That checks out. Also, I think a lot of "western" stories have this structure too, namely: jokes.

Many good jokes are conflict-less stories, that create a contradiction for the reader to resolve with a double take.

Jokes are primarily about conflict between expectations and reality.

Depends on the type of joke. For setup/punchline and wordplay-type jokes, I think “contrast” is more apt. The punchline is a resolution, sure, but not usually in the sense of a conflict—it’s dispelling confusion by connecting the parts that have been presented, or inviting the audience to connect them to have that “Oh, I get it!” moment. That seems basically like kishoutenketsu.

To me, humour based on conflict, even between expectation and reality, falls more into the category of irony, mocking, or slapstick, where someone (or something) is the “butt of the joke”.

Is there such a thing as a joke that doesn't have a "butt", though? It's obvious in mocking and slapstick but even in wordplay the joke is at the expense of the structure and rules of language and implicitly the people who try to police it.

I'm not laughing at language police when I think a particularly clever pun is funny.

Why do SCUBA divers drop backwards to get into the water?

If they dropped forwards, they would land in the boat.

There are lots of jokes about computers, and, the last time I checked, computers don't have butts.

The Sixth Sense comes to mind as an example of such a combination.

More recently, Arrival, which I like even better has a similar effect.

Both of these are by Asian(-American) artists: M. Night Shyamalan and Ted Chiang.

The problem of the reader needing to understand is story is not in the story itself. Anytime anyone reads anything, their goal is to figure out what they are reading... so that problem doesn't add anything.

Kishōtenketsu specifically doesn't set up a problem in the classic western sense. There is no apparent obstacle that the protagonist needs to overcome. There are no "stakes" that we are worried about (what happens if she doesn't get what she wants?). There is no antagonist. There is no rising action where conflict+stakes increase over time. It's just a totally different structure.

There is a twist at the end, but a twist is not a conflict.

> The problem of the reader needing to understand is story is not in the story itself. Anytime anyone reads anything, their goal is to figure out what they are reading... so that problem doesn't add anything.

I feel you're been needlessly pedantic here. Sure, the reader always has to parse each sentence and understand it. But that's pretty different from the author deliberately introducing a non sequitur that cannot be understood until the later resolution.

> It's just a totally different structure.

What skybrian is saying is that, yes, at one level the structures are different, but at the next level of abstraction there are commonalities. In both cases a tension is created in the reader which is then later resolved.

In conflict-based stories, most of the tension comes from the reader sympathizing with the protagonist who is directly experiencing the tension. In kishōtenketsu, the reader experiences a tension the characters do not because it's not "in world".

Even in Western literature, this technique is used all the time. Foreshadowing is common. Many stories shift viewpoints between multiple characters so that the reader has access to insight the characters do not, and that's used to deliberately create tension and anticipation in the reader.

As another example, it's common in novels to have multiple independent storylines that eventually connect. Part of the tension is "what do these two people's stories have to do with each other?"

Yes, I was thinking of exactly that in the shower later. It's one of my favorite ways for an author to build tension.

It's worth noting that this is the structure of haikus, which rarely make any sense in translation. Haikus hinge on a twist as well, usually a word of two meanings that is meant to create emotional movement. For example, something like "In the forest the dark pine/of my desire" would play on two meanings of the word "pine".

I agree that they are quite different. However, I was pointing out a similarity when looked at in a more abstract way.

Some stories are intentionally more difficult to understand until you've read far enough. In this sense, the author is setting up a problem and resolving it.

Spot on. You could locate the 'conflict' of a story at one of two levels: Within the content (traditional conflict between characters, etc.) Within the form (conflict between the text itself and the reader, e.g. something like a riddle, or as others have mentioned, a joke--the opponents are the text itself and the reader's preconceptions, e.g. a joke usually works when it refutes our expectations.)

The author's first example is an instance of formal conflict. Once we reach panel three we question where the panel is going because it introduces a radical element (as the author observes) that seems disconnected from the first two elements of the sequence. This is enough to establish a formal conflict for us as it subverts the form established prior--it creates a narrative question, 'why is this here, what is the point, where is this going?' The final panel then resolves this conflict by reintegrating the material from the first two panels with the third.

And so even though there's no 'conflict' in the western traditional sense of the characters of the story combating, conflict still drives the story. It's actually pretty difficult to argue that stories don't require any conflict, as conflict is often an imprecise and overloaded category (think of all its different varieties) and really when people advocate for conflict they are advocating more generally for flux and change--e.g. the idea is you couldn't tell a story if every panel were the same image--you'd perhaps be saying something--making a statement or a proposition, but it wouldn't be a story. While a poem or a painting can often take the form of a one-line proposition, a story as I conceive of it is something more like an argument--it operates on the premise that certain bits of information are out of scope as we read and that patterns are interrupted then resolved into different forms as we glean new information--all narrative arts are necessarily time bound arts and thus more often called experiences rather than objects (e.g. a film is an experience b/c it relies necessarily on a time factor, where as the totality of an object might be consumed at a singular moment T, ignoring history--)

I agree. Maybe tension/release are better terms to use then than "conflict". In both the structures presented in the blog you see tension followed by release. It's also pervasive in Western music (don't know enough about Eastern or African music to know how they work).

Yeah, I had the same response. To use the phrasing of the article, I find the third non sequitur act to be a conflict in terms of simply being a mismatch from the pattern established by the first two i.e. a combo-breaker.

The problem with that point of view is that you can find a conflict everywhere if you try hard. For a definition, like "conflict", to be useful it must be clearly and distinct. Cinematographic conflict is a problem the characters are confronted with.

That's because 'conflict" - which is a requirement first described by Aristotle - is being poorly defined.

Western conflict is psychological and heroic. A jarring or unexpected element in the text is not enough. The standard pattern is that the protagonist encounters challenges, and either overcomes them through heroic effort, bravery, and self-discovery - or (less often) is destroyed by them.

The prototype is martial and egotistical, in that the plot revolves around the protagonist's goals and actions.

External influences are either enemies, helpers, or ambiguous distractions, as seen from the protagonist's point of view.

Kishōtenketsu seems to have a more meditative and less confrontational approach. The protagonist is one character among many. They encounter other characters of equal interest and value. These other characters are not compressed into the enemy/helper dichotomy. Similarly, situations are unexpected but may be neither harmful nor helpful.

This seems less abstracted and closer to real life, where other people and events are just there without having to be shoehorned into positive or negative roles within our personal dramas.

I suppose Western audiences have set expectations, and it's not obvious that plots that take this approach will satisfy them. But it would still be interesting to see where this plotting style could lead in a Western context.