Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) is well known as an avant-garde composer, but he also played an important roll in the development of post war Japanese cinema. Takemitsu was involved in more than 100 films in his life and for many of these he was responsible for the entire sound design. As for the relationship between concert music and cinema in his creation, previous studies show that the latter functioned as an experimental field for the former.

In this paper, I clarify how the specific character of the cinema penetrates in Takemitsu’s concert music and put the relationship between these two genres in a new light, focusing on his aesthetic concept of “dream”. First, I extract the essence of his aesthetic about cinema, by examining his essays on cinema written in the early 1980s, all of these containing in their title the word “dream”. Then, I examine his piano music Les Yeux Clos (1979) which was named after the picture by Odilon Redon representing a woman who closes her eyes. This work, being dedicated by Takemitsu to the Japanese surrealist Shuzo Takiguchi, strongly evokes the concept of dream.

In my analysis I show that the way of building the relationship between motifs in this work is very similar to the technique of montage. Moreover, I examine the temporality of this work created by this montage-like structure. Finally, I compare this temporality and Takemitsu’s aesthetic of cinema and demonstrate their correspondence by using the key concept “dream” as a mediator.