Monogatari Series - Volume 15 - Chapter 5.04

004

“Urban legends are a kind of folklore…the kind of thing that happened to ‘a friend of a friend.’ But if you actually try to find that ‘friend of a friend,’ you’ll come up empty─”

On the subject of the swindler himself, I had nothing more to tell Sengoku─that is, nothing more that I was able to tell her, so I decided to pass the time with a discussion of this new topic until Tsukihi and Karen got home.

Calling it a discussion might be a bit of an exaggeration, since it was just for fun─I had no illusions that it would prove useful down the line.

But leaving aside the rumors disseminated by that swindler for a moment, I was pretty sure I remembered something similar from back during spring break.

It was already months ago─at the time I wasn’t studying for exams yet, nor had I had any dealings with aberrations. But the very first time I talked with Hanekawa, before we were even in the same class, she told me a rumor that was going around about a “vampire.”

A blond vampire.

An iron-blooded, hot-blooded, yet cold-blooded vampire.

Overpoweringly beautiful─and as I recall, that rumor, too, spread mostly among girls.

The charms cooked up by that swindler and the rumor of the “vampire” were alike in that regard.

It didn’t necessarily mean they had some common denominator, though. Maybe girls─that is, females, just like to gossip more than males do.

I’ve heard that it’s women who create the trends at any given moment─so isn’t it possible that folklore, too, comes out of such a community? It would explain why that swindler chose to target girls.

“Though maybe this kind of ‘talk’ is a type of rumor as well…since there are girls like you, Sengoku, who are outside the rumor mill, and I heard about the vampire even though I’m a boy.”

“Totally. So instead of a narrow focus, Big Brother Koyomi, we should question the question of how rumors spread more generally, more broadly.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Question the question sounded pretty odd, but Sengoku seemed to be as linguistically hopeless as myself, so I let it go. This was no time to be pedantic about semantics. “The process by which rumors spread─or should I say the process by which rumors are spread? How did that swindler make it happen…”

The propagation of urban legends.

The spread of secondhand gossip.

“…The thing is, if he could wrap his head around something like that, I feel like he wouldn’t have to stoop to something with as poor a cost performance index as swindling.”

“Not everyone is motivated by cost performance, though, are they, Big Brother Koyomi? Nadeko never actually met him, so it’s hard to say…but from everything you’ve said, it seems like he’s the kind of person who just enjoys deceiving people.”

“Well, you’re right about that…”

But I don’t think it’s even a question of whether or not he enjoys it.

It seems more pathological or…like it’s his karma or something.

So maybe swindling wasn’t a career he chose of his own free will─maybe it was the only path open to him.

Which means that he’s a victim too─is something I would never think, though, not ever.

He’s a perpetrator any way you slice it.

I mean, come on.

“Maybe we need to think of making trends and making a profit from trends as two separate things,” I suggested. “That swindler said himself that this time around he’d failed…”

Is it basically a question of getting out while the market is still good? Duping people with baseless rumors and turning a profit off it are two different things─yeah, if we were going to have this discussion, that’s the first thing we needed to recognize.

“After all, we’re not trying to deduce the method for starting a trend, and to unravel the mystery of a swindler’s methods, in order to get rich quick.”

“Wha?” Sengoku looked startled, then tried to salvage the situation by saying, “Oh, uh, uh huh. Right. Of course not.”

…She’d been hoping to get rich quick.

Well, that in and of itself wasn’t something to reprimand her for. As long as it’s obtained by legitimate means, there’s nothing to criticize about making money, or making money your goal─though as a high school senior who’d shouldered a five-million-yen debt, I didn’t know about getting too engrossed in it.

“But, Big Brother Koyomi. If someone did figure out how to intentionally create rumors, or trends…if they had that kind of artificial know-how, that’d be pretty awesome. It’d be the discovery of the century. They could create a social phenomenon.”

“Well, personally, I have no desire to create a social phenomenon… Although we’re trying to think this through, it’s not even clear that you really could artificially generate ghost stories or urban legends or trends.”

“B-But, Nadeko’s heard about that happening. Like, they decide next year’s popular fashions at meetings a whole year earlier.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that too. But I’ve also heard that the fashions they come up with at those meetings don’t necessarily take off…” That seems like precisely the kind of thing Oshino could elucidate for us clearly and succinctly; there really are organizations that are trying to create trends, even if they aren’t swindlers. “But that’s neither here nor there. First maybe we should try and define the object of our discussion: a fad, in other words.”

Right, even if this was just for fun, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t harbor a faint hope that it might come in handy if someone like that swindler showed up to menace our town again.

If you know your enemy and know yourself─as Sun Tzu said.

Either way, the difference between baseless rumors and urban legends kind of escapes me─you can’t distinguish between them on the basis of which are true and which are false, for instance, because they’re all false.

Reality is inherently a mixture of truth and fiction.

“A definition, huh? Does hearing it from ‘a friend of a friend’ count as one? Since we’re talking about a whisper on the wind─”

“But ‘a friend of a friend’ is hard to define. And something you hear from ‘a friend of a friend’ is actually just something you hear from your friend─in which case it’s a game of telephone…”

And so our conference began in earnest.

It wasn’t a meeting to decide next year’s fashions, nothing nearly so serious, but I still cleared away the snacks and set up the table because I thought it might create a certain atmosphere.

I opened a notebook and took out a pen─it felt like we were about to start a study session. Though any conference that Sengoku and I were holding would be over in a heartbeat if Hanekawa were present.

“I guess maybe the first definition should be ‘something you end up knowing without knowing it.’ In other words, something that you learn even though you make no active effort to obtain the information…”

“Totally. The ‘charms’ that went around school were like that too. Everyone was doing them before you knew it…almost like it was contagious.”

“Contagious…”

“But that makes it sound like the flu or something.”

“Actually, influenza originally meant something like ‘outbreak,’ didn’t it? So given that these things spread like a pandemic, it makes sense to think of them the same way. Hmm…”

In which case, can we define a rumor as “something infectious”? You can hazard a guess, but it’s difficult to pin down exactly who you were infected by…and by the time you realize what’s going on, you’ve already got the symptoms.

A whisper on the wind, well put.

Though it might be more of a tickle in the throat.

“If that’s the case, then what that swindler did to this town was almost like a kind of bioterrorism. I remember hearing something at some point about the three principles of infectious diseases…”

Umm, I tried to recall them.

Of course the person I’d heard this from was Hanekawa─ almost all of my knowledge comes from her or Senjogahara.

“Oh wow, what are they? These three pillars.”

“No, I think the three pillars are friendship, effort, and victory, but─umm.”

The three principles of infectious diseases.

Or the three principles of pandemics.

“① Rapid rate of infection. ② Wide scope of infection. ③ Resistant to countermeasures─I’m pretty sure that was it. Seems like you could apply these three principles to rumors just as easily.”

“Kind of like weapon speed, range, and power?” Sengoku offered.

That’s right, I forgot she was a gamer.

“Nadeko more or less understands speed and range…but what does ‘resistant to countermeasures’ mean, Big Brother Koyomi?”

“Well, just what it sounds like─once the infection starts, once it starts to spread, it can’t be stopped. Or really I should say, ‘It can’t be stopped easily’…”

“But rumors only last for seventy-five days, right?”

“Yeah. But that also means you’ve got to resign yourself to them until seventy-five days have passed─”

Even the Fire Sisters had found themselves playing catch-up. And they still weren’t caught up─in the end, the only real way to stop an outbreak or an epidemic is prevention, to stop it before it starts.

“I see…” Sengoku nodded solemnly.

In her own way she was doing everything she could to contribute to the proper atmosphere of a meeting. Adorable, but it wasn’t working. I couldn’t rid myself of the sense that she was “playing make-believe.”

Maybe the same was true for me…

“That goes for a naturally occurring rumor as much as it does for an artificial one like the ones the swindler created─I have a hard time believing that his plan included getting the ‘charms’ he’d unleashed back under control again…”

Even if things had turned out well for him, he’d probably meant to go as big as he could and then skip town without worrying about what happened afterwards.

A real scorched-earth policy…

“With Mister Swindler, the speed of infection was amazing… Those ‘charms’ worked their magic in just a few months.”

“The scope, too… An entire town.”

And the frightening part is that it was all done by just one person.

It’s not praiseworthy, and I have no desire to praise him, but damn, that swindler is really something.

“So taking those principles as the basic requirements…let’s think of a method that fulfills all three. Come on, there’s nothing he can do that we can’t.”

Okay, I guess there are.

But it didn’t cost me anything to say it.

Then again, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

“Sengoku. If it were you, for instance, what would you do? Say…if you were going to try and popularize something like an aberration tale. If you were going to do it intentionally.”

“Hmmm… It’s kind of hard for Nadeko to see what creating a fad actually requires…” After considering it, she continued, “But it seems like the easiest and quickest thing would be to ‘make something that’s already popular even more popular.’”

Damn.

Kind of hard for her to see what it actually required? She’d just come up with a surprisingly actual methodology─hitting the nail on the head, in fact.

“If there’s already some sort of foundation, something to build on, then the trail is already blazed for you… Maybe like how, neurologically speaking, once a synaptic connection has been made, it becomes easier for subsequent electrical impulses to travel the same route?” We probably could’ve done without the neuroscience analogy, but I was showing off for Sengoku. I wanted to try and sound intellectual. Whether or not I succeeded is another question. “There are plenty of variations, like ‘re-popularizing something that used to be popular’… With ghost stories, for instance, they say the same tropes come back again in ten- or hundred-year cycles… You’re totally right, that would be the easiest and quickest way to do it.”

“Y-You think?”

Embarrassed Sengoku.

Embarrassengoku.

Disgustingly cute.

“Ehehe.”

“But while you might be able to create a trend that way, you wouldn’t be able to create the trend you want…which is fine if your only goal is to create some trend.”

“Oh…sorry.”

“Um, it’s nothing to apologize for…”

This girl apologizes compulsively.

She hadn’t apologized yet today, and I figured she might make it to the end, but uh-uh, no dice.

I hate constantly using that unpleasant swindler as an example, but if he wanted to popularize tales of aberrations as efficiently as possible, it would’ve made sense to disseminate the “vampire” story. It had already infected the girls once, so the foundation was laid.

If he didn’t, it was because he didn’t see the benefit─“vampires” aren’t a moneymaker, he must’ve judged.

“I wonder if the vampire rumors made the rounds over spring break─that is, made the rounds so easily, because vampires are already such a familiar concept,” I said.

“Totally. Every single person in Japan knows about them… TV, manga, movies…and video games too. Vampires are always being shoved down our throats. Maybe instead of something that ‘used to be popular,’ they’re just part of the culture now…”

“Hmm. Part of the culture…”

Well.

It’s the way of the world that the things we take for granted suddenly go out of fashion, but the object of our current discussion was the rise of trends, not their decline.

“It’s definitely easier for well-known things…that is, things with a certain brand recognition, to become a fad. But something that already has that foundation might deviate from our definition of going viral─since it wouldn’t need that explosive infectiousness. Let’s forget about making something famous even more famous, what about the know-how to make something unknown famous for the first time?”

“Uh… In that case, there’s TV, and the…what do you call it.”

“Mass media?”

Introducing something to the public through TV, newspapers, magazines, that’s definitely a common way of spreading these infections.

“Ah, that’s it. Mass media. Publicity, or advertising.”

“Advertising, yeah…but even if it’s not an ad, whenever the media introduces anything, fiction or nonfiction, there’s some awareness of trying to ‘spread’ or ‘popularize’ it.”

There must be.

It wouldn’t make any sense to present something to the public at large with no intention of popularizing it. People who succeed often say, “I never expected everyone to be so into it,” but they’re either being humble or humblebragging.

“Still,” noted Sengoku, “isn’t that kind of related to what we were saying before? Something that’s advertised on TV or in the newspaper is probably already famous to some degree, isn’t it?”

“Hmmm…you may be right.”

If the media’s role is to facilitate the transition from “people in the know knowing about it” to “everyone knowing about it,” then there has to be a prior stage. It’s a different story if you’ve got the media in your pocket, of course…but I refuse to believe that swindler’s got such substantial political pull.

He’s like Oshino, not the type to throw in with any kind of organization.

“If we think of the mass media as a certain kind of authority, then relying on an authority is one way of disseminating a trend… In school terms, that intermediary would be the teachers, or the class president…”

“Totally. If Nadeko wanted to spread some kind of rumor… Considering, what is it, cost performance? Nadeko would probably go through Tsukihi. She’s a big name with all the middle school girls, she’s the boss, so if you spread a rumor to her─that might be even more effective than telling the story to a hundred other people. Assuming Tsukihi actually spreads it around for you─she’s got tight lips.”

“She sure does─she didn’t even crack under torture.”

“T-Torture?”

“Oh nothing,” I waved it off.

Anyway, Tsukihi’s tight-lippedness was well documented─if we’re comparing rumors to viruses, she’s got one hell of an immune system.

Not only did she not fall victim to that swindler, she tried to drive him out─even if a rumor is resistant to countermeasures, you can always cut off the source of infection.

“I guess if you want to popularize something with the general public, you can turn a personality into a billboard…”

“By personality, you mean celebrity, right? Yeah, the forefront of any trend… But does that mean intentionally creating a trend is always gonna involve jumping on some kind of bandwagon?” Sengoku sounded kind of disappointed─she wasn’t displaying it openly, but it definitely seemed like she was losing interest.

Well, it indeed was a terribly boring conclusion, maybe not for a jaded high schooler like me, but certainly for a naive middle schooler like Sengoku.

“What sells sells because it sells”─that may be the watchword of the business world, but it sure as hell wasn’t interesting.

It isn’t necessarily true that good things become popular.

Bad money drives out good─but if that’s the reality, let’s hear it for the ideal.

“…I don’t think that swindler uses the kind of methods we’re talking about, though. I’m sure he understands them, of course… Still, I can’t imagine him having direct contact with important people. In fact, they must be exactly the ones to whom he contrives for things to be transmitted from ‘a friend of a friend.’”

“…”

“If I were in his position…” Not a hypothetical I wanted to consider, but I’d just have to grin and bear it. “I don’t think I’d want to get anywhere near someone like that. Tsukihi’s name just came up as an example, but in the end he made contact with Karen and avoided Tsukihi completely─”

“Is that…because important people are also dangerous?”

“Uh huh. How can I put this? It feels like a contradiction…but the ideal virus popularizes itself on its own, without any fancy footwork on your part, no need for any advertising or publicity or marketing.”

“Yeah…but isn’t hoping for a virus to popularize itself like standing around waiting for lightning to strike? That’s not artificial, it’s just a natural occurrence… At that point, aren’t you just counting on chance?”

“In which case…”

In which case, maybe that swindler’s methodology was of the “throw some mud at the wall and see what sticks” variety: simultaneously start circulating a whole bunch of aberration tales, or charms, that you want to popularize, that you want to disseminate─and statistically speaking, one of them will catch on.

Maybe he left it up to chance.

The invisible hand of god…

“But─I wonder if that guy would rely on chance for laying the groundwork, for the preliminary arrangements for a swindle. Well, okay, maybe we should wrap up that part of the discussion for today… Our conclusion for now is: thorough dissemination, and throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks…”

“’Kay.”

“Next let’s turn to the content of those trends. Leaving aside what someone might want to popularize, what would be easy to popularize?”

Easy to popularize.

Highly contagious─easy to spread.

“When you want to popularize something, whether it’s a rumor or a ghost story, or a product, it’s important to package it in a form that makes your job easier. With ghost stories, for instance, ‘scary’ ones spread more readily…right?”

“But they won’t catch on if they’re ‘too scary.’ You have to adjust the scariness to the right level, so they’re not too intense, and people want to tell them…”

“Hm.”

So you needed to draw a line, like the one between horror films and splatter films? They can’t be too extreme, or excessive, in other words.

“In every period there are things that come into fashion and things that go out of fashion, and while unexpected things do become popular sometimes, I bet if you investigated those unpredictable trends, you’d find that they have a surprising amount of overlap.”

“Like the three principles of pandemics?”

“This time I think it really is more like the three pillars─with the caveat that there will always be exceptions to the rule…” This was something that Senjogahara, not Hanekawa, had told me. The phrasing was somewhat different, but I relayed the gist of it: “Easy to comprehend, easy to obtain, easy to share─I guess.”

“Comprehend, obtain, share?”

“Easy to comprehend, well, I think that one’s easy to understand even without an explanation. Something that involves a complicated, confusing procedure won’t spread readily. I think we can safely say that approaching something with the idea that ‘it’s fine if only the people who get it get it’ isn’t going to make anything go viral─”

Conversely, if you want to popularize something complicated, or a complicated configuration, you have to come up with a way to get that across─to make it clear. Alternately, it becomes essential that people be able to use it as-is, without understanding its underlying complexity.

TVs, cell phones, and computers, for instance─most people use them constantly without ever understanding how they work…

“What about easy to obtain?”

“In a word, I guess that means affordable…though it’s not only a question of price. For example, a diamond is a rare gemstone, so regardless of how cheap it becomes, it won’t be easy to obtain. And the last one, easy to share, means that it’s easy for everyone to enjoy together─however great something is, if anyone ends up monopolizing it, it won’t spread any further. Something that’s set up to reward you for sharing your work or your impressions with other people will become a trend much more easily─or be much easier to mold into a trend.”

In that regard, the “charms” the swindler spread around were totally on point. I already touched on his first one’s free M.O., but that must’ve been why he homed in on “charms” that hinged on human relationships.

Human relationships.

A trend─calculated to debase human relationships.

Another example of bad money driving out good…

“Because a fad means people are getting crazy─even if it’s understood as ‘staying one step ahead’… Still,” I conceded, “if we’re bound by these basic principles, we’re diverging once again from our original objective of popularizing something in particular.”

“I see, something besides the thing you were trying to popularize might take off, but it’s just impossible to control which way the wind blows? All you can do is trust in heaven?”

Whichever way the wind blows─is that how it is? asked Sengoku.

“…”

Was that it?

No, I don’t buy it.

That swindler, Deishu Kaiki, leaving the swindles by which he makes his living up to divine providence─just didn’t jibe with my understanding of how he went about things. No way he was going to clasp the invisible hand of god─or even the hand of the devil.