Title: Recontextualizing Texts
Description: 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.
Subjects: Japanese fiction, history and criticism, Narration (rhetoric), Japanese fiction, History and criticism