“Hiyoko-no-me,” Eimi Yamada's short story regularly reprinted in textbooks, has been interpreted from various viewpoints, but the meaning of the title itself —“hiyoko-no-me” or “chick's eyes”— seems to be far from sufficiently explained. This article will analyze what it represents with the concept of the“ third term” to point out another educational value of the text as teaching material.
On my visit to a school on a little island in Okinawa, I happened to meet a fisherman Mr. T through his grandson. He invited the teacher and me to his home on the shore where we had the opportunity to read Umi-no-inochi by Wahei Tatematsu. Listening to the story we read aloud, the fisherman remembered and talked about his own experiences on the sea. Finally he said, “The man who wrote this knows little about our life.” In Okinawa fishermen's culture or “life on the sea” has been orally transmitted by the prayer “Ugan-baarei.” Written words are unfamiliar and unreliable to them. How can we teachers grasp this gap between oral and written cultures? Historically overviewing oral literature in literary education, here I will answer this question from the perspective of the “third term.”
When a certain category of people define themselves as a distinct race, they are always in danger of falling into ethnocentrism. To avoid this sort of essentialist trap, a more flexible notion of “race” is needed. A more flexible notion of “subject” is needed too because any race is composed of subjects who socially, culturally or historically identify with each other. Such a paradigmatic shift presupposes radical relativism mediated by the absolute Other. Lu Xun's “Fujino-sensei” is a subversive modern novel which self-referentially foregrounds the process of telling a story itself. This meta-story provides a relativistic standpoint from which one can construct her or his own self into a racial subject without becoming ethnocentric.
Kowata-no-shigure is generally regarded as a story about a child-abusing mother. As Sotoori-Hime is mentioned in the beginning of the story, however, the relation between the mother and her twin daughters is inseparable from love affairs between the twins and a man. In short, the conventional pattern of mother-daughter narratives in the Heian Period is structurally inflected by the complicated subplot of a love triangle. But the story comes to a happy ending with the twins' exchange of partners. This extraordinary denouement is diegetically imperative in the logic of mother-daughter narratives.