Several times Emi warns me not to copy the way she speaks, for male and female speech in Japan is quite different. When I ask her how I should speak in a given situation, her answer is often ‘You’re a man. You can say anything you like.’ The truth is somewhat different, but the general idea is correct – men are permitted much more freedom in what they say than are women.

In non-verbal expression, however, the greater latitude seems to belong to women. Whereas men’s faces have only two states, dead-pan and riotous laughter, the women’s faces are much more complex – more like the surface of a lake, rippled this way and that by the breezes of thought passing over them, and deeper currents below. The delicious crinkling of the brow, the sudden glance to the sky as a new idea breaks the surface, the pursing of the lips, the wide-eyed round-mouthed exaggeration of surprise, closely followed by a giggle of pleasure. Nothing could be more bewitching.

And women exercise greater prosodic range than men.

There are the intense sympathisers: women who keep up a constant stream of interjections while men are speaking: ‘mmmm, mm, ahhhh, soooo-so-so-so, hai, mmmm, aah.’ In Japan, men declaim, women assent. These female sounds can be at times so expressive they can lull men back into memories of being in their mother’s arms.

There are the female voices so hauntingly beautiful that we are called back again and again to hear them: like Miho, or the woman at the Japanese embassy in London, or the announcer at the Tokyu Hands store in Shibuya, whose announcements always began with a soft, lilting and achingly delicate ‘o-kyaku-sama…’. I was driven to take my minidisc recorder into the store, and tried to capture her voice, but the background noise always spoilt the effect.

There are also those women who speak so slowly and perfectly, deliberately making themselves easily understood for a gaijin listener.

And then there are the demure women, who still prefer to be kissed and embraced only in private – even today there are many to be found.

There are the poetic and tantalising literary ladies of Heian times: Fujiwara Michitsuna no Haha, Murasaki Shikibu, Izumi Shikibu, Sugawara no Musume, and Sei Shonagon.

There are the penis-severing vampires and necrophiliacs, like Abe Sada, made famous in Oshima’s In the realm of the senses.

There are the uninhibited exhibitionists, who will demand a kiss in a department store, the tanned ko-gyaru, or the otherwise ordinary girls who wear skirts decorated with photographically realistic prints, which make the skirt look see-through, and appear to reveal a pair of thighs and knickers.

There are the married women who manage the house, bring up the children, feed the husband, but also have time to meet their friends every day, for coffee or noodles, or to attend classes in one of the many Japanese cultural traditions. Women who are self-directed, not living vicariously though their husbands’ professional doings. Women who seem to have a private life that their husbands can only dream of.

There are the perfect girlfriends (for the undeserving western male) depicted over and over again in the literature; The modern Madame Butterfly by Karen Ma, The lady and the monk by Pico Iyer, undemanding women who will do everything and anything for a man, including looking beautiful, cooking and cleaning, enjoying the sex and even providing pocket money.

And there are the lovers who have no inhibitions about showing their bodies, who present themselves as playgrounds for our every fantasy, are enthusiastic about sex, orgasmic to an extreme degree, and as sensually seductive as it is possible to be…