Higan-sugi-made by Sōseki Natsume formally borrows much from Robert Louis Stevenson's collection of short stories New Arabian Nights. They are also thematically similar as they both deal with the subject of curiosity. But while Stevenson makes a social and sexual inquiry into it, Sōseki treats it within the limited sphere of the privileged class. Before he became a professional writer, Sōseki was a professor of English literature who used New Arabian Nights and other literary texts as teaching material. So it can be said that the bourgeois ideology of modern education produced Higan-sugi-made through the thematic inflection of New Arabian Nights as a textbook.

Riichi Yokomitsu's short story “Hae” is an excellent text for an effective application of the “third term” theory to the classroom. The theory offers an alternative way of reading it by making us aware of the author's extra-linguistic struggle to overcome the aporia of seeing and narrating. Indeed the keyword “emptiness” of the story indicates extreme relativism; whatever the character believes to be of absolute value turns out to be as transient as a piece of steamed bun. But it also tells us that, once liberated from the character's essentialist attitude, we can paradoxically have a more positive view of such a fragmented state of things; everything has its own unique existence and value. By reading the literary text in this way, here I will demonstrate the way the theory can be practically used as an educational tool.

Shinichirō Nakamura and Makoto Ōoka recollect that Kenreimonin-Ukyō-no-Daibu-shū was very popular among young women during the first decade of the Showa Period. Its popularity was partly triggered by the publication of the Fuzanbou edition annotated by Nobutsuna Sasaki in 1939. Haruo Satō and Seiichi Funahashi also helped female readers to get well acquainted with it through their writings about the woman poet in ladies' magazines. The classical text also played a crucial role at girls' schools. “Shōsetsu-Ukyō-no-Daibu,” Funahashi's serial story in the literary magazine Geien, provides a clue to understanding its significance in the history of female education.

In Mugi-to-heitai (1938), Ashihei Hino depicted the Sino-Japanese War in the form of a soldier's diary. Although in the war novel he treated such delicate topics as soldiers' sexuality and the use of poison gas in China, it was surprisingly seldom censored. Why was this possible under strict control on freedom of expression in wartime? This article will explicate how the author strategically evaded censorship to leave the realities of war on record.