In order to cover Yamaguchi’s exploits as a political TV journalist beginning in the 1960s, Buruma invents his third narrator, this time a Japanese passionate about the cause of the Palestinians. He goes to the Middle East to train in guerilla techniques and is imprisoned in Lebanon after his involvement, as a member of the Japanese Red Army, in the Lod Airport Massacre of 1972.
It will be obvious that this scenario allows Buruma to share his insights into huge swathes of Japanese 20th-century history. These insights are welcome, and the fact that the three different narrative voices are not always made as distinct as a seasoned novelist would have made them scarcely matters. They’re distinct when Buruma remembers to make them so, but when he’s delivering what are clearly his own judgments on Japan and Japanese affairs there’s rarely any doubt as to who’s talking.
Nevertheless, this is a fascinating and highly readable book, informative about a whole range of topics from perceived Jewish involvement in 1930s Manchuria to such landmarks of Japanese cinema as its first
on-screen kiss (given and received by Yamaguchi in Ichiro Miyagawa’s Sounds of Spring).
There’s a hilarious chapter describing a visit to Tokyo, and request for guidance from Buruma’s second narrator, by Truman Capote. “I thought you might be my Cicerone in this garden of vice, or should I say my Mephistopheles?” He proves dissatisfied by the prospect, which the narrator finds so alluring, of young Japanese males, however — “Just look at their thumbs, honey. It never fails.”
Yamaguchi is treated with respect, and even affection. Her short-lived marriage to the Japanese artist Isamu Noguchi, for instance, is evoked with discretion. She’s seen in essence as an example of humanity’s ability to make itself new, just as the Japanese nation remade itself after 1945. In a way it’s her innocence that saves her, and Buruma’s own humanity and wide-ranging cultural sympathies are the perfect tools for depicting so many attitudes, decades, characters and locations.
This fine novel is yet another opportunity for the author to display his love for a country that is so endlessly intriguing, so richly exotic and yet, inevitably, not without its faults — for which, as Buruma would be the first to argue, it has suffered so disproportionately and so hideously.
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