木村：この小説、読みましたか。主人公の女性が寝言で色々な予言をするんですよ。
佐藤：私も読みました。何でも見通す千里眼の女性の話ですよね。
Senri-gan
Kimura: Kono shoosetsu, yomi mashita ka. Shujinkoo no josei ga negoto de iroiro na yogen wo surun desu yo.
Sato: Watashi mo yomi mashita. Nan demo mitoosu senri-gan no josei no hanashi desu yo ne.
Kimura: Have you read this novel? The main character is a woman who makes all kinds of predictions in her sleep.
Sato: Yes, IVe read it too. She's a clairvoyant who can see into the future, right?
Senri-gan is the ability to perceive things and minds of people in far away places. Ri is an old unit of measuring distance. Sen-ri (a thousand n) is equal to about 4,000 ki- lometers. Can means eyes.
I recently read an interesting short story titled The Wife Who Spoke in Her Sleep. The story, written by Viviehne Plumb who lives in Wellington, New Zealand, is about a couple past middle age.
One evening, the husband hears his wife speak a strange language in her sleep. It is a language he's never heard before. He records what she speaks and finds out that it is Japanese. He then learns that she is talking about events occurring far away from where thev live. A Taoanese interoreter tells him Anata no okusan wa senri-gan desu (Your wife is a clairvoyant) , which astonishes him. Watashi no tsuma ga senri-gan to wa shiri masen deshita. (I had no idea my wife was a clairvoyant).
With a Japanese language teacher serving as an inter- preter, they then start up a business giving advice and telling fortunes based on what she says in her sleep.
She soon becomes well-known and even goes on TV, with the catch phrase Senri-gan no fosei ga anata no mirai wo atemasu (Have your fortune told by the clairvoyant woman). She even talks about Japanese politics in her sleep. Then something unfortunate happens at the end. Senri-gan no josei wo tsuma ni motta koto de, otto ni taihen na koto ga okita (Something terrible happened to the husband because his wife was a clairvoyant). I'll let you guess what happens.
What's fascinating about this novel is that a woman who knew absolutely no Japanese, all of a sudden starts speaking Japanese in her sleep. The author chose the Japanese language rather than any other for her novel because she thought it is interesting and mysterious.