Night Ascends from the Ear like a Butterfly, composed in 1999 and dedicated to my grandmother, Tami, was inspired from Haruo Shibuya’s poem, Coliseum in the Desert. The words Shibuya uses in this poem such as night, a time of music, rain, black fountain, piano string, useless choir and butterfly gave me compositional ideas. These images were developed in my imagination separately from Shibuya’s poem, and they were transformed into music. To me it is very interesting that once one finishes a piece, it leaves the creator, and it flows inside somebody on its own, maybe or maybe not the same as the creator’s mind. The piece has its own life. I hope my piece has left me…