モラエスの庭 : (6)モラエスの目 : 徳島の風景

This paper is part of the results from the social action activities financed by the Faculty of Integrated Arts and Sciences, and Tokushima University, 2015. The activities are mainly focused on the reevaluation by public lectures and other exhibitions of Wenceslau de Moraes 1854-1929, a Portugal naval officer and consul general who lived and died in Tokushima. This is also part of the outcomes of the Project Studies by Moraes’s Studies Group launched on July 31, 2010.
The members of Moraes’s Studies Group, T. Miyazaki (English Literature, Comparative Literature), E. Ishikawa (German Literature, Comparative Literature), M. Satoh (Plant Physiology), M. Sakai (Clinical Psychology), all at the Institute of Socio-Arts and Sciences, Tokushima University, have been continuing to try to analyze Moraes’s works and to approach new facets of Moraes’s biographical aspects. Moraes was fascinated by the far-east Japan and fell in love with Ó-Yoné, who died soon after the marriage. After her death, Moraes decided to live in Tokushima, which was Ó-Yoné’s hometown. He lived with Ko-Haru, Ó-Yoné’s niece, for a while until she died from tuberculosis at the age of 21. His life until his death in Tokushima was a kind of a hermit, disregard of his fame as Consul General and Navy high-rank Officer of Portugal, and other financial merits entailed with them. Moraes published O ‟Bon-odori„ em Tokushima in 1916 after Ó-Yoné died, and Ó-Yoné é Ko-haru afterwards. In both works Moraes depicted Tokushima landscape and everyday things in general which his eyes caught through his keen sensitivity. He worshipped Japan’s unique beautiful landscape, but he was disappointed at the rapidly westernized aspects of large cities like Kobe, Osaka and Tokyo. He had been, in a sense, allured and attracted by the old and beautiful landscape through the writings by his foregoing visitors to Japan. His choice of Tokushima as his residence for his remaining days might be considered to search for the old and traditional beautiful aspects of Japan that seemed to him to be remaining in a local city like Tokushima far away from the large cities. Moraes’s sense of beauty through his eyes to Tokushima landscape may lead us Japanese to consider our identity in this now globalized society.