The "Beethoven of Japan?" More like "The Great Pretender!"

As enthusiasts of video game music will already have heard, the famous composer...er, "composer," Mamoru Samuragochi admitted to be a festering fraud this week. He has built his massive career on the foundations of the immensely successful Resident Evil soundtrack, which is renowned for its spectacular atonality. That soundtrack was released in 1997 - and he has admitted that everything released under his name during the past 18 years has been written by a ghost writer.

Samuragochi has found success "writing" for video games, beginning with the iconic Resident Evil soundtrack and Onimusha, and culminating in the widely successful Symphony no. 1, "Hiroshima." This symphony was written (by someone else) as a memorial to the victims of the atomic bomb. What better way to memorialize over a half a million people than to pretend to write a symphony for them? Granted, the intent is good, but as we all know the path to hell is littered with good intentions.

A new piece of music, Sonatina for Violin, is set to premier at the Olympics in Sochi - I guess we'll have to wait and see who gets credited for it.

A man by the name of Takashi Niigaki has come forward, claiming that he is the ghost writer. In this article from IGN, Niigaki reveals that Samuragochi probably isn't even deaf - which means he decided to fake a disability to garner the moniker "Japan's Beethoven," and then hired a ghost composer to boot. That's pretty despicable, if you ask me, and admitting to the fraud is a very small consolation to his deception.

"We carry on normal conversations. I don't think he is [handicapped]," Niigaki said, "At first he acted to me also as if he had suffered hearing loss, but he stopped doing so eventually.... He told me, after the music for the video games was unveiled, that he would continue to play the role [of a deaf person]."

Niigaki also suggested that Samuragochi threatened to kill himself if the ghost-writing were to cease. Samuragochi has yet to respond to these accusations.

His record label isn't impressed. They've put an immediate moratorium on shipments of his music, ceased the online sales of his music, and a planned tour is now on hold.