MIMI-NASHI-HOICHI

This work was inspired by one symbolic scene in the “Story of Mimi-nashi Hoichi” (in which the priest forgot to write the sutra onto Hoichi’s ears) that is included in Koizumi Yakumo’s Kwaidan collection of ghost stories. Kwaidan is a book of stories as re-written by Koizumi Yakumo, interspersed with his own interpretation of a number of scary stories that his wife, Koizumi Setsu, had told him.
I covered my entire body – except the ears – with scraps of pages from an English edition of The Story of Mimi-nashi Hoichi, and once
I was done with that, removed the scraps again and stuck them to the wall.
Here I retold the ”Story of Mimi-nashi Hoichi” through the filter of my own interpretation – not as a text but as a sculpture that highlights the absence of human beings as one of the appealing points of ghost stories in general.

Translated by Andreas Stuhlmann

小泉八雲の怪奇文学作品集「怪談（KWAIDAN）」の中にある「耳なし芳一の話」の象徴的な場面（お経を耳だけ書き忘れた）に着想を得て制作。「怪談（KWAIDAN）」とは、小泉八雲が妻である小泉せつから聞いた数々の怖い話をもとに自分なりの解釈を交えて書き下ろした再話本である。洋書の「耳なし芳一の話」のコピーテキストを耳だけ残して藤原の全身に貼っていき、貼り終えるとまた剥ぎとり壁に貼った。「耳なし芳一の話」を藤原というフィルターを通過させ、藤原なりの解釈を交えて再々話（テキストではなく彫刻として）し、怪談の醍醐味の一つである人間の不在を表現した。