Abstract
The present study analyzed the transcripts of oral narratives that were told, as stories, to school children by four
disaster victims of the 1995 Kobe Quake. The story tellers are members of a voluntary group, called Group-117, whose
aim is to pass such experiences on to the next generation. The analyses of the narratives focused on the ways the
narrators told the stories rather than on the narrative content, using narrative analytical concepts such as "by-players"
and "exchange of viewpoints." The results showed that, in the narratives of Ms. Shono and Ms. Asai, where a particular
person played the role of a by-player, the exchange of viewpoints between the narrators themselves and their respective
by-players underlay the basic structure of their narratives. In contrast, it was the audiences in Mr. Hasegawa's story, and
"Kobe City" in Ms. Ichihara's story, that played the role of by-players. In all four narratives, audiences were also
involved in the exchange of viewpoints due to the prevalence of a subjunctive mood during the narration, even when
audiences themselves did not act as by-players.
