It's just past nine on a rainy Tuesday evening in Causeway Bay and I'm playing text message tag with Ghost Style, one of a tiny handful of stars lighting up Hong Kong's murky hip hop sky.

As a gathering place for Hong Kong's young and moneyed, I'd figured this part of town would be an appropriate place to tap into the mainline of local youth culture. But on this night, a substantial portion of that demographic seems to be waiting in line to eat sushi at the restaurant where we have arranged to meet.

I text the grim seating prognosis to Ghost Style, and he texts back double quick, a skill no doubt developed from years of spinning wax.

"Meet in front of the Watson's around corner; sushi upstairs.''

Five minutes and four escalators later, Ghost Style and I are seated in a well-hidden but noisy Japanese restaurant, plates of sushi on the table between us. My concern that the noise might hinder the interview proves groundless - if anything, Ghost Style is a man who thrives on clamor.

This is a man with a mission, namely to put Hong Kong - a city normally associated with prepackaged, cookie-cutter Cantopop acts - on the worldwide hip-hop map. And he just might do it.

His most recent project was creating clever rhymes for the soundtrack to the movie Initial D. Ghost Style's lyrics over thumping beats are background to the speed-driven, joint Hong Kong-Japanese production about high life and higher octane. Ghost Style describes being chosen to work on the film as an "inevitable blessing.''

"If a film is being produced in Los Angles and the producer needs a rapper, they've got a whole Rolodex to chose from. In Hong Kong, though, who they gonna call?''

The answer, to paraphrase that odiously popular 1980s paranormal comedy film, is Ghost Style, the adopted name of Brendon Ho.

There are a few other names in the local rap world. MC Yan (who Ghost Style has worked with on occasion) is still working and playing locally. And Yan's former partner from the now defunct LMF DJ Tommy is still active in the Hong Kong scene. But Ghost Style possesses certain multicultural roots that give him an edge over the local hip-hop competition.

Though he describes himself as pure Hong Kong Chinese, the rapper was born in Montreal. He returned to his family roots in the SAR when he was 10.

His outlawish demeanor belies his 30-plus years as he tells me over a plate of dragon rolls: "After high school I went back to Montreal for a while but I'd already become hooked on the manic 24-hour energy of Hong Kong. I went looking for it all over Montreal but never quite found it. Hong Kong by that time was too deep in my blood so I came back one day before the handover. I've been here ever since.''

Though he'd long been into the art of sampling sounds, making beats and bending the rhymes to match, something had yet to click. As he puts it, the music in his head was still several levels above the sounds he produced. It took a literal brush with death to awaken the muse.

One night in the waning days of the last century, the young rapper ingested "way too much'' recreational chemicals. He recalls prowling the streets of Hong Kong until he reached sensory overload and passed out.

"I hovered in a kind of limbo for hours and I knew I was hanging on the edge of life and death,'' he says of the experience

"When I finally came to, I realized how easily I could have gone over to the other side. Something inside me clicked after that and I found I was able to bring the music I heard in my head into the outside world.''

Adopting the name Ghost Style to remind him of his brush with eternity, he began making music in earnest. His first album, Alias, released in 2000, was the first English rap album to come out of Hong Kong.

Shortly after he formed hip-hop group Supathugz, who put out two albums, How Deep is Yo Love and So Hot it Hertz. The group disbanded to pursue other projects and Ghost Style went solo both as an artist and producer.

To date, the Initial D project is the biggest feather in his professional cap. But the discount bins of hip-hop history are filled with has-beens who thought they could rest on their laurels and Ghost Style is already looking to the future.

"I'm starting my own label and I'm working with this young guy Dennis Zee who's into Cantonese rap, something I'm interested in promoting.''

The subject of linguistics is naturally of interest to a man who earns his pay rhyming over beats. Cantonese is his mother tongue ("We spoke Cantonese mixed with English when I was a kid in Montreal; I never got the hang of French'') and he flirts fluently with our waitress. But Hong Kong's lingua franca is not his weapon of choice when it comes to rhyme.

"I just don't rap in Cantonese,'' he admits. `It's too hard and I can't do it with flow. Cantonese is difficult, man, you get the wrong tone and people misunderstand you, at best. Worse, you say something that makes you sound `wack.' I've got nothing but respect for musicians who can rap in Cantonese,'' he says. He names FAMA, The Chef, Kwokkin and MC Yan.

Linguistics aside, Ghost Style's lyrics evoke an urban feeling suited to life in Hong Kong. On Edge, an unreleased rap (available only on the Internet at http://www.soundclick.com/bands/5/ghoststyle-music.htm), Ghost Style remixed an instrumental track originally produced by The Alchemist, then provided his own lyrics.

The product was a far cry from the sugary sentiment of Cantopop: On the street, ladies look at me they so sweet/ I say hello, I'm a gentleman, not a creep/ She smiles yo she got crooked teeth/ I crook the good looks from your fakebook/ Girls put they numbers in my phonebook/ Some sms sex / Photo express/ Abbreviation complex/ You my conquest/ Can I request/ Check your residence/ Check you undress/ Check the size of my presence.

Ghost Style says his lyrics speak to a segment of Hong Kong society not often represented. While it does not have the same level of poverty, desperation and barely concealed oppression that gave birth to hip-hop in the ghettoes of Black America, the city's street culture has a distinct flavor.

"Some people see local street culture as superficial and there's some truth to this. You get a lot of well-off kids aping street culture as a fashion statement, posers. But many Hong Kong adolescents are relatively poor and disaffected, kids who have bigger problems than parents making them study too much,'' he says.

This segment of society may be less visible in Hong Kong than in New York or London, but "it is definitely present.''

Hong Kong street culture, says the rapper, is as deep or shallow as one wishes to look. "If you want it to be all about fashion and bling-bling, we got more of that in Hong Kong than anywhere else. But it runs much deeper than that. You just need to know what you're getting into.''

Though Ghost Style's lyrics tend to be more thoughtful, he doesn't knock the Cantopop for which Hong Kong is known.

"Hong Kong may be known for creating plastic music in the world but it's the most finely crafted plastic music in the world, and I'm not banging it at all. If anything, I appreciate the effort that goes into making it. I just do something different.''

And while Ghost Style raps about Hong Kong, he shies away from rapping about politics. "Nothing personal, politics just bugs me. Once you start rapping about politics, people expect you to have an opinion about everything all the time.''

For now, Ghost Style's subjects are broadly Hong Kong.

"I represent Hong Kong. That's where I rap from, and that's what I write my lyrics about. Hong Kong is the perfect market for hip-hop, and it's only going to get bigger.''

Though available in stores, Ghost Style concedes that most of his stuff gets heard on the Internet.

"My Internet friends are all like, `Hey I love your music, I downloaded a whole album on iTtunes,' and I'm like, `Damn, that's a surprise. I never registered on iTunes.'

"But I can't complain. I'm happy that my stuff is being enjoyed. Besides, when it comes to sampling beats, I'm a total criminal. I go to a lot of second-hand stores, pick up old vinyl and sample away. I suppose this is one of the reasons I love working in Hong Kong. They're not coming after rappers for sampling. Not yet.''

For now, Ghost Style is comfortable wearing the dual caps of rapper and producer, busily putting together compilations featuring some of the better and lesser-known hip-hop artists in Asia. But there's an art to getting the Hong Kong sound right, especially when it comes to Cantonese rap.

"The thing about Canto rap is that you've got to be skillful. If you put out angry raps, people will ignore it. If you put out sugar-coated rap, people will still ignore it because they've heard it all before. So, you've got to choose your material wisely.''

As to what material is soft enough to gain a wide audience but hard enough to be interesting - what subject is quintessentially Hong Kong?

"Shopping, man,'' he says with a grin. "Come to the Hong Kong shopping fest 2005 and shop your cares away!'' The rapper laughs and finishes off the last spoonful of chawan mushi.

"Nah man, I'm just kidding. But commerce is HK's lifeblood, right? And I'm representing Hong Kong all the way.''