Conversational Storytelling among Japanese Women

Book excerpt: This book presents research findings on the overall process of storytelling as a social event in Japanese everyday conversations focusing on the relationship between a story and surrounding talks, the social and cultural aspects of the participants, and the tellability of conversational stories. Focusing on the participants’ verbal and nonverbal behavior and their use of linguistic devices, the chapters describe how the participants display their orientation to the a) embeddedness of the story in the conversation, b) their views of past events, c) their knowledge about the story content and elements, and d) their social circumstances, and how these four elements are relevant for a story becoming worth telling and sharing. The book furthers the sociolinguistic analysis of conversational storytelling by describing how the participants’ concerns about social circumstances as members of a particular community, specifically their role relationships and interpersonal relationships with others, influence the shape of their storytelling.