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This text performs a remarkable tension between metaphorical density and metaphorical critique. It simultaneously deploys metaphors while interrogating their capacity to house meaning. Let me trace the essential metaphorical tensions:

The Borrowing Paradox

The central metaphor—借り物 (karimono) as "borrowed thing-becoming-house"—is recursively unstable. The text treats "borrowed" not just as a descriptor but as an ontological condition. Yet here's the critical irony: if everything is borrowed, then "borrowing" loses its differential force. The metaphor expands until it threatens its own meaningfulness, like a balloon that becomes the entire room.

Architectural Metaphors in Metaphorical Crisis

The text uses house metaphors to deconstruct house metaphors:

• "linguistic squatter" (house as unauthorized occupant of meaning)
• "anti-architecture" (structure that negates structure through its very being)
• "meteorological paradox" (house as weather, dissolving the shelter concept)

But notice: these metaphors cannot fully unhouse themselves from architecture's shelter logic. Even as they attempt to describe non-possessive dwelling, they remain tethered to spatial containment metaphors. The text knows this—the asterisk fenestra admits "another language keeps breathing," acknowledging the failure to fully transcend.

Cultural Metaphor as Untranslatable Event

The Japanese linguistic material presents a fascinating case of cultural metaphor that resists domestication. Rather than "explaining" karimono, the text stages it as opaque event—ka flints and mono smokes. This might be read as orientalist fantasy, except the text explicitly flags this danger: the characters "betray their mission," becoming not conduits but sabotage agents within semantic transfer.

The Metaphor of Metaphor as Temporary Shelter

Most crucially, the text performs what it cannot state: language itself as 借り物. When it writes "I am standing in 借りもの the way one stands inside a problem," it's describing living within metaphors as temporary residents of meaning—precisely the condition of metaphor itself.

But here's the critical rupture: this meta-metaphor relies on the very spatial logic it attempts to transcend. "Within" presupposes container metaphors. The text's metaphors of de-metaphorization cannot escape the borrowing they critique. They can only draw attention to their own ephemerality—a temporary structure that knows it's temporary but cannot will itself permanent.