President's Message to You, July 6, 2010 Reading from Former Faculty Member Uchida Hyakken, Part 1

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Do you know a novelist named Uchida Hyakken?　He was a pupil of Soseki Natsume and also a scholar of German literature. He was also a close friend of Ryunosuke Akutagawa. He was also a faculty member of Hosei University. In 1920, when Hosei University officially became a private university under the University Ordinance, I became a professor of German language and resigned in 1934 after an incident.

I became interested in the movie "Zigoinelwaizen" directed by Seijun Suzuki, which won many awards in 1980, and began to read short stories such as "Sarasate's Board" and "Tooboe" by Hyakken Uchida, the original story of the movie. Unlike Western ghost stories or Chinese ghost stories, "fear" does not take a definite form. They are passing "omokage," like dreams, auditory hallucinations, or hallucinations, yet they are spine-chillingly terrifying and amusing. He writes novels just like Kyoka Izumi.

In the movie "Zigoinelwaizen", there is a goze (blind entertainer) who does not appear in the novel "Sarasate's Disc". There is a reason for that. Hyakken has a work titled "Yanagi kenkyou no kokan," in which the main character is a blind man who teaches the koto (Japanese harp). Kenkyou (person who makes corrections) is the highest official title for blind people. Although it was abolished in the Meiji era (1868-1912), Michio Miyagi, a blind musician, was called "Kenkyou". Hyakken greatly respected Miyagi Michio and practiced koto under him. He also wrote about Kariya Station in Aichi Prefecture, where Miyagi was killed in an accident in 1956, in his work "Tokaido Kariya Station". Director Seijun Suzuki, I believe, adopted Hyakken's deep feeling for blind entertainers, but the life of a blind person was completely different from that of a school inspector, as if it were heaven and earth.

By the way, even after his resignation, Hyakken was adored by the students of Hosei University and kept in touch with them. In 1950, one year after his 60th birthday, the students began to hold an annual birthday party called "Maada-kai". A movie was made around this party. It was Akira Kurosawa's last film, "Maada da da da. The movie, "Well, it's just a movie" begins with a classroom scene at Hosei University. It is the last classroom scene before the resignation of Hyakken Uchida. The film uses "Maada-kai" and "Nora-ya," two pieces that Hyakken wrote about the annual "Maada-kai," among others. Nora-ya" is a heart-wrenching story about a stray cat named Nora who goes missing one day, and about Hyakken's pain and sorrow over it, and his desperate search for her. This is almost directly visualized in the film "Maada da da da". There are two cats in the film. Both Nora, a brown cat, and Kurtz, a black-and-white cat, are wonderful cats that remind us of the preciousness of life. The film also recreates the postwar dugout hut in which Hyakken actually lived. It is a beautiful hut that looks like Hyakken himself, who enjoyed "poverty" rather than pursuing economic wealth. On the other hand, "Maadakai" is a banquet. In these days when a banquet tends to be just a big party, and in the past few months when it is no longer easy to have a banquet, I feel nostalgic for what banquets used to be like with humor and witty speeches. This film and essay conveys what kind of person was a person who did not look down on others, who had a "heart" and was full of goodness, dignity and humor, and what kind of influence he had on the young people. It is a film that allows us to see together what Akira Kurosawa was looking at just before his death. (continued)

July 10, 2020
TANAKA Yuko, President, Hosei University