According to the theory of the “third term,” any act of reading inevitably has the moment of meta-reading, in which the reader self-reflexively recognizes his or her own way of reading in relation to other ways of reading. If we teachers turn the process into a teaching method, we can offer students opportunities to make a creative self-investigation. This is why I am practicing the experimental reading of “Seibei-to-hyōtan” in my class. But I have often faced a certain difficulty in the classroom. In this experiment first I make students examine both what the narrator says and what he doesn't say so that they can more objectively interpret the story. But after this analytical work most students still read it from the viewpoint of the narrator. Even though I provide them with extra-textual knowledge concerning the making of the story, the result is almost the same. While checking my methodological problem, this paper will make it clear what makes student- readers adhere to such uncritical reading and suggest how the theory of the “third term” can be more practically applied to the program of kokugo.

Minoru Tanaka, the critic known for his theory of the “third term,” defines “modern fiction” as a form of writing which consists of the narrator's self-expression through story-events. In other words, the narrator works as a narrative device by which things are represented. Therefore the narrator can be neither identified with the author nor treated like some actual person. Tanaka goes so far as to say that even the readers must not be materialized because they are also one of the devices for reading texts. Basically following his idea, this paper will review the function of narration in modern fiction by reading Yasunari Kawabata's “Chirinuruwo.” As Yoshihito Kobayashi calls it a “documentary crime novel,” the story is based on the record of an actual crime. For this reason it has been often interpreted in terms of a simple binary opposition between fiction and fact. Masato Nihei argues against it, saying that it makes no sense to distinguish between narration (fiction) and quotation (fact) because any literary words, however original they seem, are quotations after all. Indeed, the author himself was fully aware of the repetitive nature of language which he had creatively struggled with all through his literary career. Nihei's brilliant insight, however, seems to leave the functional aspect of narration unexplored. Thus with the theory of the “third term” this paper will examine the concept of the narrative base in Kawabata's literary aesthetics.

Since the “narrative turn” in sociology during the 1990s, many studies, both theoretical and practical, have been done with “narrative” as a key concept. Especially the “narrative approach” has developed into an important practical method under the influence of social constructionism yet without falling into mere relativism. This method can be effectively applied to the teaching of kokugo that now seems to be torn between essentialism and relativism. The approach starts with the assumption that any narrative is constructed from signs which arbitrarily produce meanings through the system of difference. Nevertheless we don't stop making narratives because nothing epistemologically exists without any narrative form. From this standpoint we can realize how literary education has played an important social role. Indeed we learn diverse ways of living through diverse forms of narratives; the dynamism of semantic generation in literary texts stimulates and cultivates our imagination; narratives greatly help us to create a meaningful life out of chaotic reality. The narrative approach makes us aware of such a tremendous power inherent in literature.