もう少しで電子書籍「作家と住空間」が上梓されるのですが、そこで探訪した作家群の取材以降も、折に触れて全国各所で探訪を続けています。基本的にはその作家の「住んでいた」住宅そのもの、あるいはそのの残滓が感覚できる空間〜作家記念館などを探訪するワケですが、そうするとごく最近の人、まだ生きていてその評価がいまだ定まっていない作家などは、そういう住宅保存とかの段階に至っていない。
勢い、死後であってその評価が定まっている作家人物に対して取材するということになる。
そういった意味では、わたしのちょっと上の年代というのがもっとも若い年代ということになる。わたしの幼少期〜青春期はマンガ一色の文化模様。いわゆる文学としては三島由紀夫や大江健三郎、司馬遼太郎とかがあったけれど、文化としてはマンガがもっとも熱い領域だった。手塚治虫が超絶的な作品を生産してきた頃、それにはるかに憧れた全国の少年たちが、まるで梁山泊に集うように感じでトキワ荘と呼ばれるアパートに集結して、相互に刺激し合いながら、物語を紡ぎ出していた。そういう年代、わたしなどからは10数年上の世代として石ノ森章太郎がいる。
たぶん作家の住空間保存の動きとしては「もっとも新しい」世代に属するのだろう。わたしにとっては「ちょっと兄貴」年代だろうか。先日の東北行脚で仙台にほど近い宮城県登米市郊外のそのふるさとの地を訪れることが出来た。
・・・やはり圧倒的な「同時代感」が住空間各所から立ち上ってきて、いたたまれないほどだった。わたし自身も過ごしていた幼少年期・昭和30-40年代頃の共有していた時代性が住空間の至る所から感じられて、ちょっと立ち去りがたいほどの感銘を受け続けていた。大量生産型の無機質感を印象させるというそれ以降の常識とは違って、簡易な住宅壁面建材として当時一般的でだった「ベニヤ板張り」からすら、ある強い「時代感」を感じていたのだ。「おお、ベニヤ壁かよ」とその年季の入った様子に心をえぐられ続けていた。ヤバい。ベニヤ板をこころの底で愛していたのか、オレ。
中学時代、石ノ森などの後続年代として友人たちとマンガ青年を夢見ていたことが自分自身の「原点風景」として復元してきて、「明るい慟哭」とでも言える心理で過ごしておりました。
English version⬇
[A sense of ‘depth’ in the artist's exploration of his living space
The original landscape of my boyhood, when my friends and I yearned to follow in the footsteps of Shotaro Ishinomori and others as manga artists. It is like being reunited with that mental image, or looking directly at the cancer cells from the neck up. ...
The e-book ‘Writers and Living Spaces’ will be published soon, and I have continued to visit various places in Japan from time to time since the interviews with the writers I visited in the e-book. Basically, we visit the houses where the artists ‘lived’, or spaces where we can feel the residues of their works, such as writers' memorials, etc. However, we have not yet reached the stage of preserving such houses for very recent writers who are still alive and whose reputation has not yet been established.
I would be interviewing artists who are posthumous and whose reputation has been established.
In this sense, the people who are a little older than me are the youngest generation. My childhood and youth were dominated by manga. In terms of so-called literature, there was Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe and Ryotaro Shiba, but in terms of culture, manga was the hottest area. When Osamu Tezuka was producing his superb works, boys from all over the country, who admired his works, gathered in a flat called Tokiwaso, as if they were gathering at a Ryozanbaku, and while mutually stimulating each other, they spun out stories. Shotaro Ishinomori was a member of that generation, more than ten years older than myself.
He probably belongs to the ‘newest’ generation in the movement to preserve the living space of artists. For me, he is a bit older than me. On a recent trip to the Tohoku region, I was able to visit his hometown in the suburbs of Tome City, Miyagi Prefecture, which is close to Sendai.
I was also able to visit my hometown in the suburbs of Tome City in Miyagi Prefecture, close to Sendai, on a recent trip to the Tohoku region. I could feel the sense of the times that I myself shared in my childhood, around the 1950s and 1960s, everywhere in the living space, and I was continually impressed to the point where I found it hard to leave. Unlike the common sense of mass-produced, inorganic materials that have been used since then, I felt a strong ‘sense of the times’ even from the ‘veneer wall coverings’ that were common at the time as a simple building material for house walls. The plywood walls were a common building material in those days, and I kept feeling a strong sense of ‘age’ from them. It's not good. Did I love plywood in the depths of my heart?
In junior high school, when I was in the generation that followed Ishinomori and others, I dreamt of being a manga youth with my friends, and it came back to me as my own ‘origin landscape’, and I spent my time with a psychology that could be described as a ‘bright wail’.
