ABSTRACT
Throughout this book, there is a concentration on narrative. It has taken various forms: on one level there is the narrative of the decline of the Japanese economy and the increasingly desperate struggle of companies such as C-Life to stay viable. On another there is the narrative of C-Life and my involvement with it, first as an employee and then—in the final chapter—as a film-maker and anthropologist. There are the narratives I tell of individual employees I met during this process and finally, and very importantly, there are the narratives that they told me. All of these narratives are central to the descriptive and analytical material I have presented, and all of them can be—and have been—understood in very different ways. In this chapter I consider the role and importance of narrative in management and anthropology, with particular reference to some of the issues that have been raised in the preceding chapters. I also go on to look at the nature and role of myth, and how it relates to ideology; I focus in particular on the nihonjinron literature, and how looking at it as a myth itself can help us to understand it. The reflections I offer here are not intended to be an exhaustive survey of the subject, which is a very large and involved one: rather, my aim is to bring these issues to the fore and relate them to what we have already seen.
