On March 10, 2024, I returned to a classical concert for the first time in more than thirty years, attending a charity performance at Hamarikyu Asahi Hall featuring violinist Natsuho Murata. This is a candid account of the great musicians I heard in my youth, the years lost to work and regret, my continuing search for a life companion, and the moment when the sound of the Osaka Philharmonic finally saved my heart.

July 22, 2026
On March 10, 2024, Natsuho Murata appeared in a charity concert held at Hamarikyu Asahi Hall in support of those affected by the Noto Peninsula Earthquake.
I attended that concert to hear Natsuho Murata perform.
It was the first classical concert I had attended in more than thirty years.
My readers already know why I left home.
Even during the period when I was doing physical labor in Tokyo simply to earn enough to survive, I spent what little money I had to attend concerts by Hiroko Nakamura and André Watts at Tokyo Bunka Kaikan in Ueno.
After choosing Osaka as the stage upon which I would live my life, I went to Osaka Koseinenkin Kaikan and Festival Hall whenever distinguished pianists visited Japan.
Among the performances at Osaka Koseinenkin Kaikan that remain vivid in my memory are those of Michel Béroff and Alfred Brendel.
Both were magnificent.
At Festival Hall, I heard Maurizio Pollini and Vladimir Ashkenazy.
The last classical concert I attended was a recital given by Michelangeli during one of his visits to Japan.
It was held at the Kyoto International Conference Center.
I can still vividly remember both his performance and the full moon shining in the sky after the recital had ended.
That was the final classical concert I attended.
More than thirty years then passed.
In truth, that was also the period when I had finally begun to emerge from the condition in which “the first wound was the deepest,” and had started seriously searching for a wife.
Yet I spent those precious years dining in Kitashinchi and singing to piano accompaniment.
What made it even more regrettable was that I had imposed upon myself the foolish, unwritten rule that I would never take a woman working in the nightlife business as my lover.
My old school remained a boys’ school until relatively recently.
One of my mentors had sternly charged me to become a man capable of carrying Kyoto University on his shoulders.
Yet, on the very day when everyone else began preparing for university entrance examinations in their third year of high school, I lost that path.
For the following year, I spent every day listening to classical music on NHK-FM from morning until night.
I lived with a copy of Weekly FM beside me, checking every broadcast in advance.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that I had none of the natural connections with women that ordinary people ordinarily possess.
What is more, there was even a year in which I worked every day but two.
Shortly before my business entered its most successful period, I had occasion to assist an elderly woman who ran the agency representing an actress who, for several consecutive years, had been ranked by business executives as the actress they would most like to marry.
Because of that connection, the elderly woman contacted me and said, “She says she would like to meet you on the final day of the performance. Can you come?”
Naturally, I accepted.
On that very day, however, a business problem arose that absolutely had to be resolved.
Real estate is, after all, the largest purchase most people will ever make in their lives.
Even a seemingly minor problem must be resolved completely.
I had no choice but to inform them that an urgent business matter prevented me from attending.
From last year into this year, I have been attending classical concerts at a pace that seems almost intended to recover the long years I had lost.
After a while, however, I began to feel an intense pain.
My closest friends and acquaintances have heard my “conditions for marriage” many times.
One acquaintance once said to me, “Boss, does a woman like that even exist? If she did, I would pawn my own wife and go after her myself.”
Around that time, I even asked a businessman who is now probably the leading entrepreneur in Singapore, and who appeared on the cover of Time magazine several years ago, “Please introduce me to someone suitable, should you happen to know such a woman.”
His answer was superb.
“Mr. Kisara, you have no choice but to find a woman for yourself. Because if there were a woman as wonderful as the one you are looking for, I would pursue her myself.”
Since then, I have tried somehow to find her for myself, but it has proved to be an extraordinarily difficult path.
For even though I define myself as an infinite thinker who longs to live forever, and although both I and others, including my closest friends, recognize me as eternally nineteen years old, life is finite and can be lived only once.
The age conventionally regarded as suitable for marriage has long since passed me by.
And I am not Picasso.
Until the restrictions on the total volume of real-estate lending were imposed in 1990, I had been on the road to becoming what is commonly called a man worth ten billion yen.
And yet, in the world of classical music, the kind of woman I had been searching for seemed, without exaggeration, to exist in countless numbers.
No one can become a first-rate musician without possessing a beautiful heart.
Nor, naturally, could anyone become a member of a great orchestra without one.
During the eight months I spent in a hospital room after suffering a life-threatening illness, I became painfully conscious that the world consists of men and women.
“I should have had many girlfriends.”
In any event, the world of classical music is filled with wonderful women.
They, too, will eventually marry.
But the men they marry will not be me.
I do not even have close family connections or a line of succession.
The more wonderful these women appeared to me, the more painfully I felt what was missing from my own life.
Then something happened.
The sound of an orchestra saved me.
By chance, it was the day of an Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra subscription concert.
Tadaaki Otaka conducted a symphony composed by his father, Hisatada Otaka.
Tears poured from my eyes.
On that day, the painful feelings that had been tormenting me disappeared.
Of course, I still carry within me the hope that some miracle might occur.
These are the feelings I had long known that I must put into words, but had never been able to write.
Now, at last, I have been able to reveal them.