The aim of this article is to elucidate the linguistic mechanism of Yukiguni, Yasunari Kawabata's masterpiece of modern fiction, in terms of Minoru Tanaka's concept of “objective reality.” The development of Shimamura's consciousness is focused on to explore his sense of empty reality. Such sensitivity to realities causes him to be indulged in “miserable fantasy” in which Komako and Yōko appear as others to project his desire on. The way of narrating his psychological trajectory provides a key to understanding the epistemological perspective of the novel.

In his novel Han-no-hanzai, Naoya Shiga exposes the biological nature of human beings hidden under the cover of social institutions and through the cruel ending of a couple's life poses the ethical problem of the “plank of Carneades” which is concerned with life and death. In his short story “Kinosaki-nite,” where the earlier novel is mentioned, Shiga treats the same theme again. When the narrator accidentally killed a newt after his experience of being almost killed by a train, he has realized an exchangeability between “killer” and “victim” and started to assume a transcendental outlook on life and death. The narrator's philosophy may remind us of Kōichirō Kokubun's argument about a mediopassive voice, a grammatical voice which lies outside of the dichotomy between active and passive voices. Indeed the narrator is a subject in a double sense of the word or in the form of a mediopassive voice who lives his own life to be driven by nature to complete a biological process. This way of reading the story can be also connected to Minoru Tanaka's theory of the “third term” because it aims to radically shift the paradigm of literary education by exploring possibilities of literary texts which can create a new linguistic and epistemological space.

In Japanese Literature it is often pointed out that more critical reading should be introduced in classical literature. Especially there is a need for building a teaching method on the “third term” theory to deal with something beyond the act of narrating. This article demonstrates how to apply the theory in the classroom with Genji-monogatari as a textbook. Genji-monogatari is quite different in narrative structure from Taketori-monogatari and other classical texts; it is so polyphonically narrated that we must learn how to grasp interrelations between several discourses. The chapter of Yūgao is most suitable for such meta-reading. Hikaru-Genji's narration of Yūgao reveals his egoism as a reflection of his desire to symbolically possess her. As in this case, it may lead to misreading if we interpret the story from a single narration. In reading Genji-monogatari, we need to dialectically compare the narrations of the main plot with those of each chapter to discover its meta-plot or the third term that lies beyond narration.