When he was a little kid in Tokyo, Haruomi Hosono lived next door to his maternal grandfather, Takao Nakatani, whose house was full of brittle shellac records of wartime pop, Hollywood soundtracks, jazz, and Japanese-language comic storytelling. He fell in love with boogie-woogie and bounced around ecstatically to Gene Krupa’s band with a girl from the neighborhood. After TV arrived in 1953, he was entranced by Clyde McCoy’s muted trumpet on a washing machine commercial starring Norihei Miki, and Les Paul’s “Caravan,” which ran behind an advert for Yashima’s Bonbons. The test patterns on Nippon Television, soundtracked by songs like Cole Porter’s “You Do Something To Me,” were portals into another universe. In his teens, he listened to the Far East Network beaming out pop, soul, country, and rock ‘n’ roll from the United States. When the psychedelic movement began in the ‘60s, he idolized Moby Grape and Buffalo Springfield, read Japanese poems and novels from the Taishō era, and yearned for a California he’d never seen.

Hosono House, Hosono’s 1973 solo debut, was written and recorded in an American-style home in an American-style town called Amerikamura, Sayama, Saitama Prefecture, about an hour outside Tokyo. Nearby Iruma Airbase became an American outpost from 1945, and the surrounding streets reflected its new inhabitants. “We couldn't do it in Tokyo,” he wrote years later in A Hundred Views of Hosono. “After all, music is closely connected to its scenery and atmosphere. If we couldn't go to the American West, the closest environment was Sayama.”

Hosono was self-consciously trying to expand on the feel of The Band’s 1969 debut Music From Big Pink, written together in a house half the members shared. Engineer Kenji Yoshino brought a 16-track recorder, and Hosono set about turning the house itself into an instrument, its acoustics adding a warmth and looseness that any high-end studio would have flattened.

Listing the influences Hosono channeled on the album — The Band, James Taylor, Little Feat — will only get you an approximation of the sound. “I discovered a lot of music that I liked, and what started out as dots started to form a line,” he would write later. “I didn't just enjoy it, I looked for the roots. That's thanks to the deep study I did. I started making my own music, and tried to go somewhere other than imitation. There may be some music in Hosono House that is similar to others, but I don't think there's just that.”

Across his career, Hosono followed the dots that formed a line, turning them into shapes that tested the limits of modern popular music. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, he and his bandmates in Happy End rewired the Americana they grew up with, connecting it to Japanese language and culture. Years later, Hosono, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Yukihiro Takahashi electrified modern pop music as Yellow Magic Orchestra, growing into a behemoth in Japan and inspiring other innovators the world over, from discotheques in Paris to warehouses in Chicago.

Hosono’s own later experiments with ambient and electronic music were and still are hugely influential, and he flung himself into exotica and left-field music with complete abandon. The artist behind Hosono House does not sound like the same person who made the soundtrack to a Bollywood film that does not exist on 1978’s Cochin Moon, the frictionless and fascinating electro-pop of 1982’s Philharmony, or the disorienting pseudo-ambient music of 1995’s Naga.

But Hosono House was the moment that Hosono began to make music that was unmistakably his own. At once snug-sounding and panoramic, it approaches Americana holistically, rifling through genres like a kid spinning single-play records on his grandfather’s electric gramophone. He toys with country, folk, rock, soft funk, and even calypso sounds, but its magic lies in how porous the lines between those genres feel. Hosono’s bass — the instrument he was best known for — is playful and laid-back, and his voice has the welcoming charm of an artist tracking a demo with some friends in their bedroom. Sung entirely in Japanese, it has a slightly uncanny feel.

It is more popular now than it has been at any point since its release in 1974. It has been re-released, re-recorded (backwards, as Hochono House) by Hosono himself, and held up as an all-time classic by artists on both sides of the Pacific. Harry Styles heard the album on a trip to Japan and loved it so much that he named his third album Harry’s House as a tribute.

Now it has been reimagined again, as Hosono House Revisited, this time by many of the musicians whose art Hosono has inspired. Revisited features a diverse range of artists that reflects the breadth of Hosono House’s influence, including his contemporary and collaborator Akiko Yano, lead cheerleader in North America Mac DeMarco, Flipper’s Guitar co-founder Keigo Oyamada a.k.a. Cornelius, and jazz-funk artist John Carrol Kirby. It is a fittingly kaleidoscopic tribute.

Particularly striking, however, is one of the two songs re-recorded in English. Sam Gendel’s spare acoustic cover of “Koi wa Momoiro,” is totally enthralling. Translated fully into English and renamed “My Love Is Peach-Colored,” it is, Hosono wrote in a brief email to The FADER, the first song he heard from the project. He described it as “surprising” and “refreshing,” and, up next to the original, it is an immensely creative reinterpretation, its melancholy derived as much from its subtle discordance as from Gendel’s whisper-quiet voice. For those who, like me, don’t speak a word of Japanese, Gendel’s translation reveals the song’s gentle, cloud-covered existentialism for the first time: “This is the road I set foot on before / A road by the river / Taking a peek through the gap among clouds / I saw a vaguely familiar town.”

Translating Hosono’s work is in itself a weighty undertaking. Much has been made of Hosono’s previous band, Happy End, singing in Japanese rather than English. And though they weren’t the first band to lay Japanese lyrics over Western rock sounds, they were the most prominent and, often, controversial. Precisely why they became such lightning rods in the “rock-in-Japanese” debate in the early ‘70s is a knotty and complex topic, one that takes in notions of Japanese post-war and post-colonial identity, and ideas about authenticity that we in the West, a half-century on, don’t instinctively grasp. But it’s clear that Hosono wanted more than just the sounds and structures of American music: he admired, maybe even envied, their connection to their own America. “The key to their music was that they brought the essence of American roots music into their sound,” he told Red Bull Music Academy in 2014. “That led to their originality. We realized that, and we thought about what our own roots were. We were disconnected from our own roots.”

In the context of Japan in the 1970s, that’s a bold idea. Michael K. Bourdaghs writes in Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop that Happy End (and their primary lyricist, Takashi Matsumoto), weren’t “trying to lay claim to an authentic tradition: the band explicitly denied that any authentic tradition was available to them. Rather they chose to sing in a form that no reference to the past could authenticate, precisely so as to create a new authenticity in the present.” He quotes from an essay Matsumoto wrote in 1971 (itself, obviously, translated into English): “There is a wind blowing that transcends history[...] It’s time to take a trip. To find Japan.” Lifting American sounds and singing in Japanese was its own sort of radicalism, an attempt to make it new, to begin traditions rather than gazing longingly at old ones.

The truth is that the wind has not stopped blowing. History is always there to be transcended. The lines between rock and country, calypso and Taishō-era poetry, this country and that one, are fuzzier and flimsier than cultural demagogues — more numerous and powerful every week — would have us believe. Hosono has spent the better part of a lifetime proving it through his music, and Gendel’s “My Love Is Peach-Colored” is of the same spirit. It does to Hosono’s “Koi wa Momoiro” what Hosono House did to Americana: it is a warped reflection of a warped reflection, beaming back a new image.

A few years ago, Hosono played a handful of shows in the U.K. and the U.S. I was lucky enough to see him at the Barbican in London, where Sakamoto and Takahashi joined him for an impromptu rendition of “Rydeen.” It would be their last performance together. A year later, he played two shows in the United States, one in Los Angeles and one in New York. At the latter, I sat down with him for a brief interview. He was unflinchingly polite, and, though he spoke through a translator, he clearly understood my questions in English. I asked how he felt about his newfound fame in the West, particularly among musicians. “Very surprised,” he said. “I wasn’t really creating music for people. I was creating music that I wanted to listen to. It was recorded before the internet, so it was in a closed world. I didn’t think that it would get to this point where it has spread. I’m very happy, but I don’t really understand the situation.”

It’s easy to imagine Gene Krupa being similarly bemused by a little kid in Japan bouncing around to his single-player records, or Les Paul being taken aback by the fact that his guitar lick on a confectionery advert inspired a young musician on the other side of the planet. The world gets smaller as sound travels faster, and, while there will always be imitators, there will always be those making their own music, transcending history, borrowing from elsewhere, and building something entirely new. Here, a Californian jazz musician borrows from Hosono and creates something new, just as Hosono himself once did with the jazz musicians and Californian bands that inspired him. There could hardly be a more fitting tribute.