It was the fall of 1963, when — in what seemed like a flash of lightning — I became a fan of Bob Dylan the moment I heard "Blowin' in the Wind" on the radio. I was in my first year of high school.

In those days no Dylan albums had been released in Japan, and it was hard to get import records. So although that flash of lightning remained seared in my head, there wasn't much I could do about it.

Then two years later, in the fall of 1965, a Dylan album at last appeared in the record shops here — just about 3 1/2 years after his debut album, "Bob Dylan," was released in the West. In that interval, Dylan already had six albums to his name — and he'd already made a drastic shift from acoustic folk music to electric rock.