2016 Volume 65 Issue 3 Pages 2-14
Kenji Miyazawa's short story “Tsuchigami-to-kitsune” is open to a wide range of interpretations. In my class, for example, a student believes that the Birch prefers the Fox to the genius called Tsuchigami. Meanwhile I think that the Birch wants to have an equal but different relation to each of them. Such freedom of reading, however, very often falls into interpretive fallacy (Indeed my own interpretation is far from definitive; it completely ignores the amorous aspect of the story). Tsuchigami's impulsive murder of the Fox is most likely to invite us to commit such fallacy because it is so ambiguous that everyone can have his or her own view about why he has done it. But is there any right answer to it? The narrator himself tries in vain to specify his motive without reaching any conclusion. Then the narrator's interpretive dilemma over what he narrates tells us that there is something unreadable not only in others but also in ourselves.
