This is only the second work of fiction that Japanophile and polymath Ian Buruma has published, and it isn’t hard to imagine the thought processes that led him to opt again for the form. He’s always been an enthusiast for Japanese cinema, and the long career of the Japanese actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi must have seemed like an ideal subject for his talents. But there may have been problems of accountability and confidentiality that led Buruma to reject his usual non-fiction approach. The good news, however, is that he’s managed to come up with an exceptionally absorbing and enjoyable novel instead.
Buruma could write a history of Japanese cinema with ease, and The China Lover is in many ways an attempt at just such a project without the necessity of being all-inclusive. It has thee different narrators and they’re all film buffs: the first in his official capacity as promoter of Japanese culture in 1930s Manchuria; the second as a film critic on the post-war Japan Evening Post; and the third through his involvement in making soft-core romantic movies in Tokyo before going to the Middle East as a convert to the cause of Palestinian militancy. I counted 41 films mentioned by name in the book, and in addition several illustrious film directors appear in cameo roles.
This device allows Buruma to follow the career of Yamaguchi through its many phases in a way that would have been impossible using a single narrator. She is a real-life figure, of course, and Buruma informs us that she “graciously allowed me to interview her on several occasions in Tokyo.” Now called Otaka Yoshiko, her birth name, she grew to fame in 1930s Manchuria as Li Xianglan (李香蘭, Ri Koran in Japanese) playing Chinese roles in films that presented the Japanese presence there in an almost invariably favorable light. The fact that she was actually born Japanese herself was carefully concealed, and her efforts, especially her 1940 film China Nights, led to a brief enthusiasm for all things Chinese back in Japan, following the inevitable vilification of China in general that had accompanied Japan’s military incursions into the country earlier in the decade.
After World War II, Yamaguchi returned to Japan before emigrating to the US where, as Shirley Yamaguchi, she starred in several Hollywood productions. Back in Tokyo in the 1960s she re-invented herself again as a TV talk-show hostess, traveled to Vietnam and the Middle East as a TV reporter, and finally entered politics where she served 18 years in the upper house of the Japanese parliament.
There can’t be many people today possessed by the romance of Manchukuo, Tokyo’s puppet state in Manchuria that flourished from 1932 until the end of Japan’s imperial ambitions in 1945 and was ruled over by the last scion of China’s Qing Dynasty, Emperor Pu Yi (溥儀). Buruma imagines just such a romantic, however, as the first of his three narrators, a man who ran an organization there for the promotion of New Asian Culture, albeit in part as a cover
for other activities.
His second narrator is a young gay American who finds the land of his heart’s desire in the devastated Tokyo of 1946. He works initially censoring films, is sent back home in disgrace after director Nobuo Hotta’s film Time of Darkness is passed for distribution, but manages soon after to return, this time as a film critic. This job leads to his extending his contacts with Japanese cinema celebrities of the day, Yamaguchi included.
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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