Honouring the Hyakumeizan author's memory

Half a century has passed since Fukada Kyūya collapsed on a hike “among the mountains he loved” –the very words that should be used to describe such a fate, as he himself had once written. To mark this anniversary, an exhibition at the Fukui Museum of Literature (福井ふるさと文学館) will run until January next year.

Some might flag up an act of cultural appropriation here. For the Hyakumeizan author was born at Daishōji in neighbouring Ishikawa Prefecture, he lived for decades in Tokyo, and he died on Kaya-ga-dake (1704 metres) in Yamanashi. But Fukada’s mother came from Fukui, he went to school there, and he later anointed Arashima-dake, a Fukui meizan, as one of his hundred mountains. So this prefecture too has a claim on him.

The exhibition casts its net widely. As one might expect, mementoes of the Hyakumeizan author are on loan from the Fukada Kyūya Memorial Museum (深田久弥 山の文化館) at Daishōji. These include a manuscript of Nihon Hyakumeizan, as well as the author's pen. Awkwardly, his passport, also on show, reveals that officialdom chose to spell his family name as “Fukata”. Well, we’ll stick with the usual version here.

Other mountain authors are featured too. There is a manuscript of Nitta Jirō’s Tale of a Mt Fuji Porter (強力伝) and items related to Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, whose “Kappa” (1927) is set in the Japan Northern Alps. And there are paintings by Kushida Magoichi, who is best known for his Mountain thoughts (Yama no pensée), and images by the present-day photographer Ishikawa Naoki.

For alpinists, the holiest relic of all will be the very notebook in which Matsunami Akira scribbled his last words. Posthumously published as Fusetsu no Biwak (Bivouac in a blizzard), this is the account of a fatal attempt to traverse the entire Hodaka ridgeline in midwinter. Found by a search party on Matsunami’s body in the spring, the notebook is visiting Fukui by courtesy of the Ohmachi Alpine Museum.

Supporting events include a speech on mountains and literature by Fukui’s doyen of mountain writing, Masunaga Michio, an exhibition of photography by Ishikawa Naoki, and a showing of Hyōheki (Ice wall), the film of a novel by Inoue Yasushi that takes a broken rope as its mainspring. To round things off, there is a comedy film about people who go on a hike to a waterfall and get lost. Surely, everyone can relate to that.

“Yama ga aru kara” (Because it’s there), an exhibition at the Fukui Museum of Literature (福井ふるさと文学館), opened on 30 October 2021 and will close on 23 January 2022. See the exibition webpage for details and a programme of events.