袁枚 Yuan Mei (1716-1796)
Zibuyu 子不語
2 卷二
32
Topic 4 Hands, People, Apparitions
水鬼帚 Water Ghost Broom
水鬼帚
表弟張鴻業，寓秦淮潘姓河房。夏夜如廁，漏下三鼓，人聲已絕，月色大明。張愛月憑欄，聞水中砉然有聲，一人頭從水中出。張疑此時安得有泅水者，諦視之，眉目無有，黑身僵立，頸不能動，如木偶然。以石擲之，仍入於水。次日午後，有一男子溺死，方知現形者水鬼也，以此告同寓人。
有米客因言水鬼索命之奇：客少時販米嘉興，過黃泥溝，因淤泥太深，故騎水牛而過。行至半溝，有黑手出泥中，拉其腳。其人將腳縮上，黑手即拉牛腳，牛不得動。客大駭，呼路人共牽牛。牛不起，乃以火灸牛尾。牛不勝痛，盡力拔泥而起腹下有敝帚緊繫不解，腥穢難近。以杖擊之，聲啾啾然，滴下水皆黑血也。眾人用刀截帚下，取柴火焚之，臭經月才散。自此，黃泥溝不復溺人矣。米客有詩紀其事，云：「本欲牽人誤扯牛，何須懊悔哭啾啾？與君一把桑柴火，暗處陰謀明處休。」
English
Water Ghost Broom
…coming soon…
Deutsch
Wassergeist mit Besen
…demnächst verfügbar…
Translation into English and German, unless otherwise indicated, by:
Übersetzungen ins Englische und Deutsche, soweit nicht anders angegeben, von:
Teresa Johnson, Ph.D.
Topics
In a corpus of ca. 3100 stories from the strange tales collections Zibuyu, Xu Zibuyu, Yuewei caotangbiji, Liaozhai zhiyi, Yetan suilu, Ershilu and Xieduo an LDA-based topic modeling algorithm was asked to identify exactly 50 topics. The algorithm calculated the probability of each of the 50 topics to appeaer in each of the stories. Below are given the Top 5 topics in decending order of their probabilities for the story above. Probabilities are indicated with percentage numbers.
Locations
Placenames have been manually extracted from the story content.