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クウカン ノ ケイケン トシテノ フウケイ : イーフー・トゥアン カラ イシムレ ミチコ ヘ

Landscape as an Experience of Space: From Yi-Fu Tuan to Michiko Ishimure

Japanese (日本語)

国際文化学研究 : 神戸大学大学院国際文化学研究科紀要

38

1-21

神戸大学大学院国際文化学研究科

2012-09

2013-01-07

“Landscape” is an idea which presupposes a viewer standing in front of, therefore outside, a space to see it as a picture. Thus landscape is thought to be a way of experiencing space exclusively by sight, with aesthetic judgment and evaluation on it. However, our real experiences of space cannot be confined to sight; rather, its depth and width are also created by other senses like smell, touch and hearing, which would certainly make our experiences more intimate ones. “Intimate experiences” of place, as Yi-Fu Tuan puts it, “lie buried in our innermost being so that not only do we lack the words to give them form but often we are not even aware of them.”（136）But Tuan finds that those deep, though subtle, experiences can be given their clear images by “the imagination of perceptive writers.”（148）I would like to call such spatial images evoked for our contemplation “landscapes,” and we can find exquisite examples of such landscape images abound in Michiko Ishimure’s literary works in Japanese. In this paper, I would like to explore the meanings of landscapes through examining Ishimure’s images, based on Yi-Fu Tuan’s arguments on “intimate experiences of place” and “attachment to homeland.” Lake of Heaven（1997）by Ishimure can be read as a story of a young man who, visiting his late grandfather’s home-village which is now sunk behind a dam, experiences a rebirth of his senses, guided by the celestial songs of an elderly woman and her daughter sung for gods of their lost village. He is gradually introduced to the stories of the former villagers’ intimate experiences of the place recalled from their memories and dreams. Their yearning for their homeland is so strong that they often return there in their dreams. Homeland is a place where memories of our ancestors as well as of our own are stored in layers. And attachment to it “may come simply with familiarity and ease, with assurance of nurture and security, with the memory of sounds and smells, of communal activities and homely pleasures accumulated over time.”（Tuan 159）If such a memory can revive in images like a tree, a mountain, a bridge over a river and fields, along with people or gods roaming around them, that would make a landscape of our innermost soul. Today we live in an age of destruction of landscapes in a biblical scale: it is caused not only by the catastrophic disaster of earthquakes and tsunamis but also by deliberate plans of construction for economic development, or just by our everyday living. In this increasingly oblivious world, to ask what the landscape really means or how deep in our souls the loss of the landscape affects us would be more than ever important to us.

紀要論文