The Fourth-Person Structure in Sasaki Takuma's "Yukari": Relationality as Ontological Entity in Japanese Projection Poetry
Abstract
Abstract This paper presents a structural analysis of “Yukari” by Takuma Sasaki, demonstrating the first documented instance of fourth-person narrative structure in popular music lyrics. Unlike conventional love songs that operate within a dyadic I-You framework, “Yukari” introduces four distinct ontological agents: (1) Watashi (I), (2) Anata (You), (3) Shiawase-san (personified Happiness), and (4) Ano Hito (That Person = the relationship itself). Through meticulous textual analysis, we prove that “Ano Hito” refers neither to “I” nor “You,” but to the relationality between them—treated as an independent entity requiring protection. This structure creates what we term the “Accountability Square”: a cognitive framework that redistributes responsibility from human agents to systemic failures, enabling relational repair through ontological reframing. All LLMs failed to recognize the fourth-person structure, demonstrating 100% misreading across different architectures. Here, p < 0.001 does not denote inferential statistics but indicates deterministic convergence across repeated trials under identical prompts.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Mental Health via Writing
Action Observation and Synchronization
Language
Metaphor
and Cognition
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Publication date
- 18 January 2026
- Document type
- Preprint