Elf Sternberg

Layers is a costuming magazine, I see (I guess I should have been able to tell that from the rest of your comment by context, but I haven't had my coffee yet this morning). I guess the question is: how much does she need to decipher? This is only vaguely cryptography, in that the information is coded in a language she doesn't know.

There are three alphabets in Japanese, and one of them, Katakana, is directly translatable into English (indeed, it is mostly made up of borrowed English words). You can recognize it by the blocky square quality (http://www.genki-online.com/kyozai/katakana.html) of the letters. Hiragana (http://www.tokyowithkids.com/fyi/hiragana_chart.html) is the traditional "spell it like it sounds" alphabet of Japanese.

Looking at the covers of a few issues of Layers, it seems to be mostly aimed at middle-school kids, so it has the simpler 2000-character Kanji sometimes, but is mostly in Hirigana or Katakana. That's just the covers; I can't see the content.

If there's Kanji, there's no way around it: you need a SKIP dictionary. It's the easiest "look it up" dictionary for Japanese, because it lets you figure out which of the 2000 Kanji you could be looking at just by counting the number of strokes that make up the word.