But it's very common for stories to include both kinds of problems.
Many good jokes are conflict-less stories, that create a contradiction for the reader to resolve with a double take.
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”.
If they dropped forwards, they would land in the boat.
More recently, Arrival, which I like even better has a similar effect.
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.
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.
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.
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--)
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.