Published on December 22, 2021
Job titles and other details are as of the time of publication.
(The interview was conducted in Japanese and was thereafter translated into English.)

The power and role of stories

I loved stories ever since I was a child. Later, after learning English, I became fascinated with the rich expressiveness of the language and chose English literature as my research field, especially novels of the modernist period onward. In the study of narrative theory and narratology, I examine the narrative techniques used by various authors in the hope of unlocking the secrets to the portrayal of complex inner conflicts and subtle emotional shifts. Literature depicts the suffering of people trapped by their circumstances, and at the same time, uncovers the truth to free people of those circumstances. Through the study of narratology, I seek to explore the power and role of stories in our lives.

Enjoying the diversity of Toronto

My memories are hazy of real childhood events, but I clearly remember my impressions of the books I read. I was thoroughly fascinated by the Eastern and Western myths and fairy tales for children for the distinct contrast between the gentle, polite desu/masu writing style and the unrelenting story lines. It always amazed me that the character strings eternally fixed to the page could paint such vivid pictures of the characters’ feelings and the drama of their adventures, and that I could imagine the characters living beyond the formulaic ending “And they lived happily ever after.”

During my junior year of high school, my father, a literary researcher, took a teaching job in a university in Canada, and my family moved to Toronto. My father’s appointment was for one year, but my younger brother and I decided to extend our stay, in large part because we enjoyed the diversity. Canada is a multicultural nation to begin with, but this was an especially vibrant period with the influx of people from Hong Kong ahead of the handover from the UK to China. With immigrants also from Southeast Asia, East Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, Canada was a melting pot of races. I made friends from all over the world who taught me their native language and invited me to their house for home cooking. Everything was exciting for a girl who grew up in the Chofu area of Tokyo.

A break from cognitive autopilot

Back when everyone around me came from the same cultural background and spoke the same language, I was in cognitive autopilot. I could predict what my Japanese friends were thinking and anticipate what they would say next—my brain processed our conversations automatically. Right after enrolling in high school in Toronto, however, I entered the exact opposite mode and became a novice driver paying close attention to my new surroundings. With people from other Asian countries, on the one hand, it was easy enough to find things we had in common, but there were actually subtle differences in our thinking and lifestyle habits, meaning in some respects I had to be all the more considerate. With people of a different skin color who spoke a completely different language, on the other hand, both of us would be equally nervous, making the joy ever greater when we “clicked” as friends.

I stayed in Canada for university and majored in English literature. Every week we were given a reading list consisting of poems and dramas from the medieval period onward, plus several long novels. Those reading assignments were hard enough for native English-speaking students, and I don’t care to recall how tough they were for an international student like me. In the beginning, I set out to ignore a work’s historical background and focus solely on understanding the characters’ states of mind. But when it came to reading, there were no shortcuts. To feel the characters’ feelings and think from their point of view, I needed to understand the workings of society and the senses of value of that time period.

Later, I returned to Japan for graduate school, but for a while could not decide on a topic for my doctoral research. Several years after I was offered a position at Hitotsubashi University, I had the opportunity to carry out research as a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and a friend invited me to attend a lecture in psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). That turned out to be a huge revelation.

The peculiarity of a story-based world

The lecture at the MIT presented an experiment in social psychology conducted in the 1940s. In the study, observers were asked to view a simple animation, like a child’s doodling, of three geometric shapes—a circle, a small triangle, and a big triangle—moving back and forth around and in and out of a rectangle with a door-like flap that opened and closed, and then to describe what happened. The result was that nearly all of the observers came up with a story about two lovers, the circle and the small triangle, and a jealous big triangle that intimidates and bullies the small triangle, chases the lovers around, and when they escape off screen, throws a fit and destroys the house. A screening of the animated film was given in the lecture; my interpretation was much the same.

Only one observer in the original experiment gave an entirely different response: a direct, accurate description of the shapes’ physical positions and movements in relation to one another. This person likely had what we today call autism spectrum disorder (ASD). As was clear from the study results, most people perceive the things and events in their surroundings in terms of a chronological, cause-and-effect story, and furthermore seek to associate it with a central voluntary intention. Ascribing human (or human-like) characteristics to the busy circle and two triangles, taking the rectangle as a house, and identifying a romantic drama in that situation—this is a natural cognitive process for the majority of humans. That tendency is much weaker in people with ASD. Also, because they seem indifferent to those around them, and their responses are often inconsistent, autistic people are believed to have poor mind-reading and communication skills.

Hearing all of this gave me food for thought: People with ASD seem to be looking at a completely different world from mine, but which is the one with a cognitive bias, me or them? I did some delving and found out that the behavior of the majority appears peculiar in the eyes of people with ASD. Well, no wonder. Here we are trying to read each other’s unspoken thoughts and force our expectations and desires onto one another in the name of love and trust. We turn our eyes away from reality and make future predictions based on ambiguous memories and groundless guesswork, and then find ourselves trapped and imprisoned in our own stories. I couldn’t help seeing the peculiarity of the tendency of the majority. What’s more, I recognized an especially pronounced story-based cognitive tendency in myself.

That sparked my interest in the research field of cognitive narratology and in analyzing the various narrative techniques used in novels from that viewpoint. Right now, I am studying the relationships between empathy and perspective centering on Ford Madox Ford, the 20th century English novelist known for his pioneering view of literary impressionism.

Literature aids us to see other points of view

What is it good for?—The humanities are viewed with a critical eye today. Literary studies will not make any vaccines, that’s for sure. But another thing for sure is that even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we humans cannot live without stories. In fact, it is in times like these, when the reality is harsh and society is filled with anxiety, that people become susceptible to conspiracy theories which distort their senses of right and wrong, offering absurd but alluringly simple explanations for complex phenomena. Literature gives us the immunity to resist those shallow, dangerous stories.

Our times are also big on the importance of empathic communication skills. But the concept seems to have been downscaled to swiftly anticipating others’ intentions so as to avoid trouble and merely get along. That kind of efficient mind-reading can foster an attitude of distorting the other person’s personality and conforming it to a simplified, coherent story just to get it out of the way, leaving no room for any deep empathy. Besides, genuine mutual understanding among people seems to become possible precisely in the moment when they are freed from the confines of their stories.

We should all quit pretending to understand and keep trying to see the other person’s point of view. A tremendous aid to this exercise is literature. Think of it as giving up the driver’s seat and experiencing the ride as a passenger. Foreign literature forces us to dedicate time and effort to exploring a different language and culture, and taking an objective view of our autopilot responses.

We don’t even need to step foot outside Japan; just learning a foreign language will change our view of the world. I hope my classes will create that opportunity for the students.