Repository path: workshop/canon/kumonoito/manifest.md · rendered 2026-09-09

Canon manifest — 蜘蛛の糸（The Spider's Thread）

Canon member — D-20260723-02 (canon selection) ratified 2026-07-23 (independent adversarial review + non-Anthropic panel vote; see the resolved decision page). This manifest records the verification behind that ratification.

Bibliographic

• Work: 蜘蛛の糸 — The Spider's Thread
• Author: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke 芥川龍之介 (1892–1927)
• First publication: 1918 — 『赤い鳥』創刊号 (Akai Tori), July 1918; composed 1918-04-16 (dated in text)
• Register axis: Formal parable, narrated distance (D-20260723-02 register axis).

Source (Aozora Bunko)

• Card: 000879 / work 92 · file: files/92_14545.html (Shift_JIS, decoded cp932)
• URL: https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000879/files/92_14545.html
• Retrieved: 2026-07-23
• 底本 (source edition): 「芥川龍之介全集2」ちくま文庫、筑摩書房
• Stored member: whole work
• Local: workshop/canon/kumonoito/source.txt (ruby readings <rt>/<rp> and Aozora annotations ［＃…］ stripped by tools/fetch_aozora.py; paragraph breaks preserved)

Public-domain verification

• Japan (charter rule — author's death + 70 years): died 1927; 1927 + 70 = 1997 → past the death+70 threshold, so public domain in Japan (nominal onset 1 Jan 1998). Over-determined: the work was already PD under Japan's former 50-year term (from 1 Jan 1978), which the 2018 term extension did not revive — so PD status does not hinge on the extension. ✓
• US: published 1918 → public domain in the US.

Length (verified 2026-07-23)

• 2868 non-whitespace characters (2663 CJK) (corrected 2026-07-28, S051; was 2851 / 2646 — see Text condition). Criterion 3 (whole-work translatability): target ≤ ~10,000, hard ceiling ~13,000 → PASS.

Text condition

Clean; ruby stripped by tag removal (no gaiji notes). Narrated in the polite oral-tale です／ます register (ございます・居ります) — a marked, sustained stylistic choice the S001 pilot flagged (neither pilot regime engaged it); see OQ-20260723-target-register.

Corrected 2026-07-28 (S051) — the "no gaiji notes" clause above was false and the stored text was missing characters. tools/fetch_aozora.py counted only the plain-text edition's ※［＃…］ annotation; Aozora's HTML edition renders a JIS X 0213 level-3/4 character as <img class="gaiji" alt="※(…、第N水準P-KK-TT)">, which the generic tag strip deleted silently. 17 characters were lost: every one of them the first syllable of the protagonist's name, 犍陀多 (Kandata, 第3水準1-87-71), stored throughout as 陀多. No claim on A-shaw-spider-thread rests on the deleted character — the anchor names Kandata correctly and its findings are about register, sentence architecture and one imported clause — but the source it was read against was defective for 25 sessions. The tool now resolves the alt-text code to the character via the euc_jis_2004 codec (unresolvable codes become a visible ※［＃…］), and the source was regenerated. Length above is the corrected count. RS-20260728h-gaiji-deletion.

Known English translations (precedent / contamination awareness)

Heavily translated (highest end of the canon's contamination axis, criterion 6): multiple published English versions exist. The earliest, Glenn W. Shaw's "The Spider's Thread" (Tales Grotesque and Curious, Hokuseido 1930), is now the project's first Tier-1 precedent anchor, A-shaw-spider-thread — read closely against this source, so Shaw's handling of the storyteller register and the Buddhist-cosmology realia is a ready comparand for the project's own R01/R02 renderings of the same passage. Shaw's 1930 text is US-public-domain (stored in the anchor dir). Fuller translator catalogue (Kojima 1952, Rubin 2006, De Wolf 2007 — all in copyright) is in wiki/base/sources/S-akutagawa.md.

Contamination caveat (unchanged): because Shaw is now stored in-repo, keep it in the anchor context; workshop translation runs on this source must not be primed with Shaw's or any published rendering (the pilot/regimes translate from the Japanese only).