THE WASTE LAND I-II-III, for Piano and Percussion（2023）

I delved into T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land for the first time last spring (2022) and was struck above all by its narrative stylishness and sense of speed. At the end of last year I had the idea of creating a work employing the concept of musical ekphrasis，whereby a painting or poem is portrayed through the medium of music. The Waste Land is a difficult poem to understand，and it was the translation and commentary in Japanese by Sōji Iwasaki that enabled me to understand its meaning and background.
Needless to say，my music is in no sense a ‘translation’ of the poem into music. It sometimes accompanies the poem，while at other times it strays and escapes from it.
It was an unexpectedly thrilling experience for me to compose a work that conjured up in my imagination the dualisms of death and rebirth，the sacred and the profane，abundance and decay，order and chaos，sanity and madness，war and peace，love and lust，civilisation and its denouement，and the varied gradations in between. T.S. Eliot’s poem consists of five sections. My work is an ekphrasis on the poem up to and including the third section，The Fire Sermon. I am planning in the near future to compose an ekphrasis for the fourth and fifth sections of the poem.
I would like to thank the two performers who undertook to cope head on with this perhaps somewhat eccentric and cross-grained work as well as to the staff of Zen-On Music who provided me with this valuable opportunity.

(From the original programme notes)