Not only Japan's finest composer but also one of the great composers of the last century, Toru Takemitsu is only now, seven years after his death, beginning to receive the foreign critical attention that he deserves.
Though a number of assessments of Takemitsu's work have been made by Japanese critics, beginning from as early as the 1970s, the main publications in English have been two collections of Takemitsu's theoretical writings and uncollected papers by scholars such as Francisco Felciano, Luciana Galliano, Jamese Gibson, Timothy Koozen and Richard Toop.
A number of Takemitsu scholars met at a symposium held in 1998 in Sydney to mark the second anniversary of the composer's death. The volume edited by Hugh de Ferranti and Yoko Narazaki brings these papers together and provides an anthology intended to offer "new perspectives and information on an internationally prominent artist about whom there is a vast amount of writing in Japanese, but still relatively little in European languages."