宮沢賢治『銀河鉄道の夜』①絶対的なともだちって、いる？

The Text and the Show

Nishikawa Ayano (西川彩乃), Nagai Rei (長井玲), and Oshima Yasuyuki (大島康幸) took up Miyazawa Kenji's *Night on the Galactic Railroad* for their Paper Drive (ペーパードライブ) book-club series. Each host used a different edition — some the Shueisha Bunko paperback, repurchased for its cover, and others the Aozora Bunko digital text. The novel is structured in nine chapters, with the final chapter, "Giovanni's Ticket," running to around forty pages — the longest of the set. The trio also noted that portions of the manuscript remain unfinished.

The Cat Misconception and Its Legacy

All three hosts pointed out that a certain portion of readers believe *Night on the Galactic Railroad* is a story about cats — a confusion traceable directly to the 1985 anime film, which cast the characters as cats. In the original, the characters are human (at least, they are never stated to be otherwise), and the cat-character film is an entirely separate work that drew inspiration from Miyazawa. Miyazawa himself wrote many works featuring cats, which provides fertile ground for the mix-up. The conversation also touched on the later masterworks — *Galaxy Express 999*, *Spirited Away*, and others — that drew heavily from *Night on the Galactic Railroad*, creating an inversion typical of canonical texts: many readers encounter the downstream works first and arrive at the original already saturated with its echoes.

Giovanni and Campanella — Two People Joined by Pain

The novel opens during a classroom lesson on the Milky Way. When the teacher poses a question, Giovanni cannot answer — not from ignorance, but from exhaustion and a loss of confidence. Campanella knows the answer yet deliberately stays silent, absorbing Giovanni's potential embarrassment without a word. The three hosts praised how much character and mutual trust Miyazawa establishes in this single brief scene.

Campanella has a professor for a father, rich cultural capital, and many friends; he is even described as physically taller than Giovanni. Giovanni, by contrast, has an absent father, a bedridden mother, and must work while attending school. But Campanella carries his own wound: his mother has died, and he holds quietly inside the thought that "Giovanni's mother is at least still alive." The hosts agreed that this is not a story about an admirable, complete friend saving a plain one — a motif recognizable from Hesse's *Demian*, among others — but about two equals, each lacking what the other has, joined through shared incompleteness. Oshima added that while he had always thought of himself as more of a Campanella type, reading the novel made him feel that Campanella, too, is simply an ordinary person.

Miyazawa Kenji's Nature Writing — "A Different Sport"

When the Galactic Railroad arrives at the station, Miyazawa describes the starlight through two layered similes: "as if billions of firefly squid had all been fossilized at once and sunk into the sky," and "as if rough diamonds had been upended and scattered through the air." Nishikawa called this "depicting fantasy through the realistic" and said that Miyazawa's comparisons play "an entirely different sport" from those of any other writer.

In the gentian-field passage, soft flowers are rendered through the hardness of stone — "wonderful purple gentians carved from moonstone" — and as the train accelerates past, they appear in rapid succession: "welling up like rain," "smoking like burning." Giovanni cries out that he could jump off, grab a bunch, and leap back on — and the line that follows, "but they've already fallen so far behind," carries a wistfulness immediately answered by "the next clump of gentians blazed past in full light." The speed of the train and the fragility of youth rise simultaneously from a single tight sequence.

Toritori's One Line and the Philosophy of "I Came Because I Wanted to Come"

The first passenger Giovanni and Campanella encounter on the Galactic Railroad is Toritori (鳥捕り), the bird-catcher, who traps herons and cranes and shares the meat with them, explaining that the bones "come away cleanly, like chocolate" and that the flesh tastes like confection. Nishikawa noted that even though she dislikes birds in real life, she could read this scene as purely beautiful.

When Giovanni asks how Toritori got from there to here, the man answers: "Because I wanted to come, I came. And where have you two come from?" Giovanni and Campanella can only reply that they cannot think of an answer at all. The contrast with the opening scene is precise: there, Campanella had the answer but chose silence; here, neither boy has any answer whatsoever. The three hosts stressed the weight carried by Toritori's simple reply as a philosophical statement: it confronts the two boys — and the reader — with the unanswerable question of origin and purpose at the heart of life itself. On that note, the episode closed out the first half of the reading, with the final chapter still ahead.