In the world of popular classical music, few stars shine brighter than that of pianist Fujiko Hemming, whose debut CD, "La Campanella," has sold more than 900,000 copies worldwide and collected a Japan Gold Disc Award and numerous classical album of the year awards since its release in 1999.
Yet who knows what may have happened, and what even greater heights Hemming may have reached had her career not been blighted as is was beginning to peak more than 30 years ago.
Born in Berlin sometime in the 1930s (she has always refused to reveal her exact age), Hemming moved to Tokyo at the outbreak of World War II, at age 5, with her father, Russian-Swedish architect Gosta Georgii-Hemming, and her Japanese pianist mother, Toako Otsuki. Around that time, she began studying piano under her mother, who she described in a recent interview with The Japan Times as "quite a strict teacher who often criticized my playing."