In Genji-monogatari and Heike-monogatari the mode of narration is not constative but performative in that it creates intersubjective relations between characters, narrators, and readers. In early modern times, however, such a performative type of narration had been gradually marginalized due to the new concept of “author” advocated especially by Chikamatsu-Monzaemon or the self-referential style of narration in “gesaku” popular fiction. The birth of a narrating subject in modern literature decisively caused literary texts to become more monologic. Narration ceased to be performative in the works of Ozaki Kōyō, Kyōka Izumi, and other writers of the Meiji Period.

Narration in Kojiki is composed as a song which one is expected not to read but to listen to. In other words, it consists of a mixture of telling and singing, two different strands of discourses which are complicatedly intertwined. Vocal discourses are sometimes at odds with descriptive ones, and such narrative discords make the text extremely polyphonic.

Sagoromo-monogatari is known as a well-narrated story, but there are some moments which go against the grain of the whole plot. Such incoherency points to the complications and contradictions of reality which the narrating subject desires to suppress and arrange into narrative integrity. In this self-referential way the story subverts the ideological function of representation.

Kyoshi Takahama is one of the modern poets who played a leading role in the development of realism in haiku poetry. He modelled his poetical method after Ihara-Saikaku's plain, cool, and associative style of narration which can be most typically seen in Buke-giri-monogatari. In this sense Saikaku, also a haiku poet, is more realistic and modern than Ueda-Akinari who is often compared to him.

Any stories are told in the form of “displaced immediacy” because direct spoken discourses must be always transcribed into indirect written ones. Such a narrative displacement opens up the possibilities of disruption in the process of repetition. In “Birthday Girl” Haruki Murakami explores the ambivalent nature of “displaced immediacy” with “echo” dialogues which always have an ironic effect of communication and miscommunication. Indeed not only dialogues between the twenty-year-old girl and the old man but also ones between her and “I” are so ambiguous and disruptive that they eventually bring discord among them.

Most junior high school students first learn the literary term “narrator” in “Shōnen-no-hi-no-omoide,” a story in the first grade textbook. The term is now common in literary studies, but I think it is inaccurately used in the classroom because the narrator means a person who verbally tells a story. He or she can't technically do it in a written text. In this sense we teachers need to more exactly redefine it as an educational term.

Riku Onda's “Saikoro-no-nana-no-me” is a sort of meta-text which self-referentially exposes the deceptive nature of narration constructed on binary oppositions. In the short story several narrators discuss at a meeting to decide between two alternatives. They don't compare, measure, and examine them but merely make a choice in accordance with their unwritten “common sense.” Although a young woman criticizes their binary prejudice, the narrator “I” reveals her logic of justice to be authoritarian, biased, and hopelessly binary. But even the narrator “I” turns out to be unreliable because he is also inextricably caught in dichotomies. In this way the text makes students aware that the act of narration can be deceptive and dangerous precisely because of its intelligibility.

Literary texts are created out of language, but there are extra-linguistic moments in them because of the presence of the intangible. Of course it requires acute sensitivity to perceive it, but we may see it by learning how to read illustrations. Indeed good illustrations take us to worlds beyond language.