According to the legendary account of Emperor Jinmu in Kojiki, his wife Isukeyori-hime was born between a god and a human being. Omono-nushi, the god of lightning, fell in love with a girl named Seyadatara-hime. He transformed himself into a vermillion arrow which floated downstream and penetrated her vagina when she relieved herself in the river. As soon as the arrow turned back into the god, they married and had a daughter. However extraordinary it seems, the episode reflects the symbolic economy of agricultural society because Omono-nushi was believed to have a power to produce a good harvest of rice plants. Therefore the emperor's marriage with the god's daughter refers to his control over the country's agricultural affairs.

Among the picture books based on Tōkai-dōchū-hizakurige there are three different books by four different authors and “nishikie” artists but with the same title Tōkai-dōchū-kurige-no-yajiuma. The volume A is co-authored by Kanagaki-Robun and Isseisai-Yoshinao, the volume B by Kanagaki and Utagawa-Yoshiiku, and the volume C by Gakutei-Harunobu II and Utagawa. They were not made at random but systematically issued according to the marketing strategy of the publisher Tōsei-dō. Gakutei, the author of the volume C, wrote three more books based on Hizakurige. The aim of this article is to comparatively analyze interrelations between those three volumes and then between them and Gakutei's three books.

Sunao Tokunaga wrote his first novel Taiyōr-no-nai-machi under the influence of the two Russian novels Mess-Mend and Cement. Following them in style, the author boldly used the technique of film-editing for the change of scenes and other literary devices in his story. He also modeled a working-class heroine named Takae after the women characters in Mess-Mend and Cement who are belligerently committed to the class struggle. The aim of this article is to show the popular nature of the proletarian novel in terms of a Russian influence on Japanese literature.

In proportion to the rapid growth of information society our sense of powerlessness paradoxically becomes more acute. I think it's my duty as a scholar of Japanese literature to offer some way out of this current cul-de-sac through my study on modern literature. A new way of reading Lu Xun's “Kokyō” might give a clue to solving it because the short story has potentiality enough to cause a revolutionary shift of our epistemological paradigm. Referring to the philosophical theory of Shōzō Ōmori, here I will point out the six important aspects of the text that the reader must take into consideration in order to bring the force of paradigm change out of it.