“My conception of music isn’t based on day-to-day time,” Ryuichi Sakamoto tells an interviewer early in Elizabeth Lennard’s 1984 documentary Tokyo Melody. “In Japan, where music is everywhere, what we might call universal time continues to exist on the same basis as our day-to-day time.”

The dialectical implications of that claim move in two directions. Music is based in “universal time,” but stays close to the everyday, the demotic, the “popular.” It stays distinct from day-to-day time, dwelling in an aesthetic and spiritual temporality, but can live nowhere else.

Sakamoto suggests that a properly everyday and “popular” music — one that couldn’t really exist before imperial war and nuclear devastation imposed modernity absolutely on the country — is one that is necessarily bizarre, otherworldly, suggestive of another life beyond the pervasive social conformity that has been the subject of a century of Japanese art. In his work as a solo artist, member of electronic pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), and impresario in the golden age of J-pop, Sakamoto intertwined, in assemblages at once jagged and fluid, styles and sources: Western pop and the classical tradition, the most outré fragments of postwar electronic music and a great sweep of what would become “world music,” layers of the history of avant-garde and popular music, with more confidence and resourcefulness than perhaps anyone else. His easy movement between art, pop, and the gilded precincts of the middlebrow was facilitated by a personal magnetism he frequently disavowed.