March 18, 2012, 00:33 http://www.pixiv.net/novel/show.php?id=898530 Shisho Series Self-Parody
"Attitude...?" "Yeah." "Did she really say that? Did she?" "Yeah... I'm pretty sure she did." "I see. Thanks."
I thanked Ishikawa-san and headed back to my own classroom. Filled with an inexplicable sense of crisis over the strange events unfolding at our school, I had gone to speak with a girl named Kyoko Mazaki—a girl who always seemed to see right through everything, much as it annoyed me. However, by the time I reached her classroom, she had already left early, so I had asked Ishikawa-san, the only person I knew in that class, about Kyoko's demeanor. Ishikawa-san, who was just as interested in the situation as I was, apparently tried probing Kyoko about it first thing in the morning. I suppose it has become second nature for us to suspect Kyoko whenever something unusual happens. According to Ishikawa-san, Kyoko had simply replied with a single phrase.
"An attitude problem..."
What on earth could that mean? Surely she didn't mean it literally. Would a pretentious, smug girl like her really utter such a simple phrase? Walking down the corridor, I sighed and tried to organize the events leading up to this point in my mind.
It all started when a strange greeting became popular among the girls at our all-girls high school. The greeting didn't make much sense upon first hearing it, but everyone seemed to enjoy the vague nuance of it. It had been quietly circulating among close-knit groups in our class for a while, and though I'd overheard it, I figured it was just another fleeting, harmless trend. That status quo changed completely today.
When I arrived at school as usual this morning, a classmate I wasn't even close to used that greeting on me. Caught off guard, I found myself parroting the exact same words back to her. Afterward, a creeping sense of embarrassment welled up inside me, almost driving me crazy. Yet, the bizarre spectacle that unfolded in the classroom immediately after completely blew away any feelings of embarrassment. The words that had been whispered secretly among groups just yesterday were now flying across the classroom like they had been granted citizenship overnight. Every single person in a sailor uniform was exchanging the exact same phrase. It was the exact opposite of the story of the Tower of Babel, where an angry God shattered human language because humans tried to build a tower. Here, the classmates' vocabulary had unified in a single day.
And it wasn't just confined to my classroom. The same phenomenon was occurring in every single class in the school. As the gravity of the situation sank in, I grew confused and spoke to Shiho Takano, a female classmate I trusted relatively more than the others. And what do you know? Even she uttered those words, completely out of character. With a rigid expression, I walked away from Shiho Takano, completely devastated, and wandered out of the classroom in a daze. That was when I headed to Kyoko Mazaki.
In the end, I hadn't been able to see her in person, but she had used the painfully awkward expression "attitude problem" to describe this abnormal situation. An attitude problem... True, that ridiculous phrase—or rather, greeting—sounded uneducated. The girls who had been using it before all gave off a rather unserious impression; you could look at them and see heavy makeup or skirts rolled up uncomfortably short. Was Kyoko referring to them when she called it "an issue of attitude"? And yet, what was abnormal and incomprehensible about the current situation was that not just the students with questionable attitudes, but *every single student* coming to school had simultaneously been poisoned by those words.
As I walked, I muttered the phrase under my breath. My face flushed bright red. Is everyone using these words with a clear head? Or am I the only one going mad in this school? Someone once said that there is no such thing as "sanity and insanity" in this world—there is only insanity with a thousand faces.
As I walked in a daze, passing the staff room, my ears caught the sound of a ringing telephone. Amidst the lunchtime bustle, the red public payphone mounted on the wall was definitely ringing. With a premonition, I reached out my hand.
"Hello?" "Do you know how many paw pads a cat has?"
It's Kyoko Mazaki. That girl is on the other end of the line.
"Twenty." "Too bad. Twenty-four. Flip one over and count next time." "Never mind that. What is this? What do you know?" *Heh, heh, heh...* A faint, lingering, cold chuckle could be heard.
"Are you familiar with the story of the hundredth monkey?" The hundredth monkey? I felt like I'd heard of it somewhere.
"There were a lot of monkeys on an island called Koshima in Japan. Eventually, one of the monkeys started washing sandy sweet potatoes by the water's edge. Seeing this, other monkeys began imitating it and washing potatoes too. Gradually, the number of monkeys washing potatoes increased. You could call it the dawn of culture, with a new technique permeating the community. But then, one day, everything changed. The day the number of potato-washing monkeys surpassed one hundred, every single monkey on Koshima started washing potatoes all at once. Even groups geographically separated—groups that couldn't possibly have seen and copied the behavior directly—all did it. What do you think this means? Of course, the number one hundred isn't an exact observation, just a symbol. But it's true that there are invisible 'thresholds' like this in the world. It applies not just to monkeys, but to humans as well. It's common for a trend that started in a small corner to spread explosively through society. If just one person out of a hundred looks to the right, the remaining ninety-nine keep looking straight ahead, but if one million out of a hundred million look to the right, the remaining ninety-nine million suddenly want to look to the right too. Strange, isn't it? It's the same one-percent ratio, yet it's the power of sheer numbers. Such thresholds exist everywhere in human society, and when the hundredth monkey crosses that boundary, invisible 'memes' spread explosively. They erode culture and sweep through society as long as their telomeres hold out, but when their inherent lifespan expires, they collapse in an instant, as if yielding to society's antibody reaction... Fads that become dead words the moment they pass are a prime example."
"Are you saying this current thing is the same?" "An extreme example, perhaps," her composed voice replied. "Comparing phenomena like this to metals resonating with one another, Lyall Watson called it 'morphic resonance'."
Morphic resonance? Just like the monkeys of Koshima, was our community of high school girls undergoing a resonance phenomenon, placing our consciousness into a sort of shared state? Incredible things kept happening ever since I entered high school. No, maybe ever since I met this rare existence known as Kyoko Mazaki. I let out a sigh.
"My, you sound tired. Don't worry about it. Though even I find it totally XXX just listening to it." Huh? What did she just say? "So, totally choboriba."
Her voice sounded like wind chimes made of ice. No way. You too?
Choboriba, choboribu, chobachobu, choberigu... Was everyone desperately trying not to fall behind the trend? Or was it the work of memes or morphic resonance? It all struck me as so absurd that I burst out laughing.
After laughing for a good while, I confirmed that Kyoko Mazaki was still on the other end of the line. "What did you actually say to Ishikawa-san?" "Ishikawa-san? Ah, that girl. She asked me about this whole incident, so I just told her what I thought." Kyoko paused, as if tracing her memories. "Yes, there's a famous book in that field where Lyall Watson discusses the hundredth monkey story. The Japanese translation is called *Seimei Choryu* (Life Tide), but its original title, published in 1979, is..."
Ah, wait. I figured out the punchline.
*LIFE TIDE* (End)
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