《That Which Creeps Silently》 is Kiyose's first piano work. It might be said that it is, in essence, his first substantial musical composition. Kiyose, dreaming of becoming a composer, briefly studied under Kosaku Yamada, but feeling a sense of incongruity, he soon left his tutelage and subsequently mastered composition through five years of self-study. This work was composed during that period of self-study, in Taisho 13 (1924), at his family home in Oita.

Around this time, a quarter-century after Japanese composers began writing Western music, he, captivated by Scriabin's early preludes, decided to undertake a piano miniature. The style is characterized by setting a key with many accidentals, E-flat minor, and meticulously developing the entire 32 measures in a Lento tranquillo tempo. It frequently employs quarter notes and half notes, with eighth notes appearing only sparingly in the bass and upper voices in the latter half. Rather than emphasizing the melodic line, the focus seems to be on the sonority of individual chords. While a certain ruggedness can be observed in the harmonic progressions and inner voice movements, the solemn atmosphere evoked by the pentatonic scale carries a pre-war essence, making it a work worth listening to as a significant waypoint in the history of Western music in Japan.