This paper discusses Shunro Oshikawa's Bukyo No Nihon (Chivalrous Japan), which is regarded as his most representative work, and attempts to illuminate the process of its composition. The work is important because it presents the definition of "Bukyo" (warrior morality), which is the focus of the "Kaitei Gunkan" (submarine warships) series. I focus on Oshikawa's approach to the composition, a neglected aspect in the study of the work, and try to go beyond the critical evaluations of his works so far, which have tended only to imply the idea of nationalism. I discuss the material, structure and the motivating force behind the composition of the work, and compare them to the contemporary discourse. I demonstrate how Oshikawa transformed the critical awareness of the times into the appeal of the novel, which he used as his vehicle for self-expression.

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Akutagawa Ryunosuke's "Giwaku" (Suspicions) has been regarded as a defective work with too many deviations in the form of details unrelated to the whole. In this paper, I present new possibilities of interpretation by examining the significance of Gendo's words, such as "Kyojin" (madman) and "Kaibutsu" (monster) to his listener "Jissen Rinri Gakusha" (practical moralist) in conjunction with contemporary discourse. The details that have been deemed sheer nonsense prove to be allusions to the political background of the work, such as "Kyoiku Chokugo Tekkai Fusetsu Jiken" (Incident of Rumors of the Repeal of The Imperial Rescript on Education), "Tetsugakukan Jiken" (Tetsugakukan Incident), "Nanbokucho Seijun Ron" (Disputes over the Legitimacy of the Royal Family since the Period of the Northern and Southern Dynasties), "Hangyakuron Jiken" (Rebellion Lecture Incident) and the assassination of Ito Hirobumi. Gendo's narrative derives its dynamics from the return of the repressed and its amplification as "Giwaku," which infects the listener "Watashi" (I) and creates the complexity of the multi-layered narrative structure of the work.

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There is a critical consensus that Nagai Kafu during the Taisho era isolated himself from society, hated the contemporary cultural trends and immersed himself in the old-fashioned culture of the Edo period. His attitude in the era is often referred to as "Edo Kaiki" (return to Edo) or "Edo Shumi" (Edo taste). Yet his serial essays Maitsuki Kanbunroku (Monthly News), published in the journals Bunmei and Kagetsu, record Kafu's engagement with the age. I aim to reexamine Kafu's literary activities during the period through explications of Maitsuki Kenbunroku. Close reexaminations of the essays will illuminate Kafu's attitudes toward the trends of the time and their significance in his entire oeuvres. I will also present new perspectives on his literary productions in the form of journals, comparing Maitsuki Kenbunroku with Danchoutei Nichzjou (Danchoutei Diary), part of which was written during the period in which he wrote the former.

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Against the background of the rise of the film industry, Tanizaki Junichiro's "Aozukashi no Hanashi" (The Tale of Mr. Aozuka) is a realistic critique of human desire as manifested in the production and interpretation of films. Films in the work are depicted as a medium for offering visual pleasure to men, as exemplified by the director Nakata and male viewers, by means of foregrounding the "sex" of the actress Yurako. The tale presents films as an old-fashioned, primitive medium for recording and for presenting "Misemono" (spectacles). This is in fact an anachronistic view of films, as their power to portray the psychology of specific characters had been regarded as their forte since the 1920s. If the viewer devours and monopolizes the pleasure, the work suggests, he is appropriating the right to ownership of the director and the producers. The tale examines the subjectivity contained in the process of the circulation of films and defines them as a form of "folk culture," which Tanizaki found to be the essence of the film genre. Like other "film novels" by Tanizaki, "Aozukashi no Hanashi" reveals his powers of critical insight.

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In a series of the "court novels" he wrote in the late Taisho era, Kikuchi Kan looked into the contradictions and defects of the law, introducing a great variety of discourses, such as the testimonies of the investigators, the public prosecutors and the judges and the news reports, as well as the suspects' statements. He examined the law by means of literary conventions, since he insightfully understood that legal discourses, which are deployed in court as strategies for winning, are structured on the basis of the rhetoric of literature. Moreover, in Kikuchi's "court novels," readers stand in the position of the jury. His novels make visible the invisible outsiders silenced in court and reexamine standards for justice. They are attempts to acquire greater insight into what cannot be told than in what is told. They try to give words to the silenced and pursue ways to tell what cannot be told.

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This essay is a reading of Sakaguchi Ango's "Izukoe" (To Where, published in Shin Shosetsu in October, 1946) with a focus on the problems of "responsibility" and the "subject," that were controversial at the time of its publication. Two kinds of subjects were at issue: one is the "subject" constructed in the process of holding the nation responsible for the war and the other is the subject that should be responsible for the integration of "the mind and the body." The literati of the time felt hard pressed to formulate their subjective positions. The work problematizes the part of the subject that is invisible in the process of "Jiko Konkyo Ka" (self-definition) and makes the repressed region visible by pointing to a difference between "Watakushi" (I) and its multiplicity in its "search for the self." Furthermore, I argue that the act of weaving "Kake" (wager) in and out of the text is an attempt to integrate "the other," that is, what is not the self, into the subject and urges reexamination of the closed logic in the controversies on the "responsible subject."

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Abe Kobo's Tanin No Kao, Kawabata Yasunari's "Kataude" (One Arm) and Shibusawa Tatsuhiko's "Ningyo Zuka" (The Tomb for Dolls) were all written during the same one-year period from the end of the thirty-seventh year to the end of the thirty-eighth year of the Showa era. One of the important elements in their background might be the modern myth of the "Bachelor Machine" advocated by M. Carrouges. The "bachelor machine" is a concept presented in the form of the metaphors of a "bachelor" and a "machine" that signify "the loss of human feelings" and "the impossibility of having contact or communication with women." All three texts depict the futile attempts on the part of the subject to recover his true self and the resulting frustration experienced. By examining Shibusawa's understanding of Carrouges, Hijikata Tatsumi's interest in the "malformed body," as portrayed in his "Ankoku Butoh," (Dark Dance) and discourse pertaining to Hans Bellmer's "ball-jointed dolls," I try to bring into relief the discursive practices popular during the time around the fortieth year of the Showa era, which could be called the age of the "bachelor machine."

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In this paper, I discuss the theme of fear that characterizes Masao Yamakawa's novels. Fear in Yamakawa's works is caused by the loss of the sense of distance and an attendant disorder in the sensory perceptions, and is felt in situations where "human beings" and "things" or "life" and "death" overlap with each other in various forms. The archetype of such fear is the impact of images we experience when seeing films and photographs. The essence of Yamakawa's novels lies in the transformational process where the experience of such images is transplanted into real human relationships. By means of further analysis of the above phenomena, I attempt to clarify the fact that the experience of images and sensory fear constitute the central theme of all of Yamakawa's novels.

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The aim of this essay is to investigate the significance of Kazuko Saegusa's feminist theory in a contemporary cultural context. Saegusa's feminism has been regarded as an expression of "feminine principle doctrine" and has not been justly evaluated. I have, first of all, examined Saegusa's criticism of Greek tragedies and pointed to the nature of her "feminine principle" and the deconstructive process at work in her development of logic, in order to revise the evaluation of her feminism so far. I have then examined the significance of pregnancy, childbirth and the destruction of the community in Onidomo No Yoruwa Fukai (Demons' Nights Are Deep) and argued that the specter-like "feminine principle," represented only in terms of a deficiency, is nothing but a strategy on her part. I have also reinterpreted Saegusa's "feminine principle" from a contemporary point of view and examined her feminism in its relation to the two attitudes toward the (re) standardization of the body, whose rudiments were formed during the 1980s.

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I have reexamined Tanabe Seiko's Joze To Tora To Sakanatachi (Jose, the Tiger and the Fish) and the needs of its physically handicapped female protagonist from the points of view of disability studies and gender. In my reexamination, I have argued that Jose's happiness, which proves to be the equivalent of death at the end, is symbolic of the barriers presented in the face of her and other disabled women's needs during the 1980s. Moreover, I propose that such an interpretation should provide a clue to a new kind of care ethic and reading ethic that goes against modern liberalism, and have attempted to make a connection between the study of symbolic analysis of literary texts and the care ethic.

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