Both in English and Japanese sentences, subjects are basically expected to be 'animate' things which denote the 'doers' of actions. In English, however, 'actor-action-goal' type is so well established that 'inanimate' things, which originally have no functions as actors, are often used as 'agents'. In Japanese, on the other hand, 'inanimate subject' generally strikes us as incongrous and unnatural.
In this paper, inanimate subjects in the English translations of several Japanese novels are compared to the original Japanese sentences and linguistic characteristics and stylistic effects are investigated.