Silence and Rebirth of Furyu Yumeya - 1977

Silence and Rebirth of Furyu Yumeya - 1977

The Furyu Yumeya existed as a symbolic place of silent discourse in the Japanese society of the 1970s. This small dumpling shop near Matsubara Danchi in Soka City, Saitama Prefecture, was once run by Shichiro Fukazawa, a writer known for his novel Narayama Bushiyo. After the "Furyu Yumetan Incident" in 1960, he began to distance himself from the literary world and refrain from making public statements. The incident, in which his novels were attacked by right-wingers for being reminiscent of political murders, led to a raid on the Chuō Kōronsha, exposing the limits of "freedom of speech" in the postwar era to the light of day.

In an era of such suppression of speech and self-censorship, Furyu Yumeya was a quiet base for Fukasawa to continue his loose relationship with society. His literature, while depicting the sorrows of people's lives, also contained satire against authority, and even after he closed his brush, he continued his own "unspoken expression" by directly confronting people at the dango shop, a place of daily labor.

The 1970s coincided with the end of the student movement and the maturation of corporate society, and resistance to the system and ideological debate rapidly subsided. The publishing world also prioritized commercial success over politics, and writers increasingly tended to choose safe subjects. In such a climate, the furyumuya was another speech space for those who had retreated to the outside of literature, and living without a voice itself became a form of resistance.

The name "Fu-ryu Yumeya," like "Fu-ryu Yume Tan" in the past, was a mixture of dream and reality, of elegance and mundanity. In the postwar era, when freedom of speech was gradually becoming a skeleton in the midst of institutionalization and commercialization, the steam from the dumplings rising up there was like the reverberations of freedom breathing in the silence.