This is a study on various apparatuses of learning that function in the novel, Takekurabe. Those apparatuses include Fudeya (a stationery shop), Yoshiwara (a licensed prostitution area), the space called Daionji Area, as well as regular institutional schools. Each in its own way, they invite children to the worlds of adults, raise them as social beings, or function as apparatuses that involve them in the institutions of modern nation state. The learning in all those places is achieved by acquiring the particular language used in each of them. This paper focuses. especially on the space called Fudeya, which is presented in contrast with regular schools In the ending of the novel, the loss of Fudeya strikes readers as an unhappy event because it deprives children of a precious place for learning by playing, which means that they are left under the sole authority of institutionalized schools.
