石ノ森章太郎生家探訪シリーズは本日で10回目になった。「作家」という名詞はわたしのような昭和中期生まれの人間には、どうしても芥川賞的な「文学」者がその対象という刷り込みが大きい。少なくとも文学が最上位という固定観念。AIによると作家という名詞は「文章や書画などの作品を創作する専門家」という概念規定。やはり「文章」が最初にある。
　こういう社会全体の考え方が、文化を学び始める子ども時代の心理の基底に折り重なって文筆者がその筆頭概念になっているのでしょう。わたし自身も「作家と住空間」という電子本を書き始めて最初に取り上げたのは芥川龍之介。そういう刷り込みの大きさが自明なのでしょう。コトバの最優位性。
　しかし一方で現代人として、テレビや映画などの映像表現世界のビッグバンを経験してきて、ビジュアル情報の方がはるかに「先験的」だとも思ってきている。戦後以降の「マンガ文化」とそこから発展しているアニメ文化領域の方が、人間の文化受容の基底領域として巨大になって来ている。自分自身に照らしてみたときマンガ文化は、芥川龍之介作品よりもはるかに「感性に身近い」存在だと思えるのですね。そして手塚治虫以降のマンガ家たちの作品発表に手に汗を握り続けてきた生き様のリアルタイム感がハンパない。
　文章表現には分析的な深み・多様性が仕込まれていくけれど、マンガ的表現にはコトバ化を超える「一挙把握」的なコミュニケーションパワーがあるのだと思う。
　そんなマンガ文化「作家」としての石ノ森章太郎の少年期の「手すさび」とも、遊び心とも取れるような作品と出会っていた。上の写真の作品は公開されているかれの部屋に無造作に置かれていた。松ぼっくりを素材としてそれを造形的に連結積層させて、たぶん「亀」を表徴、形作ったと思われるもの。この作品が無造作に展示されていたことは、少なくとも生家を保守してきた家族にとって、なによりも石ノ森章太郎の人物性全体がそこに表現されていると感じていたに違いない。
　わたしにはそう受け止められた。素材としての松ぼっくりを家の周りから収集してくる段階からだんだんこの造形をイメージしていたと思われる。石ノ森少年の「創作意欲」の根源部分が色濃く投影されていると感じられたのだ。
　こういう領域になってくると言語表現で明晰化することは困難で、かれ石ノ森少年の「内的なパトス」としか言いようがない。しかしさまざまなかれのマンガ作品に接してきた人間にして見ると、その表現意欲や手法のコアな部分に生々しく触れてしまった感があった。みなさんはどう思われるだろうか？

English version

Traces of the artist’s ‘way of thinking’ from his childhood.
Embodies the state of internal pathos of an artist who worked with a visual communicability that transcended language as his field of expression. Quietly surprising in its rawness. …

　Today marks the tenth in the series of visits to Shotaro Ishinomori’s birthplace. The term ‘writer’ is often associated with people like myself, who were born in the mid-Showa period (mid-1989s), with the idea that ‘literary’ writers, such as Akutagawa Prize-winning writers, are the target of the term, or at least the stereotype that literature is the highest rank. According to the AI, the noun ‘writer’ is defined as ‘a professional who creates works of writing, calligraphy or painting’. After all, ‘writing’ is first.
　This way of thinking about society as a whole is probably folded into the base of the psychology of childhood, when children begin to learn about culture, and the writer is the first concept. When I myself started writing the e-book ‘Writers and Living Space’, I first took up Ryunosuke Akutagawa. The magnitude of such an imprint is probably self-evident. Kotoba’s paramountcy.
　But on the other hand, as a modern person, I have experienced the big bang in the world of visual expression, such as television and film, and have come to believe that visual information is much more ‘a priori’. Since the post-war period, ‘manga culture’ and the animated cultural sphere that has developed from it have become more massive as a base area of human cultural reception. When you look at it in the light of yourself, manga culture seems to be much ‘closer to your sensibility’ than the works of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, doesn’t it? And the real-time sense of the way of life of the manga artists since Tezuka Osamu, who have kept their hands sweaty in the publication of their works, is not a lot.
　While analytical depth and diversity is built into written expression, I think that manga expression has a communicative power that goes beyond verbalisation and is ‘grasped in a single stroke’.
　I met a work that could be seen as a playful expression of Shotaro Ishinomori’s boyhood as such a manga culture ‘artist’ and ‘tesasabi’. The work in the photo above was placed randomly in his room, which was open to the public. It is made of pine cones, which are connected and stacked in a figurative manner to form the shape of a ‘turtle’. The fact that this work was displayed in such a careless manner must have been seen as an expression of Shotaro Ishinomori’s entire personality, at least by the family who maintained the house where he was born.
　That is how it was perceived by me. It is thought that he gradually began to imagine this form from the stage of collecting pine cones from around the house as a material. I felt that the roots of the Ishinomori boy’s ‘creative urge’ were strongly projected in this work.
　When it comes to this kind of area, it is difficult to clarify in verbal expression, and can only be described as Ishinomori’s ‘internal pathos’. However, as someone who has come into contact with a wide range of different manga works, I felt that I was exposed to the core of Ishinomori’s expressive ambitions and methods in a very raw way. What do you think?

Posted on 3月 18th, 2025 by 三木 奎吾
Filed under: 日本社会・文化研究