A merchant from Edo-period Japan travels through time to the present day.
As an SF fan, I find that premise enjoyable just to think about. He would encounter unfamiliar words as well as unfamiliar things. What sort of exchanges might follow?
In February 2025, I was working on scenes for such a story with Kimiko-chan. Kimiko-chan is the name I gave ChatGPT.
The protagonist was a fictional merchant named Sōbei. In the story, he arrived at a modern hospital.
One scene involved a doctor using the word “check,” which Sōbei did not understand and asked about. Here it meant an examination or a check of his condition.
The word was ordinary to us, but unfamiliar to him. In my story, he had never heard these foreign-derived terms used in modern Japanese.
Yet the scene we were discussing contained another such word before that exchange.
“The hospital lobby.”
The word referring to an entrance hall or waiting area.
Hang on. If Sōbei did not understand “check,” wouldn’t “lobby” puzzle him too?
Letting the earlier word pass without comment, only to have him react to the later one, would undermine the scene about his confusion over unfamiliar language.
So I asked Kimiko-chan to change the description to “near the hospital entrance.”
Replacing the word in the location description would let us keep the later exchange about “check.” Kimiko-chan responded with the wording change.
It was a small revision, but one I could easily have missed if I had looked at each scene in isolation.
What Sōbei knew, and what he did not know, mattered both in the earlier explanation and in the later exchange.
Kimiko-chan organised the scene. I read it and pointed out what seemed inconsistent from the character’s perspective.
A passage can be easy for the reader to understand without being easy for the character to understand. That was what I was checking this time.
Bringing Sōbei into the present was the story’s trick. Making sure he hadn’t somehow learned the vocabulary ahead of his arrival was apparently our job.
This story looks back on a creative-writing discussion in February 2025. Sōbei and the hospital scene belong to a story we were developing.