In TM’s Atelier – Episode 4: Everything Begins with the Colour Red
(Work Made of a Note Explaining Its Title / Œuvre à partir d’une note de titre),
2025, digital visual composition
TM, furicacaruHInoco, 2025, digital visual composition
Highly Sensitive Childhood
Since I was a child, I have always seen the world slightly askew.
In the evenings, while waiting for the bus home, I would gaze at the red of the car brake lights.
“All these people call this colour ‘red’, but do they see the same red as I do?
There’s no way to prove it.”
I used to think about things like that endlessly.
I believe I used to be what we now call an HSP – a highly sensitive person.
I discovered the term much later, and when I read a book on the subject,
I was struck by how precisely it described my youth.
Incidentally, I composed a piece titled Highly Sensitive,
based on the idea of how the world once appeared through my eyes.
Until around the age of six, living itself always carried a certain pain.
I had the strange belief that I was constantly being watched by extraterrestrials.
Yet my family was wonderful; there was absolutely nothing wrong at home.
Mozart and Torazō Hirosawa
Around my first year of primary school,
I remember quite clearly making a decision:
“I can’t go on worrying about every little thing.
I’ll become a carefree, insensitive person!”
From that moment on, life became a little easier.
I also liked expanding my imagination through intricate, solitary work;
it was another way of softening the weight of existence.
I would draw railway lines on maps and make timetables for them.
(Perhaps that affection for trains found its way into Train From The Airport.)
I knew I was different,
and I didn’t particularly wish to be understood.
I thought that what I was could never truly be understood.
When a glimpse of that inner world was noticed by adults, it caused surprise.
I knew Japan’s geography unusually well,
having spent hours staring at maps.
I was also fascinated by swimming, drawing comic-style illustrations,
and browsing English dictionaries.
Sometimes I would cycle alone along Tokyo’s ring road
to look at the sports cars in the second-hand dealerships.
I simply spent long hours playing with what I loved.
Being surprised made me terribly uncomfortable;
to me it was equivalent to hearing, “What a strange boy…”
As I grew older, music gradually joined my solitary, imaginary play.
At seven or eight, I began piano lessons,
and I looked forward each night to listening to Mozart before bed.
Later, I became absorbed by rōkyoku,
the traditional Japanese art of narrative singing.
I listened every evening, faithfully imitating
the phrasing and tone of Torazō Hirosawa’s voice —
as best as I could within the range of a child’s voice.
I think this is the first time I have ever put all of this into words.
To be continued
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