The act of reading is essentially that of placing the text in any context the reader likes so as to assimilate it into his or her private sphere. But in the very same act the reader is strongly tempted to assimilate his or her own self into the public sphere, for any text more or less works as an ideological device for the status quo. In this way, when one reads something, one is always exposed to a tension between private and public spaces. Probably no one must have experienced such ambivalence more acutely than women readers in the patriarchal society of prewar Japan. While they were both socially and sexually constructed through literary texts, they could also change the configuration of the spheres to their own advantage by contextualizing the texts quite in an unexpected way.

In this article I will present the contextual reading of narration in “Midori-no-yubi,” a short story by Banana Yoshimoto. In my class of kokugo at high school I have found out that, when the students read the story not subjectively but contextually, it often awakes them to otherness in themselves. The students also find their uncritical attitude toward the accepted social values to be radically challenged by this way of reading. One of the most important goals in the teaching of kokugo, I will argue here, is thus to make the students experience such a paradigm shift of thinking.

In 2012 the Ministry of Education will issue the revised curriculum guidelines for junior high school. The kokugo textbooks of the 2012 school year are also revised for the new guidelines, but interestingly enough there is a marked increase in the number of works by Ōgai Mori, Ryûnosuke Akutagawa, and other major writers. If such traditional writings are treated in a traditional teaching method, there will be no future for the teaching of kokugo. Therefore, while reading “Torokko,” a short story by Akutagawa which is reprinted in the three textbooks, here I will propose a new way of using old teaching materials that focuses on contexts and narration.

In “Hana,” a short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, there is a monk named Zenchi-Naigu who worries about his extraordinary big nose. He is such an uncommunicative person that he passively lets others pour ridicule on his nose even if his pride is seriously wounded. The narrator never blames him for such weakness but instead benevolently watches him. In this sense, the story can be used for a teaching material to learn the importance of consideration for physically challenged people.

Language is far from a neutral communicative tool but always open to each speaker's personal inflection. The current tendency of the teaching of kokugo at elementary school, however, is to repress such linguistic idiosyncrasy and standardize language as a universal means of communication. To resist such a trend, we must make a greater effort to turn our students' attention to the various ways of narration in literary texts. In reading “Gon-gitsune,” for example, it is more important to focus on the way the narrator/reader tells the story than to interpret what he or she says. Indeed, the way of narration is deeply interwoven with its narrative structure.

How can we read the hidden context of a novel? Basically referring to Minoru Tanaka's theory of reading, here I will interpret Yasunari Kawabata's short story “Kinkai” in the attempt to answer this question. In the story, the narrator exposes the invisible yet irresistible force of the nation-state on the eve of a war. Then the narrator's role can be said to parallel the reader's; like the former who finally finds out the hidden nature of the nation-state, the latter is also expected to finally discover the context hidden under the surface of the story. With such allegorical reading I will show that this well-wrought work is of great worth not only as a literary text but also as a teaching material.