In high school when we study classical Chinese, the protagonist of "Sangetsuki," famous for the phrase "a cowardly self-esteem and an overbearing sense of shame," had a name like "Li Chū" or "Li Zhong" or someth…
In high school classical Chinese, the story famous for the phrase “a timid self-respect and an overbearing sense of shame” is Sangetsuki, and I’m pretty sure the protagonist’s name was Li Zhong or Li Zhong/Li Chong or something like that. Sangetsuki was supposed to have been based on a tale in Zhang Du’s Xuanshizhi (a Tang-dynasty collection of marvel tales), namely the piece “Li Zheng,” but now it’s said that Atsushi Nakajima wrote “Sangetsuki” based on “Renhu Zhuan” in the Qing-dynasty collection “Tangren Shuo Hui” (this part I have no memory of; when I look it up it turns into some vague, blurry story), so even if it did change I don’t know at what point it changed. Since the original was “Li Zheng,” if the name changed then there’s a possibility it changed starting from the original Tang-dynasty chuanqi tale, or from the Qing-dynasty one. Also, in the classical Chinese passage “The Banquet at Hongmen,” there’s a scene where a character flies into a rage and the rhythmic kundoku line goes “dohatsu ten o tsuki, mokushi kotogotoku saku” (“his bristling hair strikes the heavens; the corners of his eyes all split”), and the first half, “dohatsu ten o tsuki,” became an idiom and is famous. However, when I rechecked around 2022, there are reports that it had changed to “dohatsu jōshi, mokushi kotogotoku saku.” By the way, in the official histories, the origin story for “dohatsu ten o tsuku” (hair striking the heavens) is apparently the same story as the origin of the word “kanpeki” (literally “returning the jade intact”), but in that story the precise phrasing is “dohatsu kan o tsuku” (“his bristling hair strikes the crown”), and “dohatsu ten o tsuku” is said to be a Japan-only hyperbolic expression.
This case is part of the Mandela Effect case database based on "The Window of Opportunity: A Guidepost to the Mandela Effect — The Ultra-Secret X-Files" by Aoyama Takuto.