夢が叶う yume ga kanau Dreams Come True
Abstract
夢が叶う, yume ga kanau, is a modern Japanese sentence, said every day, joining 夢, a dream in the sense of a hope, and 叶う, comes true. The verb is old in both its senses; 夢 as a hope is in print by 1904, a decade before the first citation for it in the 日本国語大辞典 (精選版); the sentence itself, in that sense, is first found in the Diet Library's full-text index in the 1930s, in books the Diet Library does not open online, when a dream that came true was more often said to be 實現, realized. It needs no source and should not be given a false one: it is simply what the language now says.
Overview
The sense. The verb, under 適う with 叶う as its wish-spelling; the sentence only as an example. Not Chinese. The two dictionaries read here, 大辞泉 and the 日本国語大辞典, head the verb 適う and give 叶う to this sense: 大辞泉 defines it 思いどおりに実現する。願っていたことがそのとおりになる, to come about as one wished, with 念願が叶う and 叶わぬ恋 among its examples [1].
The words. 夢 yume, older ime, is the dream of sleep [2]; 大辞泉's second sense, 将来実現させたいと思っている事柄, what one hopes to bring about, takes this sentence, spelled かなう, as one of its two examples, 少年のころの夢がかなう [2]. 叶う kanau is old in both its senses, fit and come about as one wished [1]. The character 叶, the 字通 says, is the old form (古文) of 協, to accord; the dictionary page lists it among the 人名用漢字 [3].
The text in English. In Google Books' ngram, dreams come true is present from the 1810s, climbs through the century, surges in the 1910s and 1920s and peaks in the 2010s; capitalized, as a title, its highest single year is 1930, and make your dreams come true is first counted in 1895 [4]. An older English proverb was about sleep, as the Japanese 夢 was: morning dreams come true, a proverb the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs quotes from 1540 (after mydnyght men saye, that dreames be true), 1616 and 1813 (and morning dreams come true, they say); its citation of 1909 already turns it to hopes, our highest anticipations and desires are not unsubstantial visions, but morning dreams [5]. In Japan the English phrase is also the name of a band: DREAMS COME TRUE, 吉田美和 and 中村正人, commonly called ドリカム [6]. The example corpora now render dreams come true as 夢が叶う, 夢はかないます and 夢が実現する; the house's title Dreams Come True is the ordinary equivalent and needs no footnote.
The historical record
The 万葉集, and Ono no Komachi. 夢 is the dream of sleep, in the 万葉集 and in Ono no Komachi's 思ひつつぬればや人のみえつらん夢としりせばさめざらましを, had I known it was a dream I would not have woken [2].
1903 to 1914, 夢 as a hope. The sense the sentence carries, a thing one hopes to bring about, has the latest first citation in the 日本国語大辞典's entry: Kinoshita Mokutarō's play 常長 of 1914, 世は移って、ああ、わが夢も消えたぞ, the world has changed, and ah, my dream too is gone [2]. Print has it earlier, and with another verb. An industrial journal of 1903 reports an item whose title ends (夢の實現), the realization of a dream, a phrase whose sense the index's snippet does not show [7]; 堺利彦's abridged translation of William Morris in 1904 speaks of 其の樂しき夢の實現, the realization of that happy dream [8], and in 中村吉蔵's play 牧師の家 of 1910 a pastor says 多年の夢が實現したのだ, the dream of many years has been realized [9]. In the hits read, the sense is in print by 1904, in the Meiji era, with 實現; 叶ふ, the verb of this sentence, joins it first in the translations of 1914 and 1916 below. The index's earlier hits for 夢叶ふ do not show this sense: one of 1884 is a formula of congratulation in a letter manual, its sense not shown in the snippet, and those of 1898, 1900, 1901 and 1910 are another word in the same character: the adverb ゆめ or ゆめゆめ, written 夢 or 夢々, not in the least, before a negative.
The 万葉集, the 古今集, and the 落窪物語. For fit 叶う is in the 万葉集's eighth poem, 潮も可奈比ぬ, the tide too has come right; for come about as one wished it is in the 古今集 (命だに心にかなふ物ならば, if even life obeyed the heart) and, standing alone, the use the 日国 says mostly takes the form …がかなう, in the 落窪物語, その夜思ひ臥したりし本意の、皆かなひたるかな, what I lay hoping that night has all come true (with の), and in the 徒然草 (with は) [1].
The 狭衣物語. The Diet Library's corpus of public-domain books has 夢が叶う in no book, nor 夢が叶ふ, 夢がかなう, 夢がかなふ, 夢は叶う or 夢の叶う: the sentence's first books are not in it. It has 夢 with 叶ふ in a handful of hits (4 for 夢の叶ふ, 4 for 夢かなふ, 1 for 夢叶ふ), and among them an older and other use: the 狭衣物語, その御夢かなふには, where the dream that comes true is a dream of sleep read as an omen (the 有朋堂文庫's head-note glosses it 夢の瑞相が叶ふ, the dream's omen comes true) and 叶ふ already means come true [10].
1825, and the sentence Japanese did say. The corpus is not failing, for it has 142 hits for 願ひが叶ふ, 193 for 願が叶ふ and 135 for 望みが叶ふ; in the Diet Library's full-text index, oldest first, the earliest dated hit on these forms is a novel the library's record dates, in brackets, 文政8, 1825 (時雨の袖: そなたが年頃の願ひが叶ふて, your long-held wish has come true), and undated kabuki scripts carry it too. What Japanese said, when a hope came true, was that a 願い or a 望み had [11].
1914, and 1916, the new sense in translation. In the hits read, 叶ふ joins 夢 as a hope first in translation. Tolstoy's Princess Marya, in the War and Peace of 島村抱月 and 鈴木悦 of 1916, hopes 禁ぜられたこの世の夢の叶ふことを, that her forbidden worldly dream might come true [12]; 馬場孤蝶, two years before (his volume's title-leaf stamp is 大正3.8.20), had written the same clause 夢の協ふ [13].
1935 to 1942, the sentence. The Diet Library's full-text index, which reads the in-copyright books the public-domain corpus cannot, finds the sentence in the 1930s, in the hope sense, in Japanese writing and in translation, where the snippet shows enough (a 1927 hit, in Lamb's tales from Shakespeare bound with a Gulliver, 昨宵の夢が叶つて in Timon, is a dream of sleep). In 吉屋信子's 女人哀樂, which opens the fifth volume of her collected works of 1935, a woman thinks もしこの夢が叶つたら、どんなに嬉しいだらう, if this dream came true, how happy she would be, and a diary is named [14]; a film magazine of 1938 says of a player 學校卒業後、永い間の夢が叶つて映畫界に入りました, after school, a long-held dream came true, and into pictures [15]; a Conrad translation of 1940 writes この夢が叶ふ, its sense not shown in the snippet [16], and a girls' magazine of 1942 the day when 千代の夢がかなふ, Chiyo's dream comes true [17]. These four are read in the index's text layer; the pages themselves are open only in Japan, two of them only at the Diet Library.
Between the wars, and after. The same index shows what the language said more often. To 1946 it has 夢が實現 in 1,429 dated items and 夢は實現 in 806, against a handful for the 叶ふ forms; the modern spellings 夢が叶う and 夢がかなう have no dated item before 1947, and 2,676 and 5,833 items now [18]. 夢が叶う as the everyday sentence belongs to the postwar decades.
What is not a source. Not a proverb, not a classical phrase, not Chinese. The 狭衣物語 line is the old sense of 夢 and not the ancestor of the sentence [10]; 願いが叶う is the older sentence in the index (1825) and not this one [11].
A reading
Of the sentences of hope Japanese has, this is among the commonest now, and its history on paper is short. Its verb is in the 万葉集 and the 古今集, its noun's sense is in print in the Meiji era, and the sentence is Shōwa, in print in the 1930s and everyday after the war. It needs no source and should not be given a false one; it is simply what the language now says, and it says it well: 叶う is the verb of a wish granted, and 夢 has meant what I hope for for more than a century. A reader who wants the older Japanese has 願いが叶う, a wish come true; one who wants what the language says now has this sentence exactly.
Notes
- が marks the subject: 夢 is what comes true.
Japanese Scrolls by Master Calligrapher Eri Takase
References
- 「適う」, 大辞泉・精選版日本国語大辞典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/適う
- 「夢」, 大辞泉・精選版日本国語大辞典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/夢
- 「叶」, 普及版字通, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/叶
- Google Books Ngram Viewer, search on "dreams come true", "Dreams Come True" and "make your dreams come true". https://books.google.com/ngrams/
- Jennifer Speake (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, Oxford University Press, 2015, s.v. "Morning dreams come true".
- "DREAMS COME TRUE", Japanese Wikipedia. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/DREAMS_COME_TRUE
- 工業雑誌 19(272), 工業雑誌社, July 1903, scan 18 (the index's text layer; the page is open in Japan only). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1561357/1/18
- ヰリアム・モリス, 理想郷 (抄訳 堺利彦), 1904, scan 17. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/798702/1/17
- 中村吉蔵, 牧師の家 : 新社会劇, 1910, scan 17. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/877365/1/17
- 狭衣物語, 巻四之上, the clause as the 有朋堂文庫 typeset prints it (塚本哲三 等編, 有朋堂書店, 1913), scan 207, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1913586/1/207; the same place in a print of the Genna era (1615–1624; 元和年間 in the Diet Library's record), scan 20, where 御夢かなふ is read at the leaf, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2544518/1/20; the 有朋堂文庫's head-note, 夢の瑞相が叶ふと言はめ, read at the leaf in its 1926 printing (武笠三 校), the same page line for line, scan 209, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1018121/1/209.
- 東籬園瀬川路考, 時雨の袖, 1825, scan 12. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/8943099/1/12
- トルストイ, 戦争と平和 (訳 島村抱月・鈴木悦), 1916, scan 205. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/954325/1/205
- トルストイ, 戦争と平和 第1巻 (訳 馬場孤蝶), 泰西名著文庫, 1914 (the set ran 1914–1915; the Diet Library's stamp on this volume's title leaf reads 大正3.8.20 購求), scan 301. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/950223/1/301
- 吉屋信子, 女人哀樂, in 吉屋信子全集 第5巻, 新潮社, 1935, scan 16 (the index's text layer; the page is open at the Diet Library only; the volume's table of contents puts 女人哀樂 at p. 1 and 鳩笛を吹く女 at p. 301). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1217467/1/16
- スタア 6(10), スタア社, May 1938, scan 33 (the index's text layer; open in Japan only). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1753878/1/33
- ジョセフ・コンラッド, 蜥蜴の家 : 南海の或る河辺の物語, 弘文堂書房, 1940, scan 5 (the index's text layer; open in Japan only). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1689498/1/5
- 少女倶楽部 20(10), 大日本雄弁会講談社, October 1942, scan 70 (the index's text layer; open at the Diet Library only). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1780140/1/70
- 国立国会図書館デジタルコレクション, full-text search, oldest first, on 夢が實現, 夢は實現, 夢が叶う and 夢がかなう, read 29 September 2026. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/search/searchResult?keyword=夢が實現&fulltext=true&sortKey=ISSUED_ASC