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 Japan in the late 1970s, the boundary between music culture and literature was shaking. With his 1973 album "Ice World," Yosui Inoue became the first artist in Japanese record history to sell over a million copies, symbolizing a new era as the standard-bearer of folk new music. His music was not mere entertainment, but rather expressed urban loneliness, anxiety, and poetic sensibility through words and melody, evoking deep empathy in the listener. It can be said that his songs fulfilled the role that literature had played as an expression of the inner self to a wider public.

At this time, Japanese society had completed its period of rapid economic growth, and while materially affluent, it was enveloped in a spiritual emptiness. Culture had become an object of consumption, and creators were being asked what and how they should express themselves. Against this backdrop, Yosui Inoue's poetic words resonated as if filling a void in the hearts of many young people, giving them back their "sense of life. It was the writer and critic Azusa Nakajima (Kaoru Kurimoto), who raised questions and respect for music from the world of literature and poetry, and her open letter, "Dear Yosui Inoue," was a symbolic response.

In this letter, Nakajima elaborates on the artist's loneliness and creative pain behind his fame. She sees Yosui Inoue not merely as a popular singer, but as a poet living in the modern age, and she sheds light on the silence and anguish lurking behind his words. She sees that the different fields of expression, music and literature, both share the root of "creation through words," and senses in their resonance the possibility of a new art form. Although in the form of a letter, the work is a question to the times that transcends personal feelings, and a call to the very existence of the artist as an expressive person.

In this open letter, Nakajima reexamines "what is creation," "what is fame," and "to whom do words belong" while involving the reader in the process. Her writing reflects the intellectual tension and passion of the 1970s, a period of cultural transition. This letter, born at the intersection of the solitude of the artist and the fervor of society, is a record of the spirit of the times, looking at the emptiness that lurks behind the richness of life.

It was neither a mere musical critique nor a literary treatise, but a message that questioned the relationship between art and the times from the very foundation. Through Yosui Inoue, Azusa Nakashima depicted "the fate of those who express themselves" and "where the power of words lies. The deep meaning of this open letter breathes at the crossroads of that era, when music approached literature and literature yearned for music.