Fumio Karashima (辛島文雄) was born on 9 March 1948 in Oita Prefecture, on the southern island of Kyushu. His father taught music at Oita University, and Karashima had classical piano lessons from about the age of three. Jazz arrived in his first year of high school, when a friend told him there was such a thing as modern jazz. The first record was a five-track sonosheet that cost about 350 yen, cut from a Prestige anthology that carried Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk and the Modern Jazz Quartet. The Quartet's "Django" was the one that took, because it sounded closest to the classical music he already knew. His first LP was Rollins's Work Time, and the speed of Max Roach pulled him toward the drums. He bought sticks, practised on encyclopedias, and by his own account was a better drummer than his seniors when he joined the jazz club at Kyushu University, while still copying Tommy Flanagan and John Lewis at the piano.

He saw Elvin Jones play in Hakata as a teenager, though it was McCoy Tyner, he says, who made up his mind to be a pianist. He also reasoned that a pianist can practise alone and never has to carry a drum kit through the rain. The campus was blockaded during the student unrest of those years, so he took to walking in after midnight and playing until morning, and he stayed two extra years rather than rush to Tokyo, because he wanted to be good enough to live on piano alone. Around 1972 he played in a steakhouse, then solo from eight in the evening to four in the morning at a new jazz club in Oita, and with help from his father and farewell gifts he had about 1.2 million yen by the time he left. In 1973 he went to New York and stayed about nine months, then came home because he was engaged. The day after he landed, jet-lagged and worn out, he auditioned for Sadao Watanabe's quartet, and the job went to Takehiro Honda. He married that year, settled in Tokyo, and walked into Shinjuku Pit Inn to tell the manager he could play.

Pit Inn took to him, and being back from New York carried real weight in Tokyo at the time. Soon he was working in several bands at once. One was the quartet of the bassist Takashi Mizuhashi, which Discogs credits on two Three Blind Mice sessions in 1974: the live When a Man Loves a Woman, recorded on 23 and 26 March at Nihon Toshi Center Hall with Yoshio Otomo on alto saxophone and Shigeharu Mukai joining on trombone for one track, and the studio date Who Cares on 28 August. Then came the drummer George Otsuka's group, which is where the Pit Inn president Yoshitake Sato remembers people starting to notice him.

His first album as a leader was Piranha, recorded on 12 May 1975 at Aoi Studio in Tokyo with Isao Suzuki on bass and Jimmy Hopps on drums and issued in 1976 on the Whynot label, distributed by Trio Records. The same two years put him in Otsuka's quintet on Loving You George (July 1975) and Physical Structure (February 1976), on electric piano for Isao Suzuki's Hip Dancin' (April 1976, with Sam Jones and Billy Higgins), and on Kazumi Watanabe's quartet record Milky Shade (July 1976, with George Mraz and Motohiko Hino). In 1977 he made two trio albums that remain the core of the early catalogue: Gathering for Three Blind Mice in February, with Suzuki and Otsuka, and Landscape for Whynot on 23 October, with Mraz and Hino, on which he wrote all five tracks.

On 21 and 22 April 1978 he recorded Moonflower at Onkio Haus in Tokyo as the leader of a trio with Elvin Jones on drums and Andy McCloud on bass. He remembered it as a struggle, because the sound would not lock at first. Jones came back to Japan at New Year 1979 and the two played together in Fukuoka; Jones told him he had improved, and that summer he invited Karashima into his band. In between, in November 1978, Karashima made Hot Islands with the saxophonist Mabumi Yamaguchi, the bassist Miroslav Vitous and Otsuka, an album of band originals whose sleeve maps the four players as islands. He formally joined the Elvin Jones Jazz Machine in 1980. Pit Inn's Sato threw him a send-off session in August of that year, with Kazumi Watanabe and Otsuka among the players, and handed over the night's takings in an envelope.

He stayed with Jones for six years, touring the United States and Europe, and Discogs credits him on three live albums from the period: a concert at the Hamburg club Onkel Pö's Carnegie Hall on 22 September 1981 (issued in 2017), a night at the Village Vanguard on 1 July 1984 with Frank Foster, Pat LaBarbera and Chip Jackson (issued in 1993), and Live at Pit Inn, taped in Shinjuku on 1 August 1985 with Richard Davis on bass, Sonny Fortune and LaBarbera. By the end he said he was close to being the band's musical director, and Keiko Jones told him that he and Elvin were like brothers. At a festival in Molde, Norway, he stayed to hear a late-night Miles Davis set after his own band had finished, and wept: he realised that Davis and Jones, however different they sounded, were playing the same blues, and he stopped treating jazz as a fashion. Jones loved Japanese melodies such as "Hanayome Ningyo" (The Bride Doll), and Karashima played it until it began to sound like Debussy or Ravel. Jones asked for something closer to a Misora Hibari song intro, Karashima would not, and in 1986, in his late thirties and worried that he would never stand on his own, he left the band.

The leader years that followed came in waves. The Fumio Karashima Trio with Motohiko Hino and the bassist Ikuo Sakurai made Elegant Evening (1982), Round Midnight with the guitarist Larry Coryell (1983) and I Used To Be Alone (1984), on which Toshiyuki Honda plays tenor saxophone on three tracks. Polydor then issued two solo records, Autumn in New York (1985, his first standards collection) and Étranger (1986, all originals), and in 1987 the seven-piece Transparent, with Kohsuke Mine on saxophone and Jun Miyake on flugelhorn. In 1988 he formed a quintet of two saxophonists, Sakurai on bass and the drummer Shingo Okudaira, which made Avanti, Joy and, recorded at Roppongi Pit Inn on 13 April 1991, the farewell set I Love You: Fumio Karashima Quintet Last Live. When Okudaira left for New York in 1991 he spent about two years without a drummer who fit, and thought of giving up the piano.

The 1990s brought him back to the American and European circuit. His official discography lists In San Francisco, with Tony Williams on drums and Peter Barshay on bass, recorded in San Francisco in late 1993 and issued by Polydor in January 1994. He later said he was tense through the session and felt his own strength was not yet enough. A Beautiful Tomorrow Song (1995) was a solo record on a Bosendorfer, his first for Verve. Open the Gate (1996) brought Kazumi Watanabe, Honda, Mine, the bassist Shigeo Aramaki and the drummer Tamaya Honda together at Onkio Haus. In February 1999 he recorded Rencontre, a duo with the harmonica player Toots Thielemans, at Avatar Studios in New York for EmArcy. He was also invited to solo in Rhapsody in Blue with the Kanagawa Philharmonic, the New Japan Symphony and the Kenichi Tsunoda Big Band.

From 2001 he led a trio with the bassist Yosuke Inoue and Okudaira. The Elysian Air, recorded live at Ashibinaa in Okinawa City on 29 June 2001, was his first trio album in eight years, and the studio It's Just Beginning followed in 2003. Between them, on 23 November 2002 at the Kamakura Arts Center, he played a two-piano concert with Kei Akagi, released as Grand New Touch. In 2003 he visited five Latin American countries: Cuba, Panama, El Salvador, Mexico and Argentina. In 2005 Swing Journal gave him the 31st Fumio Nanri Prize, awarded for his work as a pioneer of jazz at home and abroad, and the Absord label reissued six of his 1970s and early 1980s albums in 2006.

Great Time (2006) was recorded on 8 and 9 September 2005 with the bassist Drew Gress and Jack DeJohnette. Karashima had idolised Elvin Jones, Tony Williams and DeJohnette since his own days as a student drummer, and with DeJohnette he said he finally felt he was meeting a first-time partner at the same level. He called it his best record to that point, and remembered the table-tennis matches the two played between takes. In May 2008 he followed it with Moon River, a solo standards album recorded on a Fazioli F278 at the Sakira hall in Ritto, Shiga. In 2011 he began teaching a jazz class at the Richmore music school in Yokohama.

The 2010s were released mainly on Pit Inn's own label. E.J. Blues (2010) was a live album with the drummer Takeo Moriyama, a tribute to Jones, and then came the quintet record Summertime (2012), the trio record A Time for Love (2014) and the solo Everything I Love (April 2015), his first solo piano album in seven years. In August 2015 he announced that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He did not stop. On 28 August he left the hospital with permission to play one solo at the unveiling of a new piano at Shinjuku Pit Inn, in a session with Otsuka, and in September he came back to the stage at Ochanomizu NARU. In early 2016 he recorded with the singers Mami Kataoka and Jasmine, made the duo I Wish I Knew with the trumpeter Issei Igarashi on 11 February, and, on four days between 25 February and 11 March, his own My Favorite Things. It began when his longtime drummer Shinnosuke Takahashi came home from New York at the end of 2015 and they realised that in all their years together they had never made a record. It collects tunes he had loved over the years, with Terumasa Hino and Kazumi Watanabe as guests. It was released on 29 June 2016.

His last concert was on 14 February 2017 at Shinjuku Pit Inn, with a sextet. Otsuka came on as a guest for three numbers; after one more tune with the sextet, Karashima told the audience in tears that he could not go on, thanked them, and left the band to finish. Fumio Karashima passed away on 24 February 2017 at Jikei University Third Hospital in Tokyo, of pancreatic cancer, at the age of 68, with his wife and two sons at his side. Shinjuku Pit Inn held two memorial nights on 27 April and 4 May 2017, titled after My Favorite Things, with Watanabe, Yoshio Suzuki, Hino and many others. A trio album released as his final recordings, My Life in Jazz, appeared in March 2018.

Karashima's own lineage is plain from his telling: McCoy Tyner decided him on the piano, and Elvin Jones, whose Jazz Machine he spent six years inside, gave him what he called the spirit of the music. His official site calls him the leading Japanese inheritor of Jones's jazz spirit, and the editor of the audio magazine analog, writing his obituary in 2017, described a pianist of romantic melodies and, at times, aggressive playing. He also credited the Miles Davis set at Molde with showing him that the blues sits under every style. In a 2008 conversation with Pit Inn's president he said he found music dictated by other people dull and played the jazz he wanted to play.

That consistency shows in the recordings. He returned to his own tunes for forty years: "Little Island" is on Piranha, on Sho and on the Otsuka quintet's Loving You George; "Friday Night" is on Moonflower and again on Summertime; "Brother J" and "Elegant Evening" move from his trio records into the solo Étranger; "Devil & Angel" appears on I Used To Be Alone and again on A Beautiful Tomorrow Song; "Late Autumn" turns up on both A Time for Love and Everything I Love, and "Brilliant Darkness" on both Great Time and Everything I Love. His tune "Tony Williams" is on The Elysian Air, Grand New Touch and the 2016 duo album with Issei Igarashi, and "Those Years With Elvin" is on Great Time.

The textures changed with the decade. The 1970s records move between acoustic trio, Fender Rhodes and the electric bass of Miroslav Vitous, and the late 1980s quintet, with its two saxophones and Fender Rhodes, sits closer to fusion. From 1995 he alternated between the piano trio and solo piano, and he spent his last decade playing standards and his own tunes on instruments he picked for the job, a Bosendorfer 290, a Fazioli F278 and, in 2015, a new piano chosen for Pit Inn.