TOWARD SILENCE.

Near the end of the Second World War, soldiers and civilians on the Japanese home front constructed networks of underground bases in anticipation of an invasion that never came. In one of those dugout fortresses, in the mountains west of Tokyo, the future composer Toru Takemitsu was stationed in 1944; he was all of fourteen years old. Although no music aside from patriotic songs was allowed, one day a kindhearted officer ushered the children-soldiers into a back room and played some records for them, using a windup phonograph with a handmade bamboo needle. One disk had Lucienne Boyer singing "Parlez-Moi d'Amour." Takemitsu listened, he later said, in a state of "enormous shock." After so much sunless, soulless labor, that winsome chanson opened a world of possibility in his mind. Ever after, he honored the moment as the birth of his musical consciousness.

Takemitsu died in 1996, at the age of sixty-five. He was by far the most celebrated of Japanese composers, although his position in the firmament of modern music was not exactly dominant; some Western commentators condescendingly described him as an artist of a decorative type, a purveyor of atmospheric wisps of sound. In the past decade or so, however, his music has started edging into the repertory. Carnegie Hall has presented several Takemitsu performances this season, most recently a concert by the violist Yuri Bashmet and the Moscow Soloists. Recordings have multiplied into the dozens, on such labels as DG, BIS, and Naxos. Film connoisseurs cherish Takemitsu's scores for various masterpieces of postwar Japanese cinema.

Critics have underestimated Takemitsu because of the unstinting sensuousness of his music. It is rich in opulent chords, luminous textures, exotic tones that almost brush the skin, hazy melodies that move like figures in mist. The titles give a sense of the sound: "Twill by Twilight," "Toward the Sea," "How Slow the Wind." Yet the picture-book atmosphere is periodically disrupted by harsh timbres, rumblings of dissonance, engulfing masses of tone. Loveliness vanishes into darkness before it can be fully apprehended, like the song that Takemitsu heard inside the mountain.

Immediately after the end of the war, Takemitsu began teaching himself music, picking up techniques from a curious jumble of sources: his father's jazz collection; canonical modern pieces by Debussy, Schoenberg, and Messiaen; American works that showed up on Armed Forces radio and in reeducation libraries during the occupation; popular and Romantic melodies that flavored movie soundtracks. (An obsessive cineaste, he attended up to three hundred films a year.) A little later, he began investigating Western avant-garde ideas, falling under the spell of John Cage. There was a circularity to this chain of influence, because both Debussy and Cage, in their very different ways, had been heavily affected by Japanese music and Japanese thought. In a sense, Takemitsu was taking back what his tradition had given to the West.

The work that launched Takemitsu's international career was the Requiem for Strings, written in 1957. Stravinsky happened to hear it during a trip to Japan; radio engineers played it for the great man by accident, and, when they were about to go back to the intended playlist, he asked them not to stop. Stravinsky praised the composer in interviews, and prizes and commissions from Western groups quickly followed. The Requiem shows Takemitsu's style in embryo: the first violins begin with a soft, sustained F-sharp; second violins and cellos add a thick chord that consists of E-flat-major and B-flat-major triads superimposed; and the violas play a high phrase that twists slowly in place as harmonies shift underfoot. Peter Burt, in his book "The Music of Toru Takemitsu," observes that the first few bars vaguely resemble Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings," and speculates that Barber's score may have been found in the library of the American Civil Information and Education unit in Tokyo.

Stravinsky catapulted Takemitsu to fame, but film scores brought the composer to his widest public. While composers in America and ...