This beautiful orchestral work of 15 minutes duration was commissioned by the Hida Furukawa International Music Festival, written and premiered in 1994.

Takemitsu often spoke of scores as landscapes where he placed objects to move among as one might walk around a Japanese garden. In this work, he became fascinated by the optical illusion of the change of perspective as one walks around a fixed group of more or less identical objects, specifically, according to Takemitsu, like the buildings in a town like Hida Furukawa located at the northern tip of the Gilu Prefecture.

In Takemitsu's score, composed following a sophisticated musical procedure, repeated motifs and chordal combinations are re-harmonized and slightly shifted rhythmically each time they recur. They are also re-orchestrated so that the ear "sees" the objects lit in a different way. Each of these discrete timbre shifts seems to invite a new sense of presence, another "spirit".

The three primary motifs - a Debussy-like theme stated at the beginning, a motif composed of the notes D, B, C and D, and a series of ascending arpeggiated chords - are built around one tone row that generates three ninth triads (augmented five minus the seventh, or augmented ninth minus the fifth), and another tone row that is built on two whole tone scales; these rows seem to be influenced by the two composers who can be most heard in Takemitsu's music, Webern and Debussy. In order for the rotating optical illusion idea to work, it is of course necessary to find shared nodal points at which these rows overlap, creating a complex structural base that nonetheless always remains in the background subordinate to the beautiful unfolding of the music.

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