ReadGlobe · morning brief
Monday 26 October
A text, an idea, a number, yesterday. Then you are done.
1 · Today’s text
Mujina
Tokyo, a dark slope, a weeping woman who will not show her face. Hearn's most famous ghost story, whole.
3 min · Lafcadio Hearn · Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things · 1904 · public domain
On the Akasaka Road, in Tōkyō, there is a slope called Kii-no-kuni-zaka,—which means the Slope of the Province of Kii. I do not know why it is called the Slope of the Province of Kii. On one side of this slope you see an ancient moat, deep and very wide, with high green banks rising up to some place of gardens;—and on the other side of the road extend the long and lofty walls of an imperial palace. Before the era of street-lamps and jinrikishas, this neighborhood was very lonesome after dark; and belated pedestrians would go miles out of their way rather than mount the Kii-no-kuni-zaka, alone, after sunset.
All because of a Mujina that used to walk there.
The last man who saw the Mujina was an old merchant of the Kyōbashi quarter, who died about thirty years ago. This is the story, as he told it:—
One night, at a late hour, he was hurrying up the Kii-no-kuni-zaka, when he perceived a woman crouching by the moat, all alone, and weeping bitterly. Fearing that she intended to drown herself, he stopped to offer her any assistance or consolation in his power. She appeared to be a slight and graceful person, handsomely dressed; and her hair was arranged like that of a young girl of good family. “O-jochū,” he exclaimed, approaching her,—“O-jochū, do not cry like that!... Tell me what the trouble is; and if there be any way to help you, I shall be glad to help you.” (He really meant what he said; for he was a very kind man.) But she continued to weep,—hiding her face from him with one of her long sleeves. “O-jochū,” he said again, as gently as he could,—“please, please listen to me!... This is no place for a young lady at night! Do not cry, I implore you!—only tell me how I may be of some help to you!” Slowly she rose up, but turned her back to him, and continued to moan and sob behind her sleeve. He laid his hand lightly upon her shoulder, and pleaded:—“O-jochū!—O-jochū!—O-jochū!... Listen to me, just for one little moment!... O-jochū!—O-jochū!”... Then that O-jochū turned around, and dropped her sleeve, and stroked her face with her hand;—and the man saw that she had no eyes or nose or mouth,—and he screamed and ran away.
Up Kii-no-kuni-zaka he ran and ran; and all was black and empty before him. On and on he ran, never daring to look back; and at last he saw a lantern, so far away that it looked like the gleam of a firefly; and he made for it. It proved to be only the lantern of an itinerant soba-seller, who had set down his stand by the road-side; but any light and any human companionship was good after that experience; and he flung himself down at the feet of the soba-seller, crying out, “Ah!—aa!!—aa!!!”...
“Koré! koré!” roughly exclaimed the soba-man. “Here! what is the matter with you? Anybody hurt you?”
“No—nobody hurt me,” panted the other,—“only... Ah!—aa!”
“—Only scared you?” queried the peddler, unsympathetically. “Robbers?”
“Not robbers,—not robbers,” gasped the terrified man... “I saw... I saw a woman—by the moat;—and she showed me... Ah! I cannot tell you what she showed me!”...
“Hé! Was it anything like THIS that she showed you?” cried the soba-man, stroking his own face—which therewith became like unto an Egg... And, simultaneously, the light went out.
From Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. Public domain. Read the whole book free.
2 · One idea · Logic & science
Occam’s razor
The most famous sentence of William of Ockham is one he never wrote.
Look up Occam's razor and it arrives as a stern rule: entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity. His surviving works do not contain those words. That phrasing comes from the Irish friar John Punch, in a commentary of 1639, who called it a common axiom.
Ockham did write something close: plurality must never be posited without necessity.
Here is the fun of it. Faced with a sharp saying and a famous name, people chose the simplest story, that the famous man said it. They were nearly right. That is how the razor usually works.
In one line. Occam’s razor is the principle that, among competing explanations, the one requiring the fewest assumptions is usually the best place to start. Simpler explanations are more likely and easier to test — not always right, but the right default.
Worked example
Your website is down. Occam’s razor says check the simple causes first — expired domain, a typo in the config, the server switched off — before theorising about a coordinated attack. “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”
How to use it, and where it fails3 · One number
People who cook with clean fuels, world
200047%
202475%
1.6 times the 2000 level.
Smoke from cooking fires indoors is one of the quietest large health risks there is.
Source: Our World in Data, world estimates, read 2026-09-24.
4 · Yesterday
Yesterday
The text was Life is long enough, if you know how to use it.
The idea was The Dunning–Kruger effect. Can you still say it in one sentence? Check
You are caught up.
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A Dakota girl of seven, running free beside the Missouri, learns why her mother cries.