Makino Shinichi had published many stories in a children's magazine “Shounen” and “Shoujo” from 1919 for about two and a half years. This paper summarizes the development of these stories, and examines the characteristics of expressions leads to Makino's fantastic novels after that. The expressive conflict over how to decide the relationship between readers and the author is engraved in the children's stories of Makino. Especially in “Nagekino Kujaku” and “Aojiroki Kouen”, the process that the novelist makes a plan of new work is described and the place to respond to readers is set and the relationship between the novelist's physical sensations and the words is focused on. The method of “Nagekino Kujaku” and “Aojiroki Kouen” that shares a process of making a story in a story is an achievement of the children's stories of Makino, the point that the novelist's dream surfaces as a matter suggests a sign of later fantastic novels.

This essay studies the role that the discourse of “naturalist” literature played in detective fictions around 1925. First, I describe the detail how the concept of “nature” increasingly became normative and was comprised of “naturalism” in the detective novels of that time. Secondly, I confirm that “naturalist literature” was discussed in contemporary literary circles and show that it has been accepted in a good light by later generations. The latter tendency could be construed as a demand to reconstruct detective fiction in the sense of finding a successor to established literature, based on a simple understanding of literary history. Although this demand eventually met strong opposition, it encouraged critics to reconfirm the principles of detective fiction and urged them to recognise detective fiction as a new, independent genre. This shows the essence of “naturalist” literature as a genre. Finally, I point out that the discourse of “naturalist” literature has influenced literary circles indirectly, referring to consciousness towards “naturalism” in the counterpart-norms that appeared later.

This essay examines Uchida Hyakken's “Neko,” first published in May 1929 in Shin Seinen, when his works were published in various magazines. “I,” the narrator of the work, perceive an elusive sense of discomfort in my own “feelings” as a sense of deviation from daily life, saying “there is something different from usual,” and this sense extends to the perception of “dimly” and lack of “light” in the obscure space outside his room. A stray cat, a nora-neko, invades his “ordinary” life from this subtle exterior in the forms of the temper of the narrator or the illusory visits of his guests. I conclude that the works describes the encroachment of ordinariness.

Yoshiya Nobuko's “Aru orokashiki mono no hanashi” (Kuroshōbi, 1925) is a serialized novel depicting a same-sex romance between a female teacher and her student. The latter half of the text features unnatural shifts in narrative perspective and concludes with an abrupt ending in which the female student is suddenly murdered, leading scholars to critique this work as flawed in its structural coherence. However, previous studies have largely overlooked the reader responses published in the magazine's readers' column during its serialization and their potential impact on the writing process of the text. This paper reevaluates “Aru orokashiki mono no hanashi” through the lens of author-reader negotiation, interpreting the novel's incoherence and abrupt ending as Yoshiya's critical response to unreceptive readers.

This paper focuses on Inagaki Taruho's WC: On an Aspect of Supreme Beauty (January 1925), which marked his entry into Bungei jidai, a journal that functioned as the medium of the New Sensationalist School (Shinkankakuha). Taruho made his debut in 1923 with One Thousand and One Second Stories which led him to be recognized as a prominent modernist writer. In 1925, WC was highly praised by Kawabata Yasunari, a leading figure of the New Sensationalist School. This prompted Taruho to officially join the School the following year. In this novel, the narrator introduces “detachment” and “prosaization” as methods for deriving beauty from faeces, echoing scatology. While previous studies have largely focused on interpreting the concept of “detachment”, this paper shifts the focus to “prosaization”, exploring its theory and mechanism in relation to the Futurism art movement that emerged during the same period. Through this analysis, the paper aims to clarify Taruho's position within the New Sensationalist School by addressing both the significance and limitations of his avant-garde approach to literature.

Kobayashi Hideo's “Karakuri” (1930) is not included in the collection of novels “One Brain Quintessence” (1933), but in “Bungei Hyoron” (1931), which has no division between novels and criticism in the table of contents. This work, the only novel there, is at the beginning of the book. In this article, we will not only point out the relationship between this work and the critical works, but also investigate why it was placed at the beginning of the book from within the work. First, we will discuss the relationship between “Count Dorgel's Ball,” which depicts the invisible inner life of human beings, and the “trickery” of this work. Furthermore, I will show that through this reading experience, “I” have mastered the act of re-creating the subject in my own perception. This re-creation is an expression of the initial stage of the activity of criticism. Although this work is in the form of a novel, it shows the embryonic stage of of the activity of “criticism”.

This essay examines one of the tanka by Terayama Shūji, focusing on the equivocality of subjectivity, which does not refer to an individual but to “we” in the field of avant-garde tanka, based on previous criticism of “sokoku,” a word used in the tanka. Referring to an idea of “tanka as something to be sung” as a theorist and a practitioner of the deconstruction of tanka's “private nature” and examining the techniques of quotation/collage and the issue of subject composition simultaneously with the postwar representation of the residue of imperialism, I reveal how various issues related to Japanese imperialism are represented in postwar avant-garde tanka.

Journey to Amanon by Kurahashi Yumiko has been read as a kind of anti-feminism novel which reveals that the aim of reversing the dualistic sexual power structure of male = subject/female = object has serves to reinforce that structure. Getting to grips with this issue, this essay shows that the novel exposes the emptiness of the endless power struggle, while seeming to be a simple inversion of the structure. Furthermore, I follow the process in which the protagonist called “P” in the novel loses his status as a male subject and becomes the owner of an ambiguous body that is neither male nor female to clarify that the work has the queer potential to disturb the sexual power structure itself.