ABSTRACT
Narratives play an important role in our lives. As the author defines them, narratives are stories, generally with a linear or sequential structure, which pervade our media, our popular culture, our conversations, and our dreams. The commercials people watch on television are generally narratives and so are the comic strips we read in the daily newspaper and the television dramas we tune into and the movies we watch in theatres or at home. Jokes are narratives and so are songs. Our dreams, Freud suggested, are a collection of images that we turn into narratives when people recount them. So people spend a great deal of time watching and listening to narratives. There is a tradition of pornographic art work in Japanese culture, so seeing sexually explicit representations of sexual relationships is not new. One fascinating erotic Japanese image shows an octopus having sex with a woman, with its various tentacles caressing her breasts and one penetrating her vagina.
