This book offers the first systematic application in English of speech act theory to modern Japanese fictional narratives, based on a reading of five modern Japanese shosetsu as performances enacted by the narrator and the narratees in each text: Natsume Soseki's Kokoro and The Three-Cornered World (Kusamakura), Ibuse Masuji's Black Rain (Kuroi ame); Mori Ogai's Wild Geese (Gan), and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's Quicksand (Manji). Sakaki's close reading of each text and her concern with narrative performance reveal a hitherto unexplored area of communications between narrator and narratee, as well as between "encoded author" and "encoded reader," within the text - an area overshadowed to date by interest in thematic concerns and political contexts.

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