Abstract
Hoshi Shinichi, a Japanese writer, is known as one of the greatest short short-story writers in Japan, who wrote 718 works during his earlier years (1968-1973). Hoshi's works have often been criticized for their structural similarities. This paper investigates the narrative patterns of Hoshi's work and describes them in terms of 11 primitive units of narrative structure. Based on previous studies, these narrative units are established as the components of frequent narrative events within Hoshi's works. Employing these units and their combinations, the most basic narrative structures are extracted by conducting analyses of pattern distributions, factor analysis, and N-gram analysis.
