宮澤賢治の"どんぐりと山猫"のすきとおったたべもの : 栄養療法の知的枠組についての研究12

This study was an attempt to understand Miyazawa Kenji's "The Acorns and Wildcat", one of the author's mental-image sketches published in the style of children' tales, in terms of transparent nourishment that he implored his reader of "The Restaurant of Many Orders", a collection of tales including the above, to make of the overall message of the author's mental-image sketches. If the author's mental images (shinsho)were what the Other revealed itself to the honest, innocent mind of the author in a face-to-face encounter with a person or a thing, and his mental-image sketches were exact verbal expressions of these mental images, then his mental-image sketches should be the sketches of the Other rather than a representation of a person or a thing according to commonly-held notions. Thus the author's mental-image sketches will engender in the reader double meanings about a person or a thing described:that conveyed by the sketches of the Other and that derived from commonly-held notions of a person or a thing. In "The Acorns and Wildcat", the double meanings correspond to a modern meaning since the Meiji Restoration,the opening of the country to the modern world, and an ancient meaning in a pre-Westernized, traditional society before it. The journey of Ichiro setting out in search of Wildcat in the mountain is psychologically equivalent to that in search for the Deity by following the trace of the portable shrine parading in the streets to return to the old Toriyagasaki Shrine of Hanamaki. A difficult case to judge announced in a most peculiar postcard was not a modern lawsuit but an oldfashioned telling by the boss, Wildcat, to his subordinates, Acorns. Each golden Acorn's claim for being the greatest (ichiban erai) will have a totally different meaning, when "erai", a modern word meaning great or honorable is replaced by "kashikoshi", an ancient word with comparable meaning that has the original meaning of inspiring a feeling of awe. Wildcat's bully, authoritarian, selfish attitude and language brought out the attribute of being a rational adult from Ichiro and extinguished from him that of being an honest,innocent,considerate schoolboy, thus a face-to-face encounter with each other did not occur. The author seems to ask the reader with the attribute of being an honest, innocent, considerate child to have courage to put himself in a face-to-face encounter with a bully,authoritarian, selfish person,and to keep up his honesty, innocence and consideration to find out in the interlocutor not a negative example but the attribute of being a potentially positive teacher for him.

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