播磨 賢

第36回「働くってなんだろう」エッセイコンテストにて、総応募数1,112作品の中から「特選」として「勤労青少年躍進会理事長賞」を受賞。 本作『愛を込めて、清掃員の世界を歩む』は、早朝の新宿で、黙々とゴミが散乱する道路を片付ける清掃員を目撃した経験をもとに執筆したエッセイ。都市の喧騒と静寂が入れ替わる夜明け前の風景のなかで、ふだんは顧みられることの少ない労働の姿を描いた。 「汚れたものを片付ける」という行為を、単なる作業ではなく、他者への応答として、そして世界との関わり方そのものとして描こうとした。実存的な働き方の描写と、現象学的な眼差しを交差させながら、労働を生計手段ではなく、愛や責任、美意識と結びついた人間の営みとして捉えようとした作品である。 執筆当時、ひそかに込めていた狙いがある。労働の尊厳を、自己の内側からひとり立ち上げる強さとしてではなく、他者の声によって外から呼び出されるものとして描くこと。孤独に自分の仕事を引き受けるハイデガー的に自己完結した存在ではなく、誰かに呼びかけられて初めて意味を得る存在として、清掃員を立たせたかった。 物語の終盤、少女が空き缶を差し出し「テンキュー」と言う。誰にも気づかれぬまま働いてきた語り手が、初めて外部から呼びかけられる瞬間だ。だが、ここで少女の姿はあまりに美しく描かれている。風が髪をなびかせ、光が輪郭を照らす。その美しさのなかで、呼びかけは語り手を揺さぶるというより、癒し、肯定し、救ってしまう。外から差し込んで自己完結した労働観を壊すはずだった一言が、清掃員としての自分を受け入れるための、美しい結末へと回収されていく。 そして書き手である私自身、いまもあの美しさへ逃げ込む誘惑から抜け出せてはいない。見えない労働に光を当てようとして、最後はその光に救われてしまうこと。それが当時の限界であり、この解説を書くいまも、私が完全には越えられていない場所である。 ▼ 作品本文はこちら（読了目安：約5分） https://www.nikkinkyo.org/tsudoi/2023/a-06.html ▼ ポートフォリオはこちら https://kenharima.com — English — Featured Writing | Award-Winning Essay Title: ‘Walking Through the World of a Cleaner, with Love’ Awarded the Special Selection Prize in the 36th “What Does It Mean to Work?” Essay Contest, selected from a total of 1,112 submissions. ”With Love, I Walk the World of Sanitation Workers” is an essay based on my experience of witnessing a sanitation worker quietly cleaning a street strewn with trash in early-morning Shinjuku. Set against the landscape before dawn, when the noise and silence of the city begin to trade places, the piece depicts a form of labor that is rarely noticed or acknowledged. I tried to portray the act of “cleaning up what has been dirtied” not as mere work, but as a response to others, and as a way of engaging with the world itself. Bringing together an existential depiction of labor with a phenomenological gaze, the essay attempts to understand work not simply as a means of earning a living, but as a human practice bound up with love, responsibility, and aesthetic sensibility. There was also an intention I had quietly embedded in the piece at the time: to depict the dignity of labor not as a strength that rises from within the self alone, but as something called forth from the outside by another person’s voice. I wanted the sanitation worker to stand not as a solitary figure who silently shoulders his own work, but as someone whose meaning emerges only when he is addressed by another. Toward the end of the story, a young girl holds out an empty can and says, “Thank you.” It is the moment when the narrator, who has been working unnoticed, is addressed from the outside for the first time. And yet the girl is rendered almost too beautifully. The wind lifts her hair; the light traces the outline of her figure. Within that beauty, her address does not so much unsettle the narrator as heal, affirm, and redeem him. The one word that should have entered from outside and broken open his self-contained view of labor is instead gathered back into a beautiful ending, allowing him to accept himself as a sanitation worker. And I, as the writer, have still not fully escaped the temptation to take refuge in that beauty. In trying to cast light on invisible labor, I ultimately allowed myself to be saved by that very light. That was the limitation of the piece at the time, and it remains a place I have not yet fully moved beyond, even now as I write this commentary. ▼ Read the full piece here (Estimated reading time: about 5 minutes) https://www.nikkinkyo.org/tsudoi/2023/a-06.html ▼ View Ken Harima's portfolio https://kenharima.com