It was when he was 14 that Huge touched the keyboard of a piano for the first time.

He liked the sounds of piano very much and he began to teach himself to play the piano. Naturally, the way he played was helplessly unreliable and the motion of his pair of thumbs, forefingers and middlefinges was quite haphazard. But the volume was, somehow confidently, so loud that I advised that he make it a rule to stop practicing at 8:00 p.m. at the latest. I wanted to avoid the nuisance to our neighborhood, for his piano sounded to my ears as if it were a thunder. Though I didn't know whether his piano performance was good or not, I found it comfortable,relaxing and pleasant to listen to his piano beside him.

A few months later, he tried to copy the piano performance of an artist he had admired and respected, but his fingers couldn't possibly keep up with the speed as might have been expected. He brought home to himself the limitation of six fingers and finally he made up his mind to take piano lessons. He needed to correct the way to move fingers, of course, ten fingers.

As I suggested his younger sister also take lessons together, he undertook a mission of her bodyguard. When the evening came, they left home and went through the woods in the Sengen Shrine (浅間大社) to attend piano lessons once a week. Rain or shine, roasting hot summers or freezing cold winters, he never missed the piano lessons during the three years.

His instructor was a pretty and unmarried woman, probably about five years older than he. I guess she was an idol, in a sense, to the high school boy, Huge.

By agreement between him and his sister, the first half of an-hour-lesson was supposed to be assigned to him and the second half to her. However, one day she complained to me that until then her lesson had been often cut down cosiderably because he preferred to talk to his instructor rather than take lessons. She still feels sorry for herself about her poor faculty to play only the chords of SPITZ, a Jpanese popular band.

But, I believe he was not so talkative by nature.

After he passed away, I came across an old cassette tape in his room. When I hesitatingly pushed the playback button on the tape recorder, quite clumsy and unsteady but pure piano sounds reached my ear.

♪do-mi-re-fa-mi-sol-fa-la-sol-ti-la-do-ti-re-do
♪do-la-ti-sol-la-fa-sol-mi-fa-re-mi-do-re-ti-do