Rentaro Taki – Kojo No Tsuki

Rentaro Taki – Kojo No Tsuki

Today I am going to share with you a very short piece, “Kojo No Tsuki” (“Moon Over Ruined Castle”) by Japanese composer Rentaro Taki, who lived a tragically short life. Taki graduated music school in Tokyo in 1901, moved to the Leipzig Conservatory in Germany to continue his music studies. He contracted tuberculosis, moved back to Japan, and died two years later. He wrote the short song “Kojo No Tsuki” in junior high school. It’s a beautiful song but so full of sadness that it seems almost prophetic about the life he is about to leave.

There are a lot of versions of this songs – there is something for everyone: There is a version for rock music lovers performed by the Scorpions in 1979, a jazz version performed by Thelonious Monk, and for opera lovers there is Andre Rieu with chorus (my favorite version).

Andre Rieu

The Scorpions in the late 1970s in Japan.

Sung by a soprano

Thelonious Monk

Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO at IMA, a value investing firm in Denver. He has written two books on investing, which were published by John Wiley & Sons and have been translated into eight languages. Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House, 2022) is his first non-investing book. You can get unpublished bonus chapters by forwarding your purchase receipt to bonus@soulinthegame.net.