Ryoko is the spiritualist in charge of the 35 Gram Club. The club is named after the technique by which a body is weighed before and after death, usually with a 35 gram difference, which means a person's soul weighs approximately 35 grams. Ryoko sets out to summon the spirit of Yoshio, a young man who died during school exams.
Inadvertently, she summons a flock of other deceased students that feel like talking and fooling around rather than having anything important to discuss. Finally Yoshio arrives, and says that he was holding out until they charged more (he believes his appearance is worth more than ¥1,500).
Published In:
Heibon Punch That's Comics Special
Rumic World Vol. 3
Publication Date: November 21, 1980
Pages: 16 (black and white)
Anime Adaptation: None
Notes:
35 Gram Club - Supposedly this is the weight of a human soul, more commonly described as "21 grams." From Wikipedia, "In 1901, Duncan MacDougall, a physician from Haverhill, Massachusetts, who wished to scientifically determine if a soul had weight, identified six patients in nursing homes whose deaths were imminent. Four were suffering from tuberculosis, one from diabetes, and one from unspecified causes. MacDougall specifically chose people who were suffering from conditions that caused physical exhaustion, as he needed the patients to remain still when they died to measure them accurately. When the patients looked like they were close to death, their entire bed was placed on an industrial sized scale that was sensitive within two tenths of an ounce (5.6 grams). On the belief that humans have souls and that animals do not, MacDougall later measured the changes in weight from fifteen dogs after death. MacDougall said he wished to use dogs that were sick or dying for his experiment, though was unable to find any. It is therefore presumed he poisoned healthy dogs.
One of the patients lost weight but then put the weight back on, and two of the other patients registered a loss of weight at death but a few minutes later lost even more weight. One of the patients lost "three-fourths of an ounce" (21.3 grams) in weight, coinciding with the time of death. MacDougall disregarded the results of another patient on the grounds the scales were "not finely adjusted", and discounted the results of another as the patient died while the equipment was still being calibrated. MacDougall reported that none of the dogs lost any weight after death.
While MacDougall believed that the results from his experiment showed the human soul might have weight, his report, which was not published until 1907, stated the experiment would have to be repeated many times before any conclusion could be obtained."
The Entrepreneurial Spirit shares a few things in common with Rumiko Takahashi's much later full series, Kyokai no RINNE. Both series deal with mortals interacting with the spirit realm, listening to their tales of woe, and earning a profit in the meantime.
