When we try to grasp the meaning of the world, we do so not only for some pragmatic purpose but also under the epistemological imperative to classify things into some sort of order. The world reflects not things themselves but just the way we see them. In short, there is nothing extra-linguistic in the world. Through this linguistic movement the subject both transforms and is transformed by objects. Thus we have to construct a sort of meta-subject precisely to understand such interactions between the two terms. As Antoine Compagnon points out in his narrative therapy, we need such a meta-subject for modern novels, a reader who is quite different from a traditional subject-reader for modern narratives.

In this paper I will analyze the narrative function of Izu-no-odoriko by focusing on not the content but the “philosophy” of the story so as to reconsider the principle of reading. As Shōzō Ōmori points out in his essay on the “mode of past tense,” we must not stop discovering textual potentialities because to do so may lead to the discovery of new aspects of our own life. In this sense, Izu-no-odoriko is a philosophical text which has the very potentialities to change the reader's self with what Minoru Tanaka calls “enlightening effects.”

Minoru Tanaka says that as we are absolutely alienated from exterior things surrounding us, we have devised the “third term” called the text by which to have access to them. As an attempt to apply his theory for the teaching of kokugo, in my class I read Nankichi Niimi's “Kitsune” as an instance of the third term. In so doing I focus on the narration of the sixth chapter which is very subjective unlike the omniscient narration in other chapters. There the narrator talks about his mother, but his discourse isn't built on any common image of affectionate mother. Thus “mother” signifies nothing extra-linguistic yet represents the object through the effect of the third term.

Since the postmodern literary theory of the 1980s, it has been taken for granted that there is no true meaning of the text but only each reader's arbitrary interpretation of it. If so, however, is there no principle of reading by which we can intersubjectively interpret the text? This paper will give an answer to this question through the reading of the three children's books by Kimiko Aman; Shiroi-bōshi, Oni-no-bōshi, and Ten-no-machi-yanagi-dōri.

As anything written is called écriture after the “linguistic turn” in postmodernism, “écriture of modern fiction” in the title of this paper seems to be tautological. In the same way it seems to be ridiculous to talk about “reader-subjects” after Roland Barthes' declaration of the “death of the author.” But now I think it necessary to go beyond such a postmodern way of thinking. To do so we have to reintroduce the concept of subject in relation to others into literary studies so that the reader as a subject can rewrite both the text and his or her self in a dialectical fashion. Comparing Hiroshi Andō's concept of “expressive mechanism” with Minoru Tanaka's theory of the “third term” in relation to Barthes's well-known definition of écriture, here I will suggest a new possibility of studies on modern fiction.

In his Kokyō-ron Minoru Tanaka analyzes the “narrative structure of multilayered consciousness” in Kokyō by Lu Xun. Now I am trying to find out how to apply his theory for my kokugo class in spite of much difficulty in doing so. Kokyō is usually read in class to draw a moral from his famous phrase; “If people walk on the same way, then there will be a path.” The aim of my experimental teaching is exactly to discover an alternative to such a standardized way of teaching.

The contextual function of a literary text is determined by its narrative style. Double narration, for example, works to contextually reconstruct interrelations between a subject and an object. The best way to demonstrate the role of double narration is to contrast it with monologic narration which can be typically seen in Yasunari Kawabata's short story “Canary.” His narrative style paradoxically gives us a good opportunity to know the importance of an ironic or polyphonic mode of narration.

One may feel the power of language not only in a poem written by Michio Mado at the age of ninety seven but also even in one by a seven-year-old child. The same power can be found in Yoshirō Ishihara's essays and poems on his experiences in Siberia as a prisoner of war. According to the linguistic philosophy of Walter Benjamin, there are three kinds of language; the language of things, the language of human beings, and the words of God. The language of human beings, he says, exists to mediate between things and God, that is, between the two transcendental levels. In this sense, Ishihara's words express something transcendental both in and beyond realities.