Analysis of the use of the tense-aspect forms RU and TA in Japanese conversational narratives. The results support the claim that an explanation of the use of Japanese tense-aspect forms involves more than morphological distinction (like past/non-past, or complete/noncomplete) since the TA and RU forms are shown to be implemented variably in the discourse, in relation to the notions of `pastness' and 'narrative event'. This indicates that the function of tense-aspect forms cannot be derived using an analysis whcih concentrates only on the sentence-level.