At the little language school where I'm learning Japanese, each session runs only eight weeks. I have just finished Japanese 1, and there's a week off before Japanese 2. You can learn some things in eight three-hour classes and a little bit of homework, but not a lot of things. My goal is to learn enough that I can follow the lyrics of Japanese pop songs. It's going to take a few more sessions. At this point I can read and write the letters of both phonetic alphabets, count to about a million, tell you when my birthday is, describe very simple spatial relationships, and relate incredibly basic details of my personal activities. I can exhort a collection of us to go out, I can ask for pardon, and I can denigrate my own fluency. I can ask you where the post office is, and if you say, very slowly and clearly, that it's in front of the flower store, it is possible that I will understand what you mean. Unless there is a vein of Japanese pop songs obsessively concerned with the locations of post offices relative to flower stores, however, my repertoires of grammar and vocabulary are not yet up to the challenge of real lyrics, at least not at any semantically useful length. But I am making progress. I can't follow the sense of sentences, but I can now recognize some of the parts of speech. "From now on, your something and my something somethings", I can provisionally discern. We don't get to any kanji until Japanese 2, which means I still can't really read anything, but I do have a kanji dictionary, and after some practice I can now usually track down a kanji character in it a) with confidence that I'm right once I find it, and b) in less than ten minutes. Rough translations of song titles are now sometimes within my grasp. And walking home after class number four, I actually understood my first whole (albeit short) line of a song just from hearing it.

I can't follow a damn thing in Takashi Sorimachi's ringingly affirmational "POISON", another song with a TV tie-in, and I'm surprised to discover that it isn't of Eighties vintage as well. All discarded idioms, I've often maintained, are alive and well somewhere in the world, and "POISON" is a refugee from that dream America in which Jon Bon Jovi, Peter Gabriel and Rick Springfield share a beach house in Santa Monica, and on the weekends record sturdy, technically-sophisticated pop songs with no significant agenda other than making people feel good. I assume, from the title, that there's something dark lurking in this one, but there is so little acrimony in the offhand way Takashi delivers the word "poison", as if he's just hit the wrong elevator button but is still ten minutes early for an appointment on the right floor, that I'm left imagining it's some oblique term of endearment. Guitars spark and flare, drums sputter and crash and bound. A "movie mix", elsewhere on his greatest-hits album, wanders off into saccharine strings and a distracted fade-out, but this one clomps along cheerfully right to the end, pile-driving its riff like Butch Vig has gotten ahold of Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark".

If I ever feel bad about my Japanese incompetence, I need only remember Glay. Not only is their name unmistakably English despite having no meaning (romanized Japanese uses "r" for the hybrid "l"/"r" sound, and there would be no "gl-" sound in Japanese even if there was a "l-"), but their song titles are frequently in unsteady English ("Way of Difference", "ALL STANDARD IS YOU", "mister popcorn", "THINK ABOUT MY DAUGHTER"), and it is only when I look at the printed lyrics that I have any idea that most of "Global Communication" is nominally being sung in English. One Love, from which it's from, is Glay's sixth album since 1995, but they too sound like a band left over from what was, for the English-speaking world, the Eighties, that simultaneously less and more self-conscious era when even the Blink 142s and Sum 41s would have had a keyboard player and matching outfits and songs that were easier to dance to. Glay are as exuberant as REM are somber, and as un-self-important as U2 are overbearing. The guitarists are probably metal fans, but the band as a unit doesn't harbor any delusions of menace. "One Love", the album's atmospheric instrumental coda, combines Enya-esque calm with little scratchy turntable noises, sonar-ping piano hooks, a short spoken text seemingly delivered by an adolescent robot, and a comically gruff bass-line borrowed from some fluttery boy-band lullaby.

Katakana is a particularly amusing game. Katakana and hiragana are the two phonetic alphabets, and they both represent the same set of sounds with the same number of characters, but hiragana is for native Japanese words and katakana is (mostly) for words imported from other languages, similar to the way we're taught to italicize foreign words, except imagine that italics were so different from regular letters that you had to learn them separately. The most common source for imported words in modern Japanese is, of course, English, but katakana represent Japanese syllables, not English ones, so once you know what the katakana characters represent, deciphering the words is a matter of reading them aloud in a cartoon Japanese accent and then trying to back the accent out so you're left with the original English sounds. The katakana title of this song expands phonetically as the four-syllable construction "boo rah un coh", the first three of which we collapse in English to the single syllable "bron". The more adjacent consonants the English word has, the more extra syllables you get in the Japanese version. In katakana, "spring" is a five-syllable word.

I give e.mu credit for attempting some English wordplay for the title of their 2000 debut, Force of Fifth, falling short only by virtue of neglecting to choose a phrase with a first meaning. In Japan, apparently, young men with attitudes still wear PVC jackets and eye-liner, and still form thrashy four-piece punk bands. But they dream of being movie stars and subway-poster idols, too, and they haven't quite got the hang of nonchalance or anti-elitism, and so e.mu set out to be the Ramones and end up more like the Undertones formed by the guys from Orgy. "Message" is busy and pealing, with the insistence of Pearl Jam, the extravagance of Guns N' Roses and the impatience of the Housemartins. "love around" is more squalling, edging over into blues caricature, but resolves into a glorious pop chorus worthy of the Goo Goo Dolls. My copy of the album came with a laminated souvenir backstage pass with a glamour shot of the drummer on it, and the clear implication that I ought to try to collect the other three. If this is really what Japanese teenage girls listen to, though, then I probably don't want to try to compete with them.

Besides, if I were (and I stress that this is purely hypothetical) going to become obsessively devoted to any Japanese singers, they would more likely be female. I'm aware that my reactions to music, in English, are influenced (if hardly determined) by the singer's gender, but the effect seems to be an order of magnitude more dramatic in Japanese. I have a bunch of theories about why, but they all smack of snap-judgement psychology, which doesn't necessarily make them wrong but makes me want them to be wrong. Do I interpret unintelligible male voices as threatening, and unintelligible female voices as alluring? No, I hardly feel threatened by the J-pop bands I like with male singers, and "alluring" is a gender-biased term anyway. Do I associate pretty Japanese voices with attractive Japanese women? Sure, probably, but I associate pretty American voices with attractive American women, too. A woman with an appealing singing voice is attractive to me for that reason alone, I don't think ethnicity really enters into it. I suspect there's a real explanation, though, and that it's rooted far deeper in Japanese culture than my very limited experience has taken me. It is a society with intricately contrived gender expectations, and I suspect that they result in overtly feminine performing art (even when some of the players are male) having a pervasively different character from overtly male performing art. It means something different to be a girl who gets up in front of a crowd, in Japan, than it does to be a boy, and the difference is manifest in the music, subtly enough that I can't explicate it without a lot more study, but unmistakably enough that I can sense it after very little.

The first thing I will translate, when I feel like I'm ready to translate more than a line in a sitting, is the beautiful extra booklet that came with my copy of Nanase Aikawa's EP The Last Quarter. "I wanna be your only one.", it says in English on the cover, and the last page has a picture of Nanase looking across at what I assume is the last stanza of a short poem about love. I don't know what it says in between, nor how, if at all, it relates to the seven songs on the EP. My favorite is the first, "Koibito ja nakunaru nichi", which I have stretched my abilities to render in romanized form for you, and will likely stretch past the breaking point to actually translate. "Koibito" is "lover" (athough not, I think, with quite as sexual a connotation as in English), "nakunaru" is "to die", "nichi" is "day", and the "ja" in the middle has some sort of tense function I don't understand, so the whole thing might mean "the day my lover dies", or "the day my lover died", or maybe "if my lover should ever die". Conceivably I'm missing a negation, and idiomatically, for all I know, it means "I have misplaced the card-key for my medium-price hotel room". Regardless, the whole EP is a deliberate departure for Nanase, focusing on slow, pretty songs to the exclusion of the sweeping rock anthems that for me anchor her albums. A few of them slow down so far they lose me, but this one strikes what feels to me like exactly the right balance, crunching along indefatigably in the mold of Tom Petty's "Learning to Fly", but with Nanase's swooping voice bearing her version aloft as surely as Tom's drawl grounds his.

I've now been following J-pop long enough, I'm happy to find, for some of the artists I know to start putting out newer material than what I discovered them with. Yaiko starts the journey towards a third album with this single, which is not a cover of the old disco song. This one, too, has an English section I thought was Japanese from listening: "Your soul ring my doorbell, / Heaven knows that lives and you're beautiful, / Your soul ring my doorbell always". If I'm allowed this much leeway in Japanese, it may not take me as long to reach a conversational level as I'd thought, although if Japanese people think I'm speaking English I'll have a hard time getting them to tell me where the post office is, and even if I write them down, I'm skeptical that my Japanese errors will be as poetic as this. I tried a sentence in the course of testing unicode support at work, and one of our Japanese customers informed me that I'd just said "I ate a letter, then I am the post office", but a) that was a few weeks ago, b) eat/write was a typo, and c) that's far cooler than what I was trying to say.

But Every Little Thing's new one is just as thrilling, frankly, so I have a feeling the list is going to be especially difficult this year. "Jump" and "Ring my bell" are more than a little similar, but ELT's version seems slightly more kinetic to me, leaning forward where "Ring my bell" leans back, and thus also a little less dramatic. Maybe this whole J-pop phase of mine wouldn't have happened if there were American bands writing songs like this, but "Jump", in particular, seems to me to have no exact American analog. We have bands that can combine guitar crunch and girlish vocals, but not ones that can make the shift from guitar crunch to chiming, keyboard-augmented redemption with such fluidity. Imagine Britney fronting Night Ranger, maybe, or a version of Loverboy with the technical ability of Asia backing up Mary Lou Lord. Colleen Fitzpatrick might have been up to it, if she hadn't sold herself. Garbage has the talent, but neither the selflessness nor the presence of mind. Sheryl Crow has the contacts, but not the anima. And the rest of us, we have credit cards and the mail.

Garnet Crow is so far the only J-pop band for which the combination of my fascination and the catalog's size and availability have led to my acquiring all their singles, which would usually be my pattern with English (particularly English English) bands. They've had four singles since First Soundscope, my favorite of which is this sweet, measured, lilting lullaby, which borrows heavily from Enya's breathy singing and cinematic arrangements, adding warm guitars and traces of GIZA's twitchy, r&b-derived production style. The pizzicato fake-string runs here serve the same function as the synth pings in "Jump" and the Celtic jangle in "Ring my bell", and the three songs go well enough together to make me suspect collusion, if I didn't also have a dozen other examples of 2002 J-pop that don't resemble this at all. But this is how I know I'm starting to relate to J-pop as more than novelty: I'm not only figuring out what I like and what I don't like, but I'm starting to separate what I like from what I really like. I like Fanatic Crisis, My Little Lover and rumania montevideo. I like rina aiuchi, Chihiro Onitsuka and Kyoko Fukada (and it's too bad I don't like Kyoko more, as CD Japan keeps sending me enormous posters of her without my asking). But liking things is a means to liking other things better. Like is "suki", really like is "daisuki". "Daisuki ongaku wa..." is the beginning of a sentence about my favorite music. I don't know any of the right Japanese words for the rest of it yet. Arguably I'm not sure what they are in English, either. The sentences about my favorite music end a hundred different ways, or don't end at all. This thing I've dragged you along on is my (our?) search for the right things to say. I have filled this week off from studying Japanese with Japanese music, and it might seem inefficient of me to search for universal truths in Japanese, or myopic not to search for them in every other language, but when we say that music is a universal language, we are misusing terms. Music is no more inherently universal than anything we make. We are universal. And "universal", in this context, just means humanity-wide, and "humans are humanity-wide" is tautological. When we say that music is universal, what we mean is that we assume -- we stipulate -- that simply by virtue of being human, we share an emotional and existential grammar and vocabulary, and seek to express common truths with it. Those truths are omnipresent, but it's hard to look for something that's everywhere. If we want to find the beliefs we share, better to look where we seem to be different. So we learn other languages, as exotic and nuanced as one with three writing systems spoken on a volcanic island on the other side of the planet, or as prosaic and constrained as what your soulmate means when she first rings your doorbell, because if we are all the same, but don't know how, then surely the clues lurk precisely where we say we're most different. We learn to say things we don't understand, in other people's languages, to find out what we haven't learned to say in the ones we think we know.