It's worth re-iteriating -- Tokyo really is, for me, the most exciting city in the world. I feel fully alive when I'm here, switched on. It's something to do with sex, of course -- the place just crackles with an extraordinary sexual energy I find nowhere else, an energy of casual glances as people mill and crush and mingle on trains, on streets, in malls. Girls are wearing black pop socks right now that stop a couple of inches beneath the hem of short, short skirts and it makes me more or less pop!



It's something to do, too, with the feeling that you live here in the present -- no old buildings -- yet the past (ritual, ancient costume) and the future (the talking police sirens! the new mega-complexes!) too. And it's something to do with no longer finding consumer capitalism toxic here. God knows, my puritan presbyterian socialist side tries, but sitting eating a lunchbowl, watching crowds arriving at Tokyo Midtown, I just can't find it in myself to despise the people flocking to the place in their expensive finery, smiles lighting up their faces, taking photos in front of the corporate sculpture as if the place were a Shinto shrine.



In fact, Midtown is a shrine -- a shrine to bubble-style boom. Everything is breath-takingly expensive. There's a chocolate shop where the chocolate has jewelry prices. And people are buying it. $60 for a velvety black box containing two earring-sized chocolate balls. The price itself is the selling-point -- and, for a few seconds, you taste not just chocolate but refinement (and the widening gulf between yourself and the classes of people who can't savour this stuff) and luxury and sensuality and extravagance. If you want to celebrate chocolate more, head to the Issey Miyake Pleats Store for eccentric and gorgeous truffle-brown ruffle clothes, or over to the Design Site museum, where there's a show themed around the stuff.

Japan is booming again, just as it was in the 80s. But this time the money is coming from China. As Japan surfs the extraordinary wave of affluence coming from its nextdoor neighbour, there's a sense that Japanese are becoming slightly more "Chinese" in their optimistic rush to shop, to acquire. That's the vibe I get at Midtown, anyway, the new Mammon. It's actually located in my least favourite part of the city. I hate Roppongi because it's full of foreigners. And God, there are more of us than ever here, with our ill-concealed leers, our loud voices, our Japanese girlfriends. Roppongi -- once sex and sleaze central -- has become money and consumerism central. It feels the way Shibuya did in the early 90s. Expect Roppongi-kei any day now.



We're here to see a performance by Gutevolk. There's a stage in the basement of the mall, next to Muji (where plain simple cotton trousers identical to the ones I'm wearing -- €2 from our local market in Berlin -- sell for €80). Hirono performs there for the scheduled 40 minutes. It lacks something -- how can an afternoon shopping mall performance (with backing tracks, vocalist, loud drums) match the magic of a concert at night, with musicians, in a charmingly shabby Barcelona music hall? Hirono stands stock still, reading her lyrics from a French 50s notebook (Hors D'Ouevres sont un Jeu D'Enfant, it says), wearing a loose cream maternity dress and one red shoe, one black shoe. Her detachment and introversion -- along with the icy, schizoid song structures, where everything comes in fours and the harmonies are super-spooky -- wins the day, and the audience looks as inwardly rapt as she does. Again I'm struck by the massive introversion of the Japanese -- how refreshingly non-demonstrative they are. I scan deeply rapt faces, yet the applause after each song is a tiny, shy flutter (and Hirono claps too). For the first time I meet Hirono's husband, who's carrying her daughter, Miona. He tells me they're thinking of moving back to the city from the countryside.



After the show I run into an American curator on the Hibiya Line -- Gabriel Ritter from LA MoCA. He's the one who put together Out of the Ordinary -- New Video from Japan, which deals with the post-Murakami generation I call Supereveryday, following descriptions by the group's "mother", critic Midori Matsui. I mentioned his show in a recent Wired column. I have old ties with MoCA -- my last sustained period of living in Tokyo, back in 2002, was actually financed by a commission from MoCA to do a piece for their Digital Gallery. (The visuals were done by Florian Perret, who now lives and works in Kamakura -- Hisae and I will spend a couple of days with him.) Gabriel turns out to be heading down to Mizuma Gallery, and tells us we might be able to get passes to the opening, Sunday, of The Seasons in Art, a big show at Ueno Royal Museum by Aida Makoto and Akira Yamaguchi. We meet Mizuma, secure two passes, and, leaving Gabriel to chat with him, head up the hill to Daikanyama to shop.

I should probably be incredibly jet-lagged by now, but I'm not. The buzz of this city feeds me. It's constant stimulation. Daikanyama feels like family, somehow. In the United Bamboo store they have new Cornelius t-shirts and an old magazine (from 2004) featuring Miho's friends, including Rusty Santos, who recorded my last album. In Bonjour Records there are the usual Too-Many-DJs-style clubby disks, their sleeves as usual more interesting than their sounds. There's a stack of DVDs of a lavishly-packaged Malcolm McLaren interview from 1984. Somehow that's a very Tokyo experience; to see a surprisingly cool and fresh-looking 1984 Malcolm McLaren being picked up, out of all the things the West offers, and touted as the most important. Yes, you think, yes! McLaren needs to be celebrated. Tokyo, you're correct!



We bob up and down Daikanyama's narrow, boutique-studded alleys, over the hill, crossing the railway tracks and snapping the ramshackle greenhouse which is my fantasy Tokyo house -- one day that weird rooftop structure of corrugated plastic will be mine! -- and passing the Mr Friendly Cafe. My love of Tokyo is all tied up with having always been something of a celebrity here, and the possibilities of sex and money that entailed. My first visits were sell-out, groupietastic Quattro Club tours in the early 90s, my second spate a series of TV appearances and concerts with Kahimi Karie ten years ago. Oh, the seas of rapturous girl-faces we played to! Only in the early noughties did I actually live in Tokyo, and by that time I was beginning to be forgotten as a music star here. But it's nice to walk into Il Tempo, the Daikanyama design bookstore, and see the Phaidon Ice Cream book laid out in pride of place on their table -- fresh goods! -- and see for the first time the four glossy pages on my supposed career as an "emerging artist". Somehow it confirms that I'm still part of this crazy exclusive culture consumerist thing that goes on here -- a thing that I'd hate if it happened in the West, but that somehow Japanese taste-filters bring into alignment with my own values here, and allow me to love.