The first has to do with the peculiarities of the Japanese language, which are numerous. There is a dominance of the verb, of subject over predicate that naturally places emphasis on state or action rather than on actor or agent. This is not a language class and discussions of the language will not proceed beyond the point necessary to establish the fact that Japanese literary activity takes place in a profoundly different linguistic milieu from that of any of the European languages. Fowler's second observation has to do with characteristic habits of both the scholarly and general reader in Japan. All this, Fowler argues, has caused Japanese literature to develop a paradoxical obsession with the self and a range of narrative stances that reflect a definition of realism through the immediacy of authorial presence rather than through verisimilitude.
Fowler argues both sides of the proposition.
His arguments point implicitly toward the affirmative, yet at several points he explicitly rejects the proposition of Japanese uniqueness in the strongest terms. In The Fracture of Meaning, David Pollack makes a long-overdue examination of the way that Chinese loan vocabulary actually functions in Japanese. Chinese loan vocabulary plays much the same role in Japanese that Greek and Latin loan vocabulary plays in English, but with the important difference that Chinese and Japanese are not only unrelated but are entirely different in syntactical and morphological character. Even though the Chinese literary tradition is the product of an almost completely unrelated line of development, the subjective effects of its rhetorical and literary functionings would seem to have more in common with the European languages than with Japanese. Pollack shows that traditional Japanese literary expression grows out of the tension between Japanese norms and values and a vocabulary of educated discourse dominated by Chinese loan words that reflect cultural values and epistemological assumptions that often remain intractably alien.