岩館真理子さんの「わたしが人魚になった日」は，4つの作品からなる短編集です。表題作の主人公「あたし」は片思いの相手に声をかけることさえできない，とても内気な高校生らしき女の子。2つ目の「街も星も君も」の主人公カムは高校の問題児で，トオルという名の，孤児院から逃げてきたという男の子とともに街を逃げ出そうとします。３つ目の「幾千夜」，４つ目の「センチメンタル・リング」の主人公リカは，自分の故郷を知らないナイトクラブ歌手です。いずれの主人公にも共通しているのは，それぞれに孤独感を抱えているということです。
Iwadate Mariko’s comic titled “Watashi ga Ningyo ni Natta Hi” is a short story collection which consists of four short stories. The title story’s main character is ‘I’, a very shy high-school girl who can’t even speak to a guy she has a crush on one-sidedly. In “Machi mo Hoshi mo Kimimo”, the second one’s main character is Kamu who has been regarded as a trouble maker in her high school and try to escape from the city with a boy who tells her he has run away from an orphanage. The main character of the third piece, “Iku Sen Ya”, and fourth one, “Sentimental Ring”, is Rika who is working as a singer in a night club and she doesn’t remember her home town at all. One thing that is common among those protagonists is the fact that each one has a sense of loneliness in their own ways.
まるで詩のタイトルのような，一つ一つの作品名の通り，いずれの作品も幻想的な雰囲気に満ちていて，読んでいて，切ないような，閉塞感に少し息苦しくなるような気持ちになります。それでも，岩館作品特有のユーモアが随所に見られ，気が付くと笑顔になってしまいます。自分が特に好きなのは，２つ目の「街も星も君も」です。宝物のように胸の奥にしまっておきたいお話です。
岩館さんのこの幻想的な世界を，また新しい作品で味わいたいです。
Every title sounds like as if it were a title of poem, and each one also has such a fully fantastic atmosphere that you feel a wistful pang and bottled-up, stifled feeling. Even so, you can enjoy her humor that is something unique and always seen anywhere in her works, so you end up smiling. The piece I particularly love is the second one, “Machi mo Hoshi mo Kimimo”. I feel this is a story I want to cherish in the deeper part of my mind.
I really want to relish Iwadate’s fantastic world in a new piece.
