Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale is constituted of two reports, i.e. that of the narrator-handmaid and that of a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies (Historical Notes on The Handmaid’s Tale) held in 2195, which indicates that the novel is made in a form of a so-called “Rahmenbau”.
The story is constructed of 3 strata, i.e. the lost democracy, the lost dignity of women, and the lost family. This study finds that a recovery of these lost factors forms the literary motif of the novel. Employing a narratological approach, this study also reveals that the handmaid narrates as if she knew nothing about the events which have already happened, but in reality she knew the processes and the consequences of them.
Based on an analysis of her narrative style, this study argues that the information/discourse she gives to readers is not logical and reliable, but full of noise, ambiguity, irrelevance and confusion. This study analyzes a close relationship between a fluctuation of her logic and the weakness of the heroin, as she shows a fear whenever she is thrown into a difficult situation to confront danger or to make a decision. This relationship should not be regarded as a defect,; on the contrary they are tied up to form a human-centered narrativity. This study argues that a pursuit for power for its own sake forms a dictatorship and function as a tyrannical system, and to avoid a tendency to desire power, it is necessary for her to relativize a world or worlds, as Nelson Goodman documents.

Kanikōsen was translated into English and published in America and Britain in 1933. The original Japanese version had been written by Takiji Kobayashi and published in 1929.The English version’s tittle was The Cannery Boat by Takiji Kobayashi, and Other Japanese Short Stories. But its translator’s name was not written anywhere in the book.
Unexpectedly, the name was revealed in a Japanese newspaper’s article reporting the roundup of the Japanese Communist Party members in 1934. It was William Maxwell Bickerton that translated Kanikōsen. He was British born and raised in New Zealand and was teaching English at Dai-ichi High School and other colleges in Tokyo. According to the article he was arrested under the Peace Preservation Law by the Tokkō (the Special Higher Police) on suspicion of giving money to the Japanese Communist Party. He told the police about his translation during the harsh investigation.
It was very rare for Japanese modern novels to be translated and published in foreign countries before the World War II. At that time, modern Japanese literature was hardly known in the West, though The Tale of Genji were translated into English in the 1925, which drew praises from many European literary people including Virginia Woolf and other modernists.
Why and how Kanikōsen was translated and published abroad is the theme of this paper. It inevitably has relation to the context of the world politics in the 1930s, especially of the rise of the Communist Movements in Japan and the West. For instance, one of the American Communist leaders, Michael Gold, a Proletarian writer himself, helped Bickerton publish his translation. This kind of political situation in the 1930s, rather than the literary quality and values of the work itself, supposedly urged the overseas translation and publication of the Kobayashi’s proletarian work.

The notion of Japanese subject has been controversial. Some linguists take the existence of subject for granted, and others deny the usefulness of the concept. The question regarding the Japanese subject has not yet been settled so far. It seems to me that some linguists collect only written data and that others collect conversational data. This might be one of the reasons for the controversy. With regard to his issue, Hoye (2008:6) states that the controversy over a Japanese subject might stem from the confusing structure of the Japanese language itself, from a historical background where Japanese was strongly influenced by Western languages, from application of generative grammar theory to the Japanese language by a number of successful Japanese linguists. In this paper, I will examine the actual conversational data I have collected for this research.