In Koji-ki, Prince Homuchiwake is born dumb under the curse of the God of Izumo. When the prince is sent to Izumo to break the spell, there a man named Kihisatsumi treats him to a great banquet that miraculously cures his dumbness. Of course the banquet is a metaphor for a religious ceremony, but it is more shamanistic than those administered by the imperial government in Yamato. Instead of a mere provincial area far away from the capital, Izumo is thus represented as a spiritual space quite different from the official one, a gateway to the other world.
Michizō Tachihara is a poet of the early Showa Period who successfully applied the poetical style of Shin-kokin-waka-shū to his own. An avid reader of the classical collection of poems, he created his particular syntax by learning from it the styles of inversion connecting two unrelated things and of a double predicate verb modified by two different subjects. At that time there was a revival of Shin-kokin-waka-shū in which it was praised as a literary paragon to be followed. But unlike many other poets who thematically made use of the ethereal atmosphere of the classical text, Tachihara structurally assimilated it into his own work.
This article will analyze Riichi Yokomitsu's novel Bishō with the concept of parallax. It has been often pointed out that the text is constructed on the “principle of excluded middle” which keeps us from logically deciding what it means. In light of a mobilized viewpoint called the “parallax view,” however, the principle will be grasped not so much the cause of textual aporia as a mechanism that produces an infinite chain of signification by the movement of differentiation.
During the late 1970s and the early 1980s there was a fad for Japanese detective fiction in China. Especially the realistic detective novels by Seichō Matsumoto and Seiichi Morimura had such a great vogue that some of them were even filmed. But interestingly enough almost all the Chinese detective films put a greater emphasis on the theme of “law” than the Japanese original texts. The aim of this article is to outline the process of cultural transformation or more literally “translation” in filming the novels Ningen-no-shōmei and Suna-no-utsuwa and examine the social role the films played in the historical contexts of the post-Cultural Revolution period.