As she criticized court ladies for their idleness in Murasaki-shikibu-nikki, Murasaki-Shikibu firmly held that women should be more practical. Shikibu herself saw a lot of women at the court who were extremely ill reputed for their deplorable lack of practicality. For most of the women were employed at the court not for their working abilities but just for their decency and beauty. But Shikibu advocated a drastic reform under the aegis of Empress Shoshi and insisted on training mere ornamental ladies into more skillful waiting women.
The Shingon Sect had several different ways of enthronement rituals. This apparently irregular religious system was originally created in the unsteady political situation of the Kamakura Period when the royal family was broken up into several factions. By the system, no matter what sudden political change occurred, the sect could perform an enthronement ritual suitable for any ruler of the time. To consider this peculiar aspect of the enthronement rituals in the esoteric sect, here I will examine the style of each ritual, the relation between the regent family and the sect, and the meanings of the ritual names of the enthroned.
In his Ishi-ni-hishigareta-zasso, Takeo Arishima built up the structure of a love affair in which the inverted action of "attraction" played a vital role. The narrator of the story is attracted to a woman called Miss.M, but strangely enough it is not other men but the woman herself that he regards with a jealous eye. Paradoxically he envies Miss.M for having successfully fascinated his ideal man who is no other than himself, the self-image created by his internalized homosocial desire. Here I will analyze this complicated relation between the tempting and the tempted in terms of the triangle of desire penetrated by a male homosocial ideology.
In 1935 Shohei Kiyama wrote a story called "Jinsan-no-haru." The setting is a classroom of the third grade at a primary school in 1912, the last year of the Meiji Period. There a reading class is held with a story within the story "Watakushi-no-uchi" as a textbook. But the teacher instructs his students to read the story silently, allowing them neither to read it aloud nor have its visual images. Some of the students come to entertain doubts about the method of silent reading. This peculiar system of education at an ordinary Japanese school may be familiar to most Japanese people. The aim of this essay is to consider the teaching method of reading exactly by reading the one described in the story.