I believe I have listened to quite a large variety of music over the years.

Rock, techno, Shibuya-kei, Kayokyoku, J-POP, folk, visual kei, club music. During one period, I walked through Tokyo with Underworld playing in my ears; at another, I was drawn to the dry violence of BLANKEY JET CITY. I passed through the lightness of Kenji Ozawa and Flipper's Guitar, and listened to the pop music of aiko, Gen Hoshino, and Kaela Kimura. Girls' Generation's "MR. TAXI," YOASOBI's "Idol," and Anri's "Sadness Is Unstoppable" all reside in the same ears.

Listed like this, it simply looks like a miscellaneous mix. But lately, I have come to wonder if I was not jumping across genres, but rather following a subterranean water vein through my listening.

Genres are merely labels attached after the fact. Rock, techno, J-POP, Kayokyoku, folk, club music—while they are all convenient classifications, the places where the body actually responds lie slightly askew from them.

For instance, the tremor in a voice, or a presence before it forms into words. The way the cityscape shifts the moment a song begins. The undecided space of time just before the chorus sets in. The way a deep sadness flows beneath a cheerful melody. The slight hint of an ending somewhere in a song designed for dancing. The way that the more pop a song is, the more it harbors things destined to vanish. Perhaps those were the things I was listening to.

That is why, even if the genres differ, there are songs that touch upon the selfsame water vein.

What exists in Underworld's "Born Slippy" or "Pearl's Girl" is the speed and loneliness of the city. Rather than club music, it is closer to the physical sensation of walking through Tokyo at night. In BLANKEY JET CITY, there is a sense of fragile things running forward without breaking. Though violent, they are somehow delicate, possessing a youthfulness like a boy who has grown up into an adult. What exists in Kenji Ozawa and Shibuya-kei is the lightness of citation and connection. Rearranging past music, books, films, streets, and fashion as if pulling them from record shelves—this was not merely a matter of style, but a methodology for re-editing the world.

In aiko's "Kabutomushi," there is the temperature of a love that remains deep in the body, and in Gen Hoshino's "Koi," there is a release where the body spontaneously begins to move within everyday life. Kaela Kimura's "Butterfly" possesses the strength of pop music transformed into a form of blessing, while Girls' Generation's "MR. TAXI" carries the speed and semiotics that cross Asian metropolises. In YOASOBI's "Idol," character, fiction, gaze, and desire all rise up as a single, dazzling surface.

Each appears to be entirely different music. Yet, within me, they connect somewhere. The body, vanishing things, quiet voices, youthfulness, leaps, connections, the city, the hint of an ending. And emotions that do not yet have names. Perhaps those were the things I was pursuing.

To listen to music was not to select a favorite genre. It was to touch beforehand upon something for which I did not yet have words.

When listening to a certain song, I sometimes suddenly recall an old path. I was not even listening to that song in that place, yet for some reason the landscape rises up. The light in front of the station, a convenience store at night, the end of summer, beneath the highway overpass. The atmosphere after saying goodbye to someone. A time when something seemed about to begin, but ultimately never did.

Music is not a storage device for memories. Rather, it preserves things before they become memories. That is why when I listen to them again years later, my past self is there. Not a self as clear as a photograph, but a self more ambiguous, closer to the body. A self that was not yet anyone, a self trying to become something, a self trying to run away from something. A self that pretended to have given up on something, while not yet fully able to do so. That self returns, if only slightly, from within the song.

When listening through the lens of genre, music is organized. But when listening through a water vein, rather than being organized, songs connect of their own accord. From Underworld to Tokyo at night, from BLANKEY to youthfulness, from Shibuya-kei to citation culture, from aiko to the body, from Gen Hoshino to daily life, from Anri to city pop, from Girls' Generation to Korean cities and competitive society, from YOASOBI to character and fiction. And these, in turn, connect to other writings, memories, and landscapes within myself.

This is not criticism, nor is it music history. It is not an accurate disc guide either. It is simply a collection, gathered after the fact, of how I have listened.

I was listening to music not through genres, but through water veins. That vein, perhaps, still flows underground today. One day, when listening to an old song, something suddenly rises up. Not nostalgia or sentimentality, but something like a question that has not yet ended.

What was I listening to? What was I responding to? Why does only that song still remain in my body today?

I believe the fragments of this music series will serve as a place to dig into that question, little by little. Through water veins rather than genres, through scents rather than classifications, through bodily responses rather than explanations. In that manner, I would like to once again trace the music I have listened to.

© SHIRO & Co.

First published: 2026-05-29