March 21, 2026.
That morning, I set out for the Osaka Castle Peach Grove, a place I had long wished to photograph again.
As I photographed Osaka Castle under a cloudless sky, I realized that, for the people of Osaka, Osaka Castle is their Mount Fuji.
It is more than a landmark.
It rises in the inner landscape of the city itself.
In that lucid light, I also noticed that the spirea was nearing its finest moment.
I immediately decided that my next destination must be the Kyoto Prefectural Botanical Garden.
On a day of such flawless weather, it seemed wasteful to spend too much time on lunch.
If one rides at the very front of the Osaka Loop Line, one emerges at Umeda Green City.
I chose a quick beef bowl at Yoshinoya, and before that, photographed Hiroshi Hara’s supreme masterpiece beneath the perfect sky.
At the botanical garden, the spirea had only just begun, but the early-blooming cherry trees were nearly at full bloom.
At one of them, I quickly encountered a Japanese white-eye.
My true purpose that day had been the peaches.
Yet along the way, the camellia garden had recovered a beauty I had not seen there for a long time.
Once, this had been a celebrated place for winter camellias, with a splendor hardly inferior to roses.
But in recent years, that radiance had somehow faded away.
And yet, though it was already March 21, the blossoms had returned in a form that recalled their former glory.
Moreover, a staff member told me that the plum grove was still well worth seeing.
So I headed there at once.
Ahead of me stood older men with expensive telephoto lenses.
I instantly sensed that a kingfisher must be there.
As expected, it was on its usual branch.
For now, I chose not to use a telephoto lens, and instead took an instantaneous shot, intending to crop it later.
As expected, after cropping, it was not in perfect focus.
The peaches were still far from their peak, but early-blooming cherry blossoms were flowering throughout the garden.
For this work, I use Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, No. 1 in C major, BWV 846, played by Glenn Gould, and Liszt’s Réminiscences de Don Juan, played by John Ogdon.
In March 2024, Yukine Kuroki’s performance of the Intermezzo from The Nutcracker struck my heart directly.
Since then, I have traveled as far as Kochi, Takamatsu, and Kanazawa to hear her perform.
The other day, at a duo recital with Natsuho, I heard Kaoruko Igarashi for the first time.
What astonished me first was that she played the Italian Concerto not in the Richter style I had expected, but in a manner that recalled Glenn Gould.
And her collaboration with Natsuho was, quite simply, a historic great performance.
It was extraordinary.
It was as though Heifetz and Gould had appeared together on the same stage.
It had not been in my plans at all, yet when I saw the announcement of her recital, I decided to travel to hear her.
This work was created as part of that preparation.