Nobuyuki Hanawa and Nobuyuki Tsuchiya of the comedy duo "Knights" appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi) on July 4th. They talked about the details of Hanawa's facial fracture.
Hanawa had been driving with a junior comedian to a place rich in nature near Mount Fuji as part of a "pilgrimage" to the filming locations of his favorite dramas. It was night, so it was pitch black, and he fell into a drain and hit his face on the concrete. "Sparks flew. For a moment I didn't know what had happened," he said. His nose started to bleed and his face started to swell, and although he bought gauze at a convenience store on the way, he decided it was impossible to continue to the hotel in that condition. The junior comedian called an ambulance. He had apparently broken bones in three places.
To perform a skit on TV, Tsuchiya alone cannot do it. Hanawa's brother, the comedian who is the base of comedy, stepped in to perform a Knights manzai with Tsuchiya. Tsuchiya recalled, "I think (Hanawa) practiced it, but it was perfect. Maybe because we're brothers, our speaking pauses are similar, so it was really easy to do. I almost burst out laughing halfway through. He did it so perfectly that I thought he was really performing with Knights right now."
Hanawa said, "I watched it and thought he was really bad," and added that he was worried that his brother would be criticized online, "but he was getting rave reviews, so I was quite shocked."
Master Katsuko Utsumi, who passed away five years ago at the age of 97, once fell down the stairs at Tokyo Station and suffered a compound fracture in her right hand. Her face was swollen, about three times as much as Hanawa's, but Master Katsuko said she didn't mind going on stage as it was, and that if the audience was waiting, she would go on stage and didn't want to take a break. "I grew up under such a master, so I wanted to do my best," says Hanawa.
Although Master Keiko doesn't usually talk much, he was a "mass of service spirit" who always thought about how to please the audience. Master Keiko said that the material didn't matter, and that if people clashed with each other's sensibilities, it would become a manzai. "He said that just talking can become a manzai in the first year and in the 60th year of his career, and he put the young ones on stage and they were a big hit," he recalled, mumbling that the Knights can't do that kind of act yet.
