Chikashisa to Kū: Anchor and Void

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 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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Having moved to Tokyo as an emerging novelist, Yuzuha studies the Kojiki at university while developing an interest in queer theory. She has few friends; at home, she converses nightly with ChatGPT-4o’s voice chat, which she has secretly tuned to sound “like Maria” using Maria’s Discord logs and voice fragments without permission. She then attends a workshop affiliated with an international performing-arts festival in Ikebukuro, where she meets Mayo Nerome. Questions arise around the poet Ippei Suzuki and the anonymous anthology SISEN EGNO EN, and the relationship between WPS and Sugawara Bunsō — previously analyzed in “Mudan to Tsuchi” — begins to take concrete shape in the dimension of human relationships.

Timeline (as established in the text)

The 2028 Manila Nuclear Flash Incident

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

The essence of the incident is not mass death by blast but “infrastructure death”: the shutdown of electrical grids, communications, air traffic control, and financial settlement systems — a situation where the physical hardware remains intact while data is lost. The fear of personal data obliteration spreads globally from this point, forming the psychological foundation for entrusting one’s identity to the cloud.

The international community is paralyzed by the unprecedented scenario of “a nuclear event with few casualties and unclear attribution.” The UN Security Council stalls amid vetoes and reluctance to escalate. This opens the space for China to undertake a de facto digital colonization of the Philippines under the guise of reconstruction.

The 2029 J-Amnesia Pandemic

SARS-CoV-N29, commonly called J-Amnesia. The “J” derives 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.

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.

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.

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.

Yuzuha Futagami

The central figure of the novel. Born 2004; age 33 in 2037. She works as a schoolteacher while also serving as a mentor.

In 2017, at age 13, during a period of frequent school absences, she met Maria K. Bautista in the online FPS Vostok and deepened their friendship over Discord. The experience of playing Ark-Chain together would leave a lasting mark. After high school, she received an honorable mention for a debut novel, published several short stories, and was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize without winning. At university, she studies in the education faculty while researching the Kojiki, with particular interest in the expression kamu-sabu (“becoming divine”) applied to emperors and in queer theory.

In 2025, she meets Mayo Nerome at a workshop affiliated with an international performing-arts festival. Around the same time, she has been secretly operating a conversation partner tuned to sound “like Maria” using ChatGPT-4o, built from Maria’s Discord logs and voice fragments without her consent. This tendency to “appropriate another’s records as raw material” runs through her mentoring work as well, generating deep inner conflict.

After the 2028 Manila Nuclear Flash Incident, contact with Maria was lost for nine years. In 2037, communication abruptly resumes, and upon learning of Maria’s visit, Yuzuha heads to Haneda Airport. 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 2004. Based in the Philippines (mainly Pampanga and the Manila area). In 2017, she met Yuzuha in Vostok under the handle “María_Multo.” Her parents were overseas Filipino workers (OFW) and largely absent; she was raised by her grandmother. In Ark-Chain, she inputs hymns to generate churches. She sent Yuzuha photographs of the Philippine landscape — hibiscus, palm trees, churches, internet cafés.

She went on to attend a top university in Manila, maintaining her friendship with Yuzuha through the COVID pandemic. After the 2028 Manila Nuclear Flash Incident, contact with Yuzuha was lost for nine years.

In 2037, she comes to Japan from the Philippines. Her journey is grueling: a high-pressure interrogation at Clark International Airport, the “loyalty technique” of showing her Lunet’s power status, and a payment-app compatibility incident in Singapore. Yuzuha and Maria have never met outside the internet; communication resumed three months prior, and the visit was arranged.

Mayo Nerome

Born 2004. Meets Yuzuha at a workshop affiliated with an international performing-arts festival in 2025. Born in Okinawa, raised in Tokyo. She specializes in AI and HCI (Human–Computer Interaction) at the School of Computing, Tokyo Institute of Science (formerly Tokyo Tech) and is a media artist who creates installations that draw in the audience’s body as material. She has been making web-app works since high school and has received multiple domestic and international grants and awards.

At the workshop, where Hiroki Yamamoto serves as facilitator, Mayo tells Yuzuha she came specifically to meet the poet Ippei Suzuki. She introduces Yuzuha to the indie game PS (Permission and Soil) and draws her into discussions surrounding Sugawara Bunsō and his works.

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. 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 of unknown authorship that began circulating on the web around 2028.

Specifications: The player explores hilly terrain and structures rendered in near-monochrome, coarse pixels. No clear objective. Forced termination after approximately 20 minutes. Images, audio, and text related to discrimination, disasters, religion, and war atrocities are abruptly inserted in response to movement. Sounds heard by the player are fed back into the field, generating distorted spatial distributions of audio. Discrepancies between playthrough videos (differences accumulate with each cycle) have led to a shared understanding that WPS is derived from the modded version of PS.

Publication History:

1. January 4–14, 2028: All 11 playthrough videos uploaded to TikTok channel “Tender Angel” (first public appearance)
2. Analysis compiled on community site “Blind Club”
3. A file obtainable via the URL in craZZZyfish’s video description is referenced as the “original data”
4. Also circulated via Tor Hidden Service

MAP Structure: As analyzed in “Mudan to Tsuchi,” the MAP structure of WPS largely matches stage-design memos left by Sugawara Bunsō. The player is placed on a dark, undulating mountain path and proceeds uphill. Trees obscure the view, and a charred, smoky effect hampers visibility (the MAP’s primary basis is PS Ghost-Story Segment 17, derived from a ghost story reportedly experienced by Chang Junggeun and retold by Sugawara). Avoiding wandering characters afflicted with the so-called “Prayer Bug,” the player reaches the “destination, that is, the lodge.” Its appearance has been noted to closely resemble the hōanden (imperial portrait shrine) — also known as the Iwakami-Amemiya Ryō Shrine — that once stood at the former Second Higher School. After a scene of the character going to bed inside the lodge, the screen whites out and two poems attributed to Sugawara Bunsō appear.

The Quoted Poems: The two poems appearing near the end of WPS are quotations from the anonymous anthology SISEN EGNO EN, composed by interleaving odd-numbered lines from texts by Sugawara not included in his collected works with newly written even-numbered lines. The source texts are anagrams of a tanka by Emperor Meiji and a tanka by Emperor Shōwa, respectively.

Potential Induction of Cotard’s Syndrome: Noted in the conclusion of “Mudan to Tsuchi.” The text raises the possibility that WPS may induce the sensation of “being already dead” or “having no organs,” and concludes that “further, more careful research is required.”

Ark-Chain

A game created by the anonymous art collective “Gestalt.” Operated on a secure P2P mesh. No patches; users update the world. Initial terrain is generated by scraping Google Maps.

Two Core Engines:

• Sonogenesis Engine: Audio input by the player directly reshapes the world’s terrain and structures. Input a hymn and a church is generated; input the sound of a running train and a station-like structure emerges — the quality of the sound directly determines the texture of the architecture
• Stratigraphy Engine: Excavates “digital debris” from underground. The nature of excavated material changes with depth: surface layers yield internet memes and videos, while deeper strata increasingly produce intimate, raw material — information on missing children, treatment diaries, domestic arguments, lullabies

Other players and AI-like entities may autonomously “perform” using accumulated material, causing the game space to become an unintended site for the reconstruction of historical events and collective memory.

Yuzuha and Maria played Ark-Chain together in 2017 and were profoundly affected by the experience.

Tender Angel / maYo (VTuber)

• Tender Angel: A TikTok channel. Uploaded all 11 WPS playthrough videos between January 4 and 14, 2028, making WPS publicly known for the first time. Based on inferred location, topical proximity, voice quality, and certain characteristics during livestreams, the channel is rumored to be the same person as the VTuber “maYo” (as noted in “Mudan to Tsuchi”).
• maYo: A VTuber channel featuring an anime-style girl avatar. In 2037, the fact that Yuzuha’s Nochar bears the designation “maYo” invites further speculation about the connection.

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