The slow days of winter are upon us, making an evening on the couch with a good book or tune more enticing than the sweaty confines of a live house or club. As folks slowly stream back into town from the New Year's holidays, there isn't a lot happening in the first few weeks of January anyway, so kick back and try dosing on these missives from Tokyo's steamy underground.

* * * For a long time Japanese comics, film and music were in the realm of the obsessive connoisseur, and the only information available was either through abstruse film textbooks or ranting fanzines. With the publishing of Steve McClure's "Nippon Pop," and Mark Schilling's "Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture," however, the ins and outs of Johnny's Jimusho and "wide shows" have been made a little clearer to the average foreign reader. As Pokemon conquers television sets and playgrounds worldwide, mainstream Japanese pop culture has truly gone above ground.

"Japan Edge: The Insider's Guide to Japanese Pop Subculture" (Cadence Books) sets out to do the same for the underground as well. The book's team of writers tackles cinema, manga and music, culminating with a roundtable discussion that highlights some of the overlaps among these various scenes.

Though packed full of groovy hints and useful (if disorganized) lists of what to buy and where to buy it, the book can't seem to pin down its audience. Is it an expanded fanzine in book form or is it attempting to be a comprehensive map to an area of Japanese culture hitherto little known to the masses? The digressive "Tokyo Diaries" section, essentially tidbits of the writer's explorations of fondly remembered parts of Tokyo, suggests the former. The handy guide for buying manga online suggests the later.

Mason Jones' exploration of Japanese noise walks the narrow line between the two, making it is by far the best part of the book. Through his Charnel Music mail-order service and later his music zine Ongaku Otaku, Jones was one of the first to export news on the Japanese "noise" scene, distributing the full-throttle chaos of Masonna and Merzbow to black-clad subcultural types in Berkeley and other similar subcultural zones.

Jones seems to understand the fanzine reader's incorrigible need for information. He gives a fairly concise historical overview of Japanese noise, identifying the key players and ending with an excellent discography for the novice (though the Boredoms' Eye Yamataka or Seiji Yamamoto are given short shrift, as is Ground Zero's Yoshihide Otomo).

Though both his projects, Charnel House and Ongaku Otaku, focus mostly on Jones' noise fetish, "Japan Edge" takes a more catholic approach to music, including reviews of pop and punk releases too. This in turn puts Jones' writing on the noise scene into some type of wider cultural perspective, again a gift to those looking for signposts in unfamiliar territory.

Unfortunately, the book's music (as opposed to noise) section is not nearly as complete. Boiling down the cacophony of music emitting from Japan's live houses into one "subculture" is clearly impossible; haphazard research doesn't help.

While noting the big names like Guitar Wolf, Buffalo Daughter and Sugar Plant, writer Yuji Oniki ignores many of the less famous yet, in some sense, more trailblazing groups such as Jackie and the Cedrics, Copass Grinders and Haco who continue to make music within the constraints of their own small subcultures. The continued vitality of Japan's hip-hop, club, or mellow-core scene is likewise ignored. Though all of these have gained some level of mainstream acceptance, they are still powered by smaller, indie labels and a feisty active underground.

Instead Oniki tries to make up for what amounts to a lack of information by long dissertations on Bob Dylan, and whatever else came to mind (where was his editor one wonders), little of which has to do with Japanese music of any sort. The discography is more about Sun Ra than Japanese music. The end result is a chapter more appropriate to quirky fanzine world than to what purports to be a "guide" to the Japanese underground.

* * *To approximate the delights of "Ice Scream," the latest single from Tokyo clubsters, Sha' Cho Mouse pour a bit of Moloko's hyphenated beats, a dash of Portishead's languid, lush arrangements, a tad of Cole Porter (tinkling piano keys abound) and blend gently.

The duo of Japanese singer Tomo and British-Japanese instrumentalist Maya relish such clever juxtapositions of musical tropes. (Think of Cornelius making dance-inflected electronica instead of kitsch pop.) Metal guitars share space with African flutes; sitars (the only real cliches in their sonic palette) mix it up with dance-floor rhythms.

Although the melange has garnerd the inevitable comparisons in the U.K. press to other cultural omnivores from Japan, the group has carved out a more musically adventurous universe than their so-called peers. The opening cut, "M.M.M.," on their last album "Photo, Synthesizer" (on rising Tokyo indie label NS Com) starts with an industrial rhythm track straight out of Einsturzende Neubauten (or even Nine Inch Nails) before unwinding into a piano interlude that could be lifted from a '40s Hollywood musical.

Purring in strangulated polysyllables, singer Tomo sounds like a Japanese Bjork. "Ice Scream" has her gently caressing notes with the aplomb of a church soloist before soaring into spitfire, almost tense scat. Again, it's a comparison that might invite notions of imitation. But vocal fireworks like these are hard to come by if they aren't natural. For Tomo, they seem to be in the genes.