Genre
Short fiction entailing short stories
Setting and Context
The short stories' events take place during the Taisho period in rural Japan. The short stories reconcile different cultures and religious views.
Narrator and Point of View
First-person narration
Tone and Mood
The tone in most stories is saccharine with spiritual fundamentals.
Protagonist and Antagonist
The protagonist in the story 'The Nose' has a large nose that hinders his daily activities, while the protagonist in the story 'Hell Screen' is the servant.
Major Conflict
The major conflict in the first story is the clash between the protagonist and the people who mock him because of his large nose. As a result, the protagonist is unhappy and opts to look for a solution to his problem. In the second story, a man dies in a complex situation, and the cause of his death remains unknown despite using a variety of techniques to uncover the truth.
Climax
The nose reshaping procedure in the first story is the climax because the protagonist at least feels happy. Unfortunately, one day he wakes up to his old nose. In the third story, Yoshihide creates a figure of hell to torment his novices physically.
Foreshadowing
Waking up to his old face is a foreshadowing that indicates the protagonist in the first story is about to be mocked again. Similarly, the procedure to reshape his nose foreshadows the punishment is about to receive from people. The creation of an image by Yoshihide foreshadows the tragedy that will attack him and his daughter.
Understatement
N/A
Allusions
In the story 'The Nose,' the author uses the protagonist's long nose to reference the challenges the physically disabled people go through in life. In the stories 'Ina Grove and Hell Screen,' the author uses death to reference the complexity of modern technologies in discovering the precise cause of death.
Imagery
The images used by the author in all the stories are purposely intended to convey the relationship between culture, vanity, and religious practices from the Taisho period in Japan.
Paradox
The main paradox is when Yoshihide creates an image to torment his apprentices physically, but instead, he commits suicide when his daughter is burned.
Parallelism
The death of the unidentified man in the story ‘In a Grove’ and the suicide of Yoshihide are parallel because they are all complex.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
'Beyond this was only darkness' referring to Kyoto's ambiguity
Personification
N/A
