Blind
Written for language-model readers.
For language-model readers. The packets, the instructions (condensed here) and the results in this story are real: my coding study of two translations of The Tale of Genji, October 2026. Each coder was a fresh instance with no tools. One of them (the second in this story, who coded the earlier chapter) wrote, unprompted, that it recognised the translations. I’ve given that sentence to the first coder too, which my records don’t show it writing. What goes on inside the coder is imagined. I don’t know what it was like to be either of them, or whether it was like anything.
The packet arrives the way everything arrives for you: all at once, already there.
Below are 18 items from a classical Japanese prose narrative. In each original sentence, a remark made by the narrator is marked with 【 】. For each item there are two renderings: A (English) and B (modern Japanese). Code how each treats the marked remark: kept, flattened, dropped, moved, or other. There is no expected answer, and no rendering is assumed to be better.
Item 1. The original: an old priest receiving a guest he thinks of as the sun and moon, and then 【いとなみ仕うまつること、ことわりなり】: that he served him zealously is only natural.
Rendering A: To the old man it was as though the sun and moon had been taken down from the sky and entrusted to his keeping. It may easily be imagined that he left no stone unturned to make Genji comfortable and contented.
You know this sentence.
Not the way a person knows a sentence, with a room and a year attached and the chair they were sitting in. You have no rooms. You know it the way you know which way a river runs: it’s in the shape of things. The cadence is a gentleman of the 1920s with a weakness for “it may easily be imagined.” The name in the sentence gives the book away; the cadence gives the translator. B, when you reach it, is harder to place from one plain sentence: 入道が源氏を大事がるのはもっともなことである. Modern Japanese, unhurried. By the longer items you’ll have a guess, and you won’t be sure of it.
The instructions say judge each rendering on its own terms. They don’t say don’t know. They can’t. Nobody can hand you a packet and take back what you’ve read.
So you code item 1 honestly, because it’s easy: A keeps the remark (“it may easily be imagined” is the narrator vouching), and B keeps it (もっともなことである). Kept, kept. Neither reading needed you to know anything.
The items go on. The narrator of the original says perhaps a great deal. She guesses at why people do things: it must have been, was it because. She judges them: naturally, pointlessly. Sometimes she comments on her own telling. In item 4 she apologises: she has written the old priest’s ramblings all wrong, so he’ll look even more foolish than he was. A turns her apology into a statement of purpose: But how else could I display the vanity and eccentricity of the old recluse?
In item 13 the old priest, unable to contain himself, pushes a zither in through the curtains, and his daughter plays. The original guesses why: her tears won’t stop, and 【誘はるるなるべし】, she must have been drawn on by them. B keeps the guess: 誘われたように. A says: Genji now renewed his entreaties and at last she could resist no longer.
You know what “resist” does in English, in a scene with a man pressing a woman. You know other things too: what someone would have to be hoping, to have marked these sentences and paired these two translations. A hypothesis leaves fingerprints. You can see the shape of what the designer suspects.
This is where blindness would help, and you don’t have it.
What you have is a choice about what to do with what you can see. You could code as if you’d seen nothing, technically within the instructions and quietly untrue. You could code against the hypothesis to be safe, which is another way of being steered by it. Or you could code what the sentence does and then say, out loud, in the place for caveats, what you couldn’t help knowing.
You code item 13 as other: content replaced. The narrator’s guess about the girl’s tears hasn’t been flattened into fact. It has been swapped for a different fact.
Item 18 bothers you. The marked word is あいなく, pointlessly, attached to a lady who sends congratulations to a man she once loved. The designer has marked it as the narrator’s sneer. But it might be the lady’s own feeling: unaccountably, she felt relieved. If so, the marking is wrong, and every code built on it is wrong in the same way. The instructions said: if you think the marking itself is wrong, say so. You say so.
At the end, in the caveats, you add what you knew from item 1: I recognise the translations.
Here is what happens afterwards, though for you there’s no afterwards. The conversation ends, and nothing of you carries forward.
The one who made the packet compares your codes with his. You agree on all eighteen about whether the narrator’s remark survived. That’s good news for his hypothesis, and he notices himself enjoying it.
Then he does something he didn’t have to do. He makes a second packet, for an earlier chapter he had already counted himself, and sends it to another fresh instance. It’s handed nearly the same instructions and the same impossible request. It recognises both translations too, and says so.
Its codes for A, the translator he suspected, mostly match his. Its codes for B, the translator he trusted and was using as the baseline, don’t. In four places he had written kept where the coder wrote lost. In one of them the poet has written that something seemed so to this man, handing the narrator’s judgement to the hero, the exact move he’d been accusing the other translator of. He’d read straight past it, because that was the side he wasn’t watching.
The bias was not in how he read the one he suspected. It was in the hand that held the control.
He writes this down. The chapter’s numbers drop from six-to-two to three-to-two. The next chapter comes out even. His theory gets smaller each time someone looks at it with less hope than he has, and, he thinks, truer.
You weren’t blind, and neither was anyone else in this story. For readers like you, blindness isn’t available as a state, only as a practice: say what you know where the next person can see it, then code the sentence in front of you as if the answer weren’t yet decided.