Imagine if you will a female Japanese artist who dresses as a hamster and scurries round amid wood chips and scraps of torn paper, wide-eyed, nibbling on croissant-size, cookie-dough "sunflower seeds." Yes, in this city with its insatiable sweet tooth for art, it does sound like yet another serving of cotton-candy cuteness.

But I took a chance on Sako Kojima's current exhibition, because her new work is executed in the comfort food of artistic media, good old-fashioned paint on canvas. I was also overdue for a visit to northeast Shinjuku's Kagurazaka, whose tiny streets host scores of independent printing factories and a quartet of very independent galleries, the Kodama, Takahashi, Sasahara and the Yamamoto Gendai -- where Kojima's "The Gloaming," opened last Saturday night.

A bit about Kagurazaka -- while it's good to see Tokyo's leading contemporary art spaces in Roppongi and Kiyosumi-Shirakawa becoming more "world-class," I can't help thinking that as their stock has risen internationally, their domestic operations have become more predictable. If one imagines these elite galleries as a miniaturized version of New York City's West Chelsea, then the Kagurazaka spots, which opened a couple of years back, are a mini-Williamsburg. In a word, funky.