Letter to Yosui Inoue: The Era of Solitude and Resonance (Late 1970s)

Letter to Yosui Inoue: The Era of Solitude and Resonance (Late 1970s)

In the late 1970s, Japan had completed its rapid economic growth and was facing a spiritual vacuum in the midst of material affluence. Yosui Inoue had a hit with his album "Ice World," selling over a million copies and symbolizing the era as the standard-bearer of folk new music. His music poetically depicted the loneliness and anxiety of the city and deeply touched people's hearts. Writer and critic Azusa Nakajima Azusa (Kaoru Kurimoto) responded to this phenomenon with an open letter, "Dear Yosui Inoue," in which she looked at the solitude and creative pain behind the artist's fame. She sees Inoue as a poet and explores the essence of "word creation" shared by music and literature, and finds in it the possibility of a new art form. Through the form of a letter, she posed the questions "What is creation?" and "Whose words belong to whom?" to the entire age. This work is a cultural testimony that reexamines the relationship between art and society from its very roots, vividly
depicting the intersection of an era when music yearned for literature and literature yearned for music.