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On July 26, I gave an concert at the dining hall of Minami-Kaikisen in Izu Kogen. The hall was filled with about fifty people, and their warm, enthusiastic applause made the afternoon a memorable one for all of us.

This was the third time I had presented a concert at Minami-Kaikisen. Although the members have been different each time, the heart of the performance has always been a string quartet. For this concert, I invited several friends from Carta da Musica, the orchestra I joined when it was founded last year. Satomi, our concertmaster, played first violin; Marino, who is also the orchestra's director, played viola; Kanno, the principal cellist of a professional game music orchestra, played cello; and I took the second violin part. Satomi and Marino are both still in their mid-twenties, and Kanno is also a young musician who was recently married.

How did the idea takek a concrete shape?

The idea actually goes back more than twenty years, to the time when I was living in Frankfurt. I wondered whether German adults who had little interest in Japanese anime or manga might be more open to Japanese picture books. When I finally decided to put the idea into practice, it occurred to me that simply reading the stories aloud might not be enough to hold the audience's attention. So I added live incidental music, beginning with the simplest possible accompaniment?a violin duet. The idea worked better than I had expected, and over the years I introduced many different Japanese picture books in this way.

A few years ago, I began to wonder whether the same approach might also appeal to Japanese audiences. I asked Yuki Urabe, who graduated from the composition department of the Tokyo University of the Arts, continued his studies in Milan and Munich, and returned to Japan at the end of 2024, to compose the music for The Cat That Lived a Million Times. For the past several years, I have been giving string quartet performances several times a year for a senior citizens' association in Musashino City, and while looking for a fresh musical project for our audience, I remembered what I had done in Germany twenty years earlier.

Preparation for the concert started.

The picture-book performance with narration and live music lasts for less than thirty minutes, so by itself it would have been too short for a full concert. We therefore added a first half introducing the string quartet as a musical genre, together with works by three of its great early masters: Haydn, Boccherini, and Cambini, all of whom played important roles in the development of the string quartet during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

We chose Luigi Boccherini's String Quartet in G major, G.164, and Giuseppe Maria Cambini's String Quartet, T.169 - works that may well have received their Japanese premieres at this concert. In Japan, where the classical repertoire has traditionally been viewed through a strongly German lens, I have long hoped that more listeners would discover the richness and elegance of the Italian tradition, the very birthplace of classical music. Our choice of repertoire reflected that hope.

In contrast to the first half of the concert, which explored the early history of the string quartet, the second half brought the audience into the present day with The Cat That Lived a Million Times. The accompanying music had been composed only the previous year, in 2025. Since the Cat's theme is based on a waltz - although in a highly transformed form - we chose, as our encore, another contemporary work inspired by the same dance: the Waltz from Suite Porpora, composed in 2017 by the Italian composer Davide Piero Runcini.

The days in Minami-Kaikisen

Of the six people involved in the performance, four of us (or seven, including family members) stayed overnight at Minami-Kaikisen before the concert, enjoying a little holiday atmosphere. Satomi, our first violinist, even took her parents to the nearby Akazawa Onsen before joining us, where they relaxed in the open-air bath overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

My own "holiday," however, consisted mainly of solving practical problems. As the organizer, I spent the previous day working with the Minami-Kaikisen staff to prepare the hall. The dining room has magnificent windows with beautiful views over the Izu landscape, but no curtains. That was wonderful for the scenery, but rather inconvenient for projecting pictures from the book. After trying several ideas, we improvised a surprisingly effective solution. We clipped together several coloured bed sheets and hung them across the sunlit windows to block much of the daylight. A whiteboard became our projection screen, and because one of the windows behind it could not be completely covered, we even leaned an aluminium bath cover against the glass to reduce the remaining light. Somehow, we managed to reach a happy compromise: the projected illustrations were clearly visible, while there was still enough natural light for the musicians to read their music without additional stage lighting.

The Cat That Lived a Million Times tells the story of a cat who lives a million lives. Again and again he dies, and again and again he is reborn. Throughout those countless lives, he loves no one but himself. Only when he finally learns to love another does the endless cycle of rebirth come to an end.

1. Once he belonged to a king.
2. Once he belonged to a sailor.
3. Once he belonged to a circus.
4. Once he belonged to a little girl.

5. To impress her, he even turned somersaults before her.

6. Waltz

The concert began at two o'clock and turned out even better than we had hoped. The audience responded warmly throughout, and the performance was a great success. Afterwards, I would have loved to relax for a while and enjoy the afterglow of the concert. Our hosts had even prepared chilled watermelon for everyone. But some members of the ensemble had evening commitments, so instead I hurried them into my car and drove straight to Ito Station.