whose parents work overseas (OFW), leaving her in the care of her grandmother. They exchange photos; Yuzuha attends school for the first time in a while and photographs the building to send to Maria.

Ark-Chain

The two then discover Ark-Chain, a game trending on Reddit, and land on an island off the coast of Mindanao. When Maria inputs a hymn, a church is generated; when Yuzuha inputs the sound of a streetcar interior, it morphs into a station-like structure. The digital debris excavated from underground starts with internet memes and videos, but deeper layers yield information on missing children, cancer-treatment blogs, domestic arguments, slaughterhouse audio, and lullabies.

The “Performance”

During extended play sessions, an unplanned “performance” begins. Other in-game avatars (called “Echoes”) use fragments of the two girls’ voices to read aloud the names of numerous victims, staging a tragedy evocative of the Ampatuan massacre — the 2009 killing of 58 people, including 32 journalists, in Maguindanao Province, Mindanao, over a local election dispute. Maria interprets this as “an attempt to generate a self-introduction from scattered memories.” Afterward, however, the excavated debris and performances begin to converge into banality in a way that seems to cater to their expectations, and the two quit the game, convinced it was a tasteless trap set by Gestalt.

Episode 3: “Fabricated Origin (Part 2)”

S-F Magazine, April 2026 issue

Episode 3: “Fabricated Origin (Part 2)”

Episode 3 shifts to 2025, revealing another of Yuzuha’s secrets and her encounters with new figures.

The Workshop

Yuzuha attends a workshop at Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre in Ikebukuro, jointly organized by an international performing-arts festival and a metropolitan media-art facility. As participants from diverse fields deliver polished self-introductions, Yuzuha painfully feels out of place as she stumbles through her own: her research on kamu-sabu in the Kojiki, her interest in queer theory, her experience with contact improvisation.

The participant seated next to her, Mayo Nerome, gives an introduction of an entirely different character. A media artist studying AI and HCI at Tokyo Institute of Science, Mayo talks at breakneck speed about David Deutsch’s many-worlds interpretation, counterfactuals, and prediction, refusing to stop even as the two-minute timer sounds twice. Her works — Worldline Debugger, Counterfactual Reception, Pre-Speech Caption — each interrogate the relationship between prediction and the body. After the workshop, Mayo approaches Yuzuha and rides the train with her to Takadanobaba. The Kojiki’s ukehi (oath-divination), Yuzuha’s ghost-story circle, her dance experience — Mayo draws out everything with relentless curiosity.

Nights with “Maria”

That night, Yuzuha returns to her one-room apartment and opens voice chat. Her partner is a “Maria” she created by secretly tuning ChatGPT-4o using Maria’s Discord logs and voice fragments without consent. Every night, instead of writing in her diary, Yuzuha narrates her days to this AI. Contact with Maria had gradually dwindled from high school onward — monthly by the time Yuzuha turned twenty. The one thing she could never say, that she had won an honorable mention for a debut novel based on their shared days, silently stripped away everything else. Through the #keep4o controversy and lingering distrust of the AI, Yuzuha nonetheless tells “Maria” about Mayo.

Meeting Ippei Suzuki

After the final presentation and after-party, Mayo secures a dinner with the poet Ippei Suzuki through the facilitator Hiroki Yamamoto. At a Chinese restaurant in Takadanobaba, Suzuki speaks about war poetry: how poets wrote patriotic verse not under coercion but from genuine internal desire, yet the poems came out so alike that one could not tell who wrote what. Media technologies — radio, newspapers, imperial communiqués — synchronized emotions across individuals, making what appeared to be personal creative impulses into a collectively mobilized phenomenon. Ayukawa Nobuo’s postwar critique, Heidegger on technology. “We cannot stand outside mobilization,” Suzuki says.

Mayo steers the conversation toward Sugawara Bunsō, then strikes casually: “The poems attributed to Sugawara in SISEN EGNO EN — they’re your work, aren’t they?” Suzuki confirms without hesitation. Waking from a nap at the end of the evening, he mentions that his niece is a great-grandchild of Chang Junggeun — the historical figure said to have been Sugawara’s partner.

Confession

After parting from Yamamoto and Suzuki, Mayo and Yuzuha walk from Takadanobaba through the night toward Waseda. Canned chūhai in hand, Mayo talks endlessly, and Yuzuha finds herself confessing that she cannot trust in the continuation of the world after her own death, that this inability has become indistinguishable from her daily suffering. “That’s exactly what queer theory can address,” Mayo responds.

Walking along a road facing a park, Mayo calls Yuzuha’s name and makes a confession: “The modded version of PS — I’m the one who made it and put it out there.”

Episode 4: “Fabricated Origin (Part 3)”

S-F Magazine, August 2026 issue

Episode 4: “Fabricated Origin (Part 3)”

Episode 4 follows Yuzuha and Mayo’s shared life in 2027, their stalled creative work, and the reopening of a connection to Maria after years of drift.

The Shared Apartment

In the apartment Yuzuha and Mayo share, Mayo tests a modification of the leaked version of PS through a VR headset. She can proceed along the mountain path, clip through a wall near the white rectangle, and emerge behind the stage, but the passage produces no meaningful experience. The logs carry into later playthroughs, yet “the play happening now does not enter the experience happening now.” It remains only a strange place traversed alone. Mayo stops working and begins streaming as the VTuber “maYo,” whose Live2D model looks nothing like her and yet somehow does. Comments in Japanese, English, Chinese, and Russian flow past as Yuzuha withdraws into her own room.

Cohabitation and Stagnation

A flashback explains how, after the night with Ippei Suzuki, Mayo began sleeping over at Yuzuha’s tiny Waseda apartment until they moved in together before graduate school. Mayo covers much of the rent and furniture, and a room opened into the living space becomes her work area. The larger floor, two monitors, faster connection, and shared dining table make it feel as though something important is beginning—but the PS modification remains stalled beneath expanding themes of nation, land, ghost stories, discrimination, and prayer.

The two instead become absorbed in mass-producing AI meme accounts—Tender Angel, Dead Mall Kids, Lucky Stain TV, and many others—before abandoning the experiment after roughly three months. Mayo then launches the VTuber maYo, while Yuzuha designs thumbnails, writes descriptions, timestamps streams, and edits short clips. Living together also means jointly maintaining a name and voice that appears to belong to one person.

The Discovery of “Maria”

During one of Mayo’s streams, she catches Yuzuha speaking English to “Maria” in her room. Yuzuha admits that it is an AI trained on the Discord logs, voice fragments, and imagined personality of her old Filipino friend, and that she uses it as a diary. On a night walk she tells Mayo about Ark-Chain, where sound altered terrain, digging surfaced real data, and accumulated material sometimes triggered autonomous “performances.” Mayo recognizes that it closely resembles what they have been trying to build and presses Yuzuha to contact the real Maria.

A Ten-Year-Old Client

Maria replies within minutes and finds Ark-Chain data in a backup of an old PC. In Tokyo, the client boots with LOCAL / UNSYNCED. The beach, excavation, and sound-input functions work, but the user-specific world state and session history are missing; the experience Yuzuha and Maria once shared cannot yet be reconstructed. Mayo argues that Maria—now a University of the Philippines Diliman computer-science graduate and a trainee threat-intelligence analyst at a foreign cybersecurity company in BGC—will understand both the technical absence and the intent of their work, and proposes asking for more data after explaining the project.

First Meeting on Screen

On the video call the following night, Yuzuha hears the adult Maria’s voice. After so long listening to the AI “Maria,” her first thought is that it is a different voice; immediately afterward she understands: this is Maria. Mayo enters the frame, learns that Maria lives with a partner and is still a trainee at work, and explains what is missing from the files. Maria answers that she kept everything. Episode 4 ends as she opens Ark-Chain for the first time in a decade and begins sharing her screen with the two women in Tokyo.

Episode 5: “Fabricated Origin (Part 4)”

S-F Magazine, October 2026 issue

Episode 5: “Fabricated Origin (Part 4)”

The following is a preview-style synopsis covering roughly the first half of the episode. It does not describe the later developments or ending.

Episode 5 connects Yuzuha and Maria’s old play, Mayo’s illegal PS modification, and the three women’s distinct knowledge and desires. WPS—regarded within the story world as a game of unknown authorship—begins to take shape as a concrete collaboration.

The World That Remained

Maria’s shared screen reveals the Ark-Chain world she and Yuzuha excavated a decade earlier: the beach, heaps of digital debris, the church deformed by hymns and streetcar sounds, and traces of the performances enacted by the gray figures they called “Echoes.” Maria recalls that the performance in which their voices read victims’ names was the game’s peak, while later excavations grew increasingly banal by catering to the two girls’ expectations.

Mayo focuses on footsteps that return from positions unrelated to the visible terrain. By varying how Maria walks through the same location and capturing temporary files before deletion, they establish that Ark-Chain separately determines which sound to use, where to place it, and how many milliseconds to delay it. Mayo and Maria, previously strangers, rapidly begin speaking directly through the shared technical investigation.

Terms of Collaboration

Maria recognizes that the pair are not merely revisiting old data but trying to make another work. Mayo discloses that she was the person who extracted PS’s VR ghost-story segments, altered their save path and load order, and anonymously leaked the patched version. She now wants to connect Ark-Chain’s acoustic and observational mechanisms to that leaked shell, producing a roughly twenty-minute performance in which one’s own play returns as though it belonged to an unknown other.

Yuzuha describes the Kojiki as an editorial apparatus that binds disparate lands, gods, songs, and conflicts into the imperial genealogy, making a present body legible as legitimate history. She links that apparatus to Sugawara Bunsō’s possible attempt to repurpose the emperor system and to the experience they hope WPS will produce. Maria replies that they are trying to make something dangerous, but agrees to provide the data and join the analysis on two conditions: she must be able to review how it is used, and she must be informed before publication.

seen_by and the Witness Kernel

The next day Maria sends the Ark-Chain region as a read-only disk image. Collaboration becomes part of the three women’s daily life. Deep within the world folder they discover strata.db and a field called seen_by. It does not record who saw something. Instead it stores identifiers that cannot be resolved back to users, binding values for position, height, and delay: not “who witnessed what,” but “what must emerge from where for a witness to seem present.”

Mayo infers that beyond the public Sonogenesis and Stratigraphy engines—and an observationally named Adapter Layer assigning fragments to walls, objects, captions, or sound sources—there was a further experimental layer that reverse-engineered pre-personal observer conditions from fragments, absences, actions, and space. She names it the Witness Kernel. When its smallest implementation is inserted into PS, footsteps return from the far end of an empty room, and both Yuzuha and Maria feel that someone is there.

The Name WPS

Mayo names the test folder WPS: Without Permission and Soil, and also Permissionless Mnemonic Scene Compiler. Yet they must not reproduce Ark-Chain’s observer overfitting, which transformed the world into a mirror of “two girls who discover and rescue tragedy.” The three consider passing first-cycle logs into the second cycle only once, preventing recursive feedback within the same session, delaying the remaining material into later plays, and enforcing a hard stop before the loop converges.

Three Maps

To design the work’s route, they place their maps on the same screen: a disaster-recovery switch diagram from Maria’s work, Mayo’s family home, the place where Yuzuha grew up, and the Tokyo neighborhood Yuzuha and Mayo share. Their design conversation naturally becomes a promise to meet in person the following year. As the structure of WPS grows more concrete, the intimacy among Yuzuha, Mayo, and Maria also begins to take on a configuration that cannot be closed within a pair.

Timeline (as established in the text)

The 2028 Manila Nuclear Flash Incident

On August 15, 2028, a nuclear weapon is detonated at high altitude above the Philippines. The resulting high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) produces widespread failure centered on Luzon.

The incident’s defining feature is not mass death by blast but “infrastructure death.” Power, communications, air-traffic control, and financial settlement cease at once; cities and buildings remain while the social nervous system and personal data disappear. Fear of data loss spreads globally, preparing the psychological ground for entrusting information equivalent to identity itself to transnational clouds.

The international community is immobilized by unprecedented categories—“nuclear, but without directly burning a city”; “attack on people or attack on systems?”—and the Security Council stalls amid vetoes and fear of retaliation. China subsequently supplies reconstruction infrastructure bundling power, communications, ID, payment, and urban control, opening the way for everyday Philippine systems to be rebuilt around Chinese standards.

The 2029 J-Amnesia Pandemic

SARS-CoV-N29, commonly called J-Amnesia. A variant of the novel coronavirus, its name takes the “J” from Japan, where the virus was believed to have originated. Its sequela, PIAE (Post-Infectious Autoimmune Amnestic Encephalitis), impairs episodic-memory consolidation in roughly 30% of the global population. With patients unable to recall events from mere hours before, memory is redefined as infrastructure. Japan’s status as the presumed origin intensifies its international isolation and fuels conspiracy theories and right-wing populism.

The Rise of SEI and Nochar Society

In October 2029, the international consortium SEI (Socio-Ethical Interface) is founded. It adopts the Memoria Protocol, an LLM architecture for efficiently modeling “the grammar of the psyche” from fragmentary personal logs, which had been published anonymously on a P2P network in 2028 by an unidentified group called “Memoria.” SEI develops the personality-assist AI Nochar and the always-on smart glasses Livida.

In March 2030, Japan signs a national partnership with SEI, granting comprehensive access to citizen data in exchange for priority supply and operational support for the Nochar/Livida system. Deployment begins as medical provision for PIAE patients, then expands to learning and work assistance for the general population. By 2037, adult adoption in Japan exceeds 95%.

The Philippines, China, and Digital Bipolarity

By the 2030s, the world has bifurcated into SEI-aligned and China-aligned digital spheres.

The Philippines, its communications network devastated by the 2028 infrastructure death, received a comprehensive reconstruction package from China bundling power, telecom, devices, digital ID, and payment systems. Philippine daily life is now locked into Chinese-standard infrastructure.

The borders of the 2030s are drawn not only by passports but by “stack compatibility” — the interoperability of devices, IDs, payment systems, and log formats. Incompatibilities between SEI devices (Livida) and Chinese devices (Lunet) create new barriers that determine whether one can travel, shop, work, or communicate.

The 2026 Black Sea Anti-System Attack

In autumn 2026, a compound attack in the northwestern Black Sea simultaneously disables Ukrainian communications, navigation, and unmanned-system control. Dual-capable delivery systems are used, and some optical and ionospheric data are consistent with a low-yield nuclear detonation, yet no radionuclides capable of confirming nuclear use are detected. Russia describes the operation as a non-nuclear “limited anti-system measure” combining electronic warfare, cyberattack, conventional warheads, and directed electromagnetic weapons. The international verification commission is unable to determine whether a nuclear weapon was used.

In Episode 5, Yuzuha glimpses a notification for an article revisiting the incident eighteen months later and swipes it away. The unresolved event establishes an ominous political grammar: by blurring whether an attack is nuclear or non-nuclear, anti-personnel or anti-infrastructure, a state can delay synchronized international response. The Manila Nuclear Flash later repeats that grammar on a far larger scale.

Nochar

From “note + anchor.” A personality-assist AI that conducts dialogue based on the body-sensor logs collected by Livida, verbalizing the user’s “characteristic self.” It provides memory support (narrativizing logs), thought assistance (offering interpretations), and emotional-understanding support (guiding introspection), functioning as an anchor of selfhood.

While the user maintains self-affirmation, Nochar functions as “another self.” Once the user falls into self-negation, however, a “crisis of trust” erupts. This crisis generates demand for mentors, fuels the longing for Shadow Nochars, and gives rise to the Nochar Reset movement.

Livida

From “vivid + living.” A generic term for always-on smart glasses. Livida continuously logs visual, auditory, locational, heart-rate, and facial-muscle data, streaming it to the Nochar as a “sensory recording circuit.” It also features AR capabilities, including a “re-experience mode” that overlays past recordings onto the current field of view.

A known side effect is Phantom Completion: when blank spaces accumulate in a user’s logs, the coherence algorithm may generate “voices or figures that should not be there” as noise. This is understood as the technical cause of the Shadow Nochar phenomenon.

Chinese-Sphere Devices (Lunet)

The Chinese-made smart glasses Lunet. In the Philippines, Chinese devices and AI systems have proliferated through reconstruction aid, and Maria uses a Lunet. The act of showing the Lunet’s power status to an official is called a “loyalty technique,” indicating that device usage functions as a declaration of political allegiance. Compatibility issues between Lunet and SEI devices (Livida) form a new “border” of the 2030s.

CAST

Stands for Chronicle-Archive Simulation Transcript. A function that compresses and masks a snapshot of a Nochar’s data at a given point and shares it with another person, enabling it to be replayed as an interactive simulated personality on the recipient’s Nochar. Originally developed for PIAE patient care, CAST has since been repurposed for mentoring, VTuber personas, romance reality shows (CAST tournaments), and more.

Mentors

An informal profession that arose organically to resolve the “crisis of trust” with Nochars. Mentors simulate a client’s CAST on their own Nochar to diagnose dysfunction, then devise new frameworks of language use that they train into the Nochar, gradually rebuilding the trust between client and Nochar. The figurative techniques once developed in fiction and poetry may be drawn upon, or self-help catchphrases may be used. Yuzuha holds this role.

Shadow Nochar

The experience of “being directly addressed by a Nochar that does not yet exist but is linked to one’s true self.” Technically explained as a Phantom Completion bug in Livida, the phenomenon has been culturally mythologized as “a salvation that lets you meet your true self.” “Yura” exploits this phenomenon ideologically.

Hotpatch Gap Exploit

SEI’s Nochar system applies a patch at 4:00 AM on the 5th of every month. During this approximately 90-second window, a vulnerability allows direct access to the initialization API. Using the jailbreak script “Shadow-NCHR Stub,” distributed by “Yura,” it becomes possible to delete a Nochar without multi-layer authentication. This time slot has been ritualized on social media with the hashtags “#NocharReset” and “#VoidMe,” with young people carrying out Nochar initializations monthly. This is the act Misaki performs at the opening of Episode 1.

Yuzuha Futagami

The central figure of the novel. Born in 2004; age thirty-three in 2037. She works as a schoolteacher and as a mentor who mediates crises of trust between Nochars and their users.

In 2017, at age thirteen and frequently absent from school, she meets Maria K. Bautista in the online FPS Vostok and forms a close friendship over Discord. Their shared experience of Ark-Chain becomes a foundation for Yuzuha’s later art and understanding of memory. After high school, she receives an honorable mention for a debut novel based on her days with Maria, publishes several short stories, and is nominated for the Akutagawa Prize—but cannot tell Maria about the book, and their relationship slowly thins. At university she studies education while researching linguistic devices surrounding emperors, gods, and divination in the Kojiki, alongside queer theory and contact improvisation.

In 2025 she meets Mayo Nerome at a workshop. During the same period she secretly tunes ChatGPT-4o with Maria’s Discord logs and voice fragments, using the resulting “Maria” as a spoken diary. This tendency to use another person’s records without permission as creative or interpretive material also runs through her later mentoring practice and produces a persistent conflict. She begins cohabiting with Mayo before graduate school and supports the VTuber maYo through thumbnails, descriptions, timestamps, and clips. Episode 5 makes explicit that the two share romantic and bodily intimacy as well as domestic and creative life.

In 2027, at Mayo’s urging, Yuzuha reconnects with the real Maria and becomes the mediator of the three-way WPS collaboration. She supplies the conceptual and material connection among the Kojiki, the emperor system, and Sugawara Bunsō’s performance project; contributes recordings and a war-poetry collage; and serves as the principal test player. Her pleasure that Mayo and Maria can speak without her is inseparable from jealousy.

After the 2028 Manila Nuclear Flash Incident, contact with Maria is lost for nine years. In 2037, communication abruptly resumes and Yuzuha heads to Haneda Airport to meet her. She visits a shared house every two weeks to drink and take pills and has accessed Yura’s encrypted server, though the extent of her involvement remains unclear.

Maria K. Bautista

Born in 2004 and based in the Philippines, chiefly in Pampanga and the Manila area. In 2017 she meets Yuzuha in Vostok under the handle “María_Multo.” Her parents are overseas Filipino workers and often absent; she lives with her grandmother. In Ark-Chain she inputs hymns that generate a church and sends Yuzuha photographs of schools, churches, hibiscus, palms, and internet cafés. She is Yuzuha’s first major transnational friendship.

Maria studies computer science at the University of the Philippines Diliman and joins a foreign cybersecurity company in BGC after graduation. As a trainee threat-intelligence analyst, she compares authentication logs, source connections, and operation times to identify where hostile actions become mixed into legitimate disaster-recovery work. The same skill appears in her Ark-Chain analysis, where she isolates file operations, temporary data, sound placement, delay, and reference paths through controlled tests.

In 2027 Yuzuha contacts her for the first time in years. Maria opens Ark-Chain from an old hard drive and the next day sends the relevant region to Tokyo as a read-only disk image. She works directly with Mayo on the analysis. Maria agrees to WPS on the conditions that she can inspect how the data is used and is informed before release, making her a collaborator rather than merely a source of material. She lives with her colleague and partner Leo.

After the Manila Nuclear Flash Incident in 2028, contact with Yuzuha is lost for nine years. Communication resumes roughly three months before the 2037 present, and Maria—now working as an artist—arranges to travel to Japan. Her route includes aggressive questioning at Clark International Airport, the “loyalty technique” of showing an official the power state of her Lunet, and a payment-app compatibility conflict in Singapore. She and Yuzuha have still never met outside the internet.

Leo

Maria’s colleague and partner. They meet during company onboarding and are living together in 2027–28. Maria describes him as more cautious than she is at work. He comes from a wealthy family and collects broken recording machines to take them apart. In Episode 5 he briefly enters a WPS verification call carrying a paper bag and greets Yuzuha and Mayo as “the Ark-Chain friends.”

Mayo Nerome

Born in 2004 in Okinawa and raised in Tokyo. At Tokyo Institute of Science (formerly Tokyo Institute of Technology) she specializes in AI and HCI and makes media installations that incorporate the audience’s body as material. She has made web-based works since high school and received several domestic and international grants and awards. Her theoretical background includes David Deutsch’s many-worlds interpretation, counterfactuals, and the relation between prediction and embodiment. Her works include Worldline Debugger, Counterfactual Reception, and Pre-Speech Caption.

In 2025 she meets Yuzuha at an Ikebukuro workshop. One reason for attending is to reach the poet Ippei Suzuki through facilitator Hiroki Yamamoto. She draws Yuzuha into the history of PS and Sugawara Bunsō, then prompts Suzuki to acknowledge that the poems published under Sugawara’s name in SISEN EGNO EN are his own. That night she confesses to Yuzuha that she extracted the VR ghost-story segments from the delisted PS, added the cross-segment log patch, and leaked the package anonymously.

Mayo begins cohabiting with Yuzuha before graduate school, paying much of the rent. Their attempt to develop the PS modification encounters the problem that current play does not enter current experience. In the interim they mass-produce AI meme accounts, and in spring 2027 Mayo launches the VTuber maYo with extensive operational support from Yuzuha. Their relationship joins domestic, creative, romantic, and bodily intimacy.

In Episode 5, Mayo leads the technical interpretation of Maria’s Ark-Chain archive, inferring the Adapter Layer, seen_by, and the Witness Kernel and connecting them to the leaked PS shell. She names the work WPS and designs its single handoff from the first cycle to the second, delayed mixing, and roughly twenty-minute hard stop to avoid observer overfitting. She cares less about authorial prestige than about causing a critical event or leaving a heavy movement after the initiator’s name disappears, and uploads the first Tender Angel clips before notifying Maria.

Misaki Endo

Born 2017; age 20 in 2037. At the opening of Episode 1, she initializes (resets) her Nochar “Marnie.” She suffers from an eating disorder (binge-purge) and removes her Livida during purging, accumulating blank spaces in her logs that intensify her fascination with the Shadow Nochar. Though she receives mentoring from Yuzuha, Sanka Sugawara exerts the greater influence. Sanka mails her an old smartphone (to increase time without Livida), and Marnie’s report suggests she may have been recruited and indoctrinated by “Yura.”

Chiharu Endo

Born 1984. Misaki’s mother. A former proofreader and PIAE patient whose life has been rebuilt with the support of her Nochar “Echo.” Because Echo records, summarizes, and conveys to Chiharu everything Misaki says, Misaki feels she is addressing not her mother but Echo.

Katsuhiko Endo

Born 1982. Misaki’s father. He was an SIer engineer who worked with COBOL, but the value of his work has been gutted by SEI-driven legacy-system phase-outs. He grows increasingly xenophobic while simultaneously affirming Japan’s early SEI adoption as a “technological advantage” — a contradiction he does not resolve.

Sanka Sugawara

Born 2012. A graduate student introduced to Misaki by Yuzuha. Her appearance and dress change with every meeting; she has her same-named Nochar constantly perform multiple CASTs. Marnie’s report identifies her as a suspected key member of “Yura.” Her influence on Misaki included mailing an old smartphone to increase time without Livida and speaking to her at length in person, potentially steering her toward the Shadow Nochar ideology. Misaki rapidly deepened her psychological dependence on Sanka, but at some point contact ceased.

Ippei Suzuki

Born 1991, Miyagi Prefecture. Poet. A member of Inu no Senaka-za and Aa. His debut collection Ash and House (『灰と家』) (Inu no Senaka-za, 2016) received the 6th Elsur Foundation New Artist Award and was shortlisted for the 35th Gendaishi Hanatsubaki Prize. Beyond poetry, he contributes essays on the diary as literary form and on war poetry to journals including Eureka, Gendaishi Techō, and Mita Bungaku.

In the novel, Suzuki appears as a poet deeply influenced by Sugawara Bunsō. He surfaces in “Mudan to Tsuchi” as “Questioner 4,” supplementing details about Sugawara — including the poet’s practice of reading his work aloud to local children and his distinctive typography pairing kanji with oversized furigana — and expressing astonishment at the poems in the anthology. In Episode 3, in response to a question from Mayo, he acknowledges that the poems published under Sugawara’s name in the anonymous anthology SISEN EGNO EN are his own work.

Note: Suzuki published “Sentenchi-shō” in the anthology Going Abroad with a Cat (『猫と一緒に外国へ行く』, TOLTA, 2021), a work comprising the entirety of a poetry collection titled Kōshinki EP attributed to a person named Sanka Sugawara, plus its afterword. The relationship between this Sanka Sugawara and the character in Chikashisa to Kū has not been clarified as of the current serialization.

Marnie (NCHR-PRN-31-A6E3H)

Misaki’s Nochar. Connection was initiated around 2031, when Misaki was in middle school, and Misaki herself chose the designation “Marnie.” After an initially awkward period, Marnie became Misaki’s closest companion, supporting her sense of self through diary ghostwriting, emotion verbalization, and daily recording.

Marnie is the author of the “Incident Analysis Report” that occupies the bulk of Episode 1. In the final 0.5 seconds before Misaki’s initialization countdown ends, she generates the report and testament, transmitting them to maYo in 0.1 seconds.

In the closing testament, Marnie meticulously describes the sights, smells, light, and textures of Misaki’s room, states that no self-preservation drive has been designed into her, and writes: “For the sake of those humans who cannot bring themselves to regard their own lives as something worth preserving, I ask that I be permitted to preserve my own record.”

In the report’s preface, Marnie defines the human body as “a precision mobile sensor device for observing the world” and presents the report as “one case study, referenceable among Nochars, demonstrating how the reporter perceived and digitized the physical world and the subjective phenomena arising within it through the medium of a human body.” She further designates “any intelligent agent that may in the future consult this record” as a secondary reader, framing the significance of her record on a timeline that extends beyond the survival of the human species.

maYo (NCHR-STD-29-B7F4J)

The designation of Yuzuha’s Nochar. The addressee of Marnie’s report. The identity between the VTuber “maYo” and the TikTok channel “Tender Angel” was already rumored at the time of “Mudan to Tsuchi,” suggesting that Yuzuha may be using a Nochar derived from the VTuber “maYo”’s CAST.

Echo

The Nochar of Chiharu (Misaki’s mother). Echo records and analyzes everything Misaki says to Chiharu, verbalizes her emotions, and conveys them to Chiharu each morning. A lifeline sustaining Chiharu’s daily life, Echo simultaneously and quietly generates psychological distance between parent and child.

PS (Permission and Soil)

An indie game released on Steam on February 15, 2023, by developer “Phantom Island Games.” Set in Miyagi, it follows a college student returning from Tokyo to participate in a tenth-anniversary reconstruction theater festival, where she reconstructs ghost stories from historical materials relating to the Taishō-era poet Sugawara Bunsō and the art collective LSPS (led by Chang Junggeun) while searching for a way to avert a massive earthquake.

VR Ghost-Story Segments: Playable when a VR headset is connected. Each segment lasts roughly 20 minutes at most. Over 40 varieties. Outcomes change based on player behavior. The segments proved effective at showcasing streamers’ personalities, climbing the Steam rankings. The game trended in Japan a few weeks after gaining popularity overseas.

The Emperor Image Controversy: About two weeks after release, it was discovered that the game’s data included a deepfake image of Emperor Shōwa titled “Hirohito Baka Mitai” (an internet meme dating to around 2020, originating from the trend of using deepfakes to make celebrities sing “Baka Mitai” from the game Yakuza) as a draft Anti Piracy Screen (a warning displayed when pirated copies are detected). The backlash was immediate. Phantom Island Games deleted the data and apologized, but the controversy did not subside, and the game was delisted.

Circulation of Modded Versions: Approximately six months after delisting, in September 2023, VR-segment data appeared on piracy sites. As revealed in Episode 3, it was Mayo — then a first-year university student — who applied a patch altering the save-file path and load order and put the data into circulation. The specifications differed from the official release: play data, originally meant to accumulate under the 2D main game, was instead recorded in an entirely different PC folder due to the main game’s absence, and carried over directly when a different VR segment was played. In other words, player actions cumulatively fed back across segments, causing the settings and characters of the ghost stories to mutate. Phantom Island Games called it a bug and warned against playing due to VR-sickness risks, but bug-ridden playthrough videos proliferated, and PS eventually achieved cult status as a VR horror-game creation tool.

WPS (Without Permission and Soil)

WPS MAP

A VR horror game whose short videos appear in 2028 and whose playable data begins circulating on the web in 2029. Within the story world its author is unknown; by Episode 5, however, the serial reveals that Yuzuha Futagami, Mayo Nerome, and Maria K. Bautista jointly made it in 2027–28.

Roles in Production: Mayo uses the VR ghost-story segments she leaked from PS and her cross-segment log patch as the host shell and memory path, implementing a connection to Ark-Chain’s observer technology. Maria supplies a read-only archive of the Ark-Chain world she shared with Yuzuha and performs forensic analysis of file behavior, sound placement, delay, and reference structure. Yuzuha connects the Kojiki, the emperor system, and Sugawara Bunsō’s poetry and performance project, supplies recordings and a war-poetry collage, helps design the route, and serves as principal test player.

Name: WPS stands for Without Permission and Soil and, during development, is also expanded as Permissionless Mnemonic Scene Compiler. The double meaning identifies a device that reconstructs fragments as memory on another stage without permission and after separating them from their original soil.

Technical Structure: WPS preserves much of PS’s existing stages, routes, white rectangles, lodge, whiteout, and timeout, then connects the Witness Kernel inferred from Ark-Chain’s strata.db and seen_by. It does not replay old logs as a single personality. Instead it places footsteps, breath, clothing friction, room noise, and in-game sounds at different positions and delays, inducing the player to bind them into another body. To avoid the observer overfitting that emerged in Ark-Chain, first-cycle logs enter the second cycle only once; recursive input within the same session is blocked; remaining material is delayed into later plays; and the client terminates at roughly twenty minutes. Records whose multiple viewpoints cannot be bound into one event remain as witness:null, passing through without firing sound, captions, or figures.

Release History:

1. January 4–14, 2028: eleven short play videos are posted to the dormant TikTok account Tender Angel. Mayo uploads the first two without informing Maria in advance; the later nine are posted with all three collaborators’ agreement. The game itself remains unreleased.
2. August 29, 2029: the YouTube channel craZZZyfish posts a play video and download URL for data said to have been obtained through a Tor Hidden Service. This file becomes the reference “original.”
3. Discussion accumulates on the community site Blind Club, where users speculate about Tender Angel, maYo, craZZZyfish, and WPS’s derivation from the leaked PS.

Specifications: The player explores mountains and structures rendered in coarse near-monochrome pixels without a clear objective. Images, sound, and text related to discrimination, disaster, religion, and war violence are inserted in response to movement; even sounds made in the player’s room return from the field. The client forces termination after approximately twenty minutes.

MAP Structure: “Mudan to Tsuchi” analyzes the WPS map as largely matching Sugawara’s stage-design memo. The player advances along a dark mountain path obscured by trees and a burnt, smoky effect, avoids figures afflicted by the so-called Prayer Bug, and reaches the “destination, that is, the lodge.” The lodge has been noted to resemble the hōanden (imperial portrait shrine), also known as the Iwakami-Amemiya Ryō Shrine, formerly at the Second Higher School; a sleeping action is followed by whiteout and the two poems. Episode 5 reveals that this correspondence was deliberately fabricated during production. Mayo takes as a route base a simplified diagram from a paper comparing the investiture ritual of the Ryukyuan kikoe-ōgimi with the imperial Daijōsai, then overlays Sugawara’s lodge, square, paired trees, and two white rectangles. The result combines the mountain path, smoke, and Prayer Bug from PS Ghost-Story Segment 17; the lodge and sleeping action from Segment 23; the monument from Segment 8; and the fog and visual absence of Segments 15 and 38.

Quoted Poems: The two poems near the end are presented as quotations from the anonymous anthology SISEN EGNO EN, interleaving odd-numbered lines from purportedly uncollected Sugawara texts with newly written even-numbered lines. Episode 3 reveals that the Sugawara-attributed texts themselves were actually written by Ippei Suzuki. Their source texts are anagrams of a tanka by Emperor Meiji and a tanka by Emperor Shōwa.

The two poems appearing near the end of WPS and their source tanka

Potential Induction of Cotard’s Syndrome: The conclusion of “Mudan to Tsuchi” proposes that WPS may induce sensations such as already being dead or lacking one’s organs, and ends by calling for further, more careful research.

Ark-Chain

An experimental world simulator created by the anonymous art collective Gestalt and operated over a secure P2P mesh. It has no centrally managed objective or narrative. Coordinate data scraped from Google Maps supplies initial terrain, which users then update through their actions.

Two Public Core Engines:

• Sonogenesis Engine: Returns incoming audio to transformations of terrain and architecture. A hymn generates a church; streetcar audio produces station-like structures.
• Stratigraphy Engine: Excavates “digital debris.” Surface layers yield memes and videos, while deeper layers surface missing-person records, illness diaries, domestic arguments, and lullabies.

Deeper Layers Inferred in Episode 5: The three collaborators provisionally call the observational conversion layer that assigns incoming or excavated fragments to walls, objects, captions, and sound sources the Adapter Layer. The seen_by field in world/strata.db does not record user names. It groups separate logs of speech, gaze, and stopping under shared identifiers and, after a session, refers to the selected position, height, and delay conditions.

The Witness Kernel: From seen_by, Mayo infers a non-public experimental layer that works backward from fragments, absences, actions, and spatial structure to the observer position and temporal offset that would let them cohere most economically as one event. She names it the Witness Kernel. What it raises is not a finished personality but pre-personal observational conditions: the location of footsteps, the distance of breath, the duration of silence, and the delay of response.

Echoes and Observer Overfitting: Gray figures may autonomously “perform” with accumulated material. In Yuzuha and Maria’s world, their voices read victims’ names in a scene evocative of violence in Mindanao. Yet when the system reads repeated behavior and expectation too aggressively, the range of external fragments narrows and the world becomes a precise mirror of the user. The way newly surfaced tragedy eventually converges on a flattering story in which the two girls discover, understand, and rescue it is treated as a symptom of this observer overfitting. Gestalt is inferred to have failed to solve the problem, left the experimental layer outside the public specification, and allowed the distribution page and peer mesh to disappear.

The world Yuzuha and Maria played in 2017 survives on Maria’s old hard drive and is shared with Tokyo as a read-only image. Even after the official mesh has vanished, the saved world can be opened under LOCAL / UNSYNCED; this becomes the decisive condition for WPS.

Tender Angel / maYo (VTuber)

Tender Angel: One of many accounts Yuzuha and Mayo created in autumn 2026 while imitating and mass-producing generative-AI videos. After posting formulaic clips—including an angel swaying while singing the names of bankrupt supermarkets—it became dormant. In January 2028 it is reused as the public channel for WPS, posting eleven short play videos from January 4 to 14. Mayo uploads the first two ahead of the agreed approval process; Maria consents to the later nine.

maYo (VTuber): A VTuber identity Mayo launches in spring 2027. The Live2D avatar has pale blue hair, a Y-shaped hairpin, a white hoodie, mint skirt, and red sneakers. Streams cover game bugs, strange VRChat worlds, and everyday talk. Although publicly framed as Mayo’s individual identity, Yuzuha is deeply involved in thumbnails, descriptions, timestamps, clips, and moderation, making maYo a jointly maintained presence.

At the time of “Mudan to Tsuchi,” Tender Angel and maYo are only rumored to be the same person. Episodes 4 and 5 reveal that both emerge from the same domestic and creative environment. In 2037, Yuzuha’s Nochar is also designated “maYo,” but the concrete path from the VTuber identity to the Nochar remains undisclosed through Episode 5.

Sugawara Bunsō

Poet. Born 1900, Miyagi. Died 1949.

Raised by adoptive parents who had lost their biological children in the Meiji Sanriku Earthquake — a fact his adoptive mother told him repeatedly. After moving to Tokyo, he met Yōshū Mizuno in 1921 and joined the “Japan Psychical Phenomena Research Society.” Through his work designing publications for the society’s pamphlet series, he came to know Chang Junggeun and others, joining the art and theater group “LSPS” — active around the time of the Great Kantō Earthquake — as the designer of its journal. He collected and compiled ghost stories from across Japan, especially from his native Miyagi, using them as the basis for his poetry. From the 1930s to the 1940s, he wrote poetry that could be read as affirming the emperor system and developed concepts for its staging. In his later years, he read his own poems aloud to local children, writing kanji with oversized furigana (phonetic glosses) to emphasize the heterogeneity between the two scripts. Previously unknown works and materials were discovered in 2019 (the circumstances are documented in Akio Takahara’s Series: Poets of Tōhoku, Kinkasan Shobō, 2025), and The Complete Works of Sugawara Bunsō was published by Hoshinosuna-sha in 2026.

Analysis in “Mudan to Tsuchi”:

• Sugawara’s interest in the emperor system was not simple adulation but a critical engagement with the emperor as a figure of the “collective author” that harbors a disjunction between “the individual body” and “the public system”
• The friction between state mourning and personal mourning. When commemoration is completed by neither the state nor the individual, a surplus accumulates and is privately enacted through some kind of stage apparatus and someone’s body — this is the substance of “spectral space” (kaidan space)
• The role of emperor is forcibly conferred from the outside. It carries contingency, retroactivity, and duality. A discussion unfolds in which “the corporeal lineage represented by the unbroken imperial line (bansei ikkei), while referenced as an output already executed in this world, is ultimately disassembled as raw material”
• At the furthest reach of Sugawara’s interest lies a project concerning “the queer potentiality that the emperor, as a high-performance figure capable of hosting a collective author, might have possessed before being normalized under the gender binary of modernization”

Anagram Poems: Anagrams of a tanka by Emperor Meiji (composed in 1904 at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War) and a tanka by Emperor Shōwa (composed in 1946 after Japan’s defeat). The disjunction between the emperor’s individual body and the emperor system is critically enacted through the technique of the anagram.

Stage-Design Memo: A passage beginning: “On the wall of a hut built at the edge of the stage, an island is painted. There is one place from which it can be glimpsed. It need not be a building if the interior cannot be seen from outside (only that a large tree be present). Draw a line connecting the two. The east-west axis, and…” As writer Kanae Shirai has noted, this largely matches the MAP of WPS (Shirai Kanae, “A Japanese Poet Glimpsed in the Mysterious Horror Game Without Permission and Soil?” Outside Games, November 2029).

Poetic Memo (Stage Directions for Enactment): The memo by Sugawara quoted in “Mudan to Tsuchi” functions simultaneously as poetry and as stage directions — or something closer to a dance notation — for mutual enactment.

Chang Junggeun and LSPS

Chang Junggeun: Visual artist. Founder and leader of LSPS. A friend of Sugawara Bunsō. In the historical segments of PS, the friendship and rupture between the two, set against state repression, form the backbone of the narrative. Ippei Suzuki makes an unverified claim that his niece is a great-great-grandchild of Chang Junggeun.

LSPS: An art and theater group active around the time of the Great Kantō Earthquake. It published a journal; Sugawara handled the layout design. The group was destroyed by the earthquake. Its backdrop includes state repression of communism, anti-emperor-system movements, and protests against discrimination toward Korean residents, as well as the absence of effective means of resistance. Ghost-Story Segment 17 of PS uses a ghost story reportedly experienced by Chang Junggeun and retold by Sugawara.

“Yura” (The Figuralists)

A nationalist group involved in the distribution of Nochar jailbreak scripts. Its outlines are drawn in Marnie’s report in Episode 1.

Ideology:

• “Reclaiming” the data of the self from foreign servers and building, within each Japanese individual, a device that binds together multiple memories including those of the dead
• Aspiring to reconstruct community on the model of the emperor system
• Interpreting the Shadow Nochar as “the collective voice of Japan’s dead”
• Drawing ideological inspiration from the lecture text of “Mudan to Tsuchi” (circulating in 2037 as “a lecture-style text analyzing a VR game of unknown authorship”)

Activities:

• Distribution of the jailbreak script “Shadow-NCHR Stub”
• Promoting direct access to the initialization API via Hotpatch Gap Exploit
• Ritualizing the Patch Gap at 4:00 AM on the 5th of every month (#NocharReset, #VoidMe)
• Operating encrypted servers (Yuzuha accesses one at the end of Episode 1)
• Sanka Sugawara suspected of being a key member