My Account | RSS
| ||
|
||
The China Lover
by Ian Buruma
Reviewed by Isaac Stone Fish
"Don't be a frog in the Japanese well," urges Yoshiko Yamaguchi throughout this enchanting fictionalized account of modern Japanese history and one of its lesser known personages.
Born in Manchuria to Japanese parents, Yamaguchi becomes a famous Mandarin language actress and singer in World War 2 China, partially by keeping her Japanese identity a secret. After a brief stint acting in postwar Japan, she moves to Hollywood to try to make a career as Shirley Yamaguchi. She finally returns to Japan to be a journalist and "fight against all the stupid prejudices in this world." Ian Buruma, novelist and Japanese expert, uses her life story as the frame upon which to view different isms of modern Japanese life, trumpeted by different narrators: A Japanese in Manchuria, an American in Post-War Japan, and a Japanese in the Middle East. A fascination with Yamaguchi and an obsession with the cinema bind the narrators together.
The novel opens with the story of Saito Daisuke, who moves to China in the 1930s to seek his fortune. He learns fluent Mandarin, and gets a job searching for local talent for Manchurian film companies. He first recognizes Yamaguchi's appeal and helps catapult her to stardom, but can not save himself when the Japanese empire crumbles.
Part two follows the American Sidney Vanoven in post-war Japan as he obsesses over Japanese language, cinema and men. Working his way into the rarefied film circle, he becomes a friend and confident of Yamaguchi, until he criticizes one of her films during a phone conversation. She hangs up and never speaks with him again.
The third part is narrated by Sato Kenkichi, who meets Yamaguchi in her third incarnation as a television journalist. A former assistant director of porn films, Sato joins the Japanese red army. The novel ends with him languishing in a Beirut prison after murdering a Jewish scientist who supposedly had "plans to build a Jewish bomb that will threaten the lives of all the Arabs."
All three males share the desire to escape their narrow upbringings. For Sato the talent scout, "China, with its vast spaces, its teeming cities, and its five thousand years of civilizations, always represented an escape from the well." He leaves his native village, "a small place in a narrow-minded province of a small country," to meet his destiny in China and to civilize Manchuria. Sato truly believes the Japanese can help the Chinese rid themselves of the imperialist Westerners, and, with Yamaguchi, is one of the book's title characters. He lavishes praise on the cities of Manchuria, especially Mukden, "the most cosmopolitan city in Manchuria, more modern even than Tokyo in its best days."
But it is the Chinese women that draw him to the country. "Where the Western woman is large and coarse, like an overripe fruit, and the Japanese woman is small, shapeless and bland, like cold beancurd, the Chinese woman is a banquet of flavors, spicy, sweet and sour, bitter; she is the finest specimen of a racial selection that found its perfect form after more than five thousand years of civilization."
Vanoven escapes from the narrow mores and homophobia of Bowling Green, Ohio, to a Tokyo that to him is like "the Garden of Eden. He loves the elegance of the Imperial Hotel, and the mundane: "If I ate enough rice, I often mused, I might even start smelling like everybody else. Every time I fell to my knees in worship, no matter how squalid the shrine of the moment, a public toilet, the park, the dank room of a short time hotel, I do so hoping I could possess something of the Japanese."
Sato Kenkichi, the stammering, ungainly third narrator, finds his escape from the complacency of 1960's Japan in radical politics. Through the advice of various people, including the hard drinking fetish porn director known as "the King of Rape," and the now TV reporter Yamaguchi, Sato decides to liberate himself from his narrow island. Yamaguchi says "We Japanese have to make amends. You must do what you think is right. Don't just obey the authorities. Don't be a frog in the Japanese well." To him, this means taking up the militant Palestinian cause.
Buruma does an excellent job of portraying the men as a product of the ideologies of their respective eras. Sato the radical bemoans, "What was our program about the liberation struggle of the Palestinian people if not another kind of entertainment for the rabbits glued to their flickering shrines? To them it was a travelogue, political porn." Sato the talent scout knows the Japanese will be victorious, because "we were fighting for justice and freedom, while the imperialists were just defending their selfish interests, like thieves trespassing on a continent that wasn't theirs."
Yamaguchi's character is not perhaps as well drawn as the men's. Moving from career to career, man to man and competing ideologies, Buruma pours twenty years of Japanese history into her, and she is a bit unrealistic as a result.
Still, The China Lover is a compelling book and Ian Buruma juggles his ideologies and cinema images well. As Sato philosophizes in prison, "The colonization of our minds by the movies offers a certain solace (one is never alone) but it is terrifying too, for their voices drown out your own."
--
Isaac Stone Fish lives in Beijing and is involved in literature and media.
by Ian Buruma
Reviewed by Isaac Stone Fish
"Don't be a frog in the Japanese well," urges Yoshiko Yamaguchi throughout this enchanting fictionalized account of modern Japanese history and one of its lesser known personages.
Born in Manchuria to Japanese parents, Yamaguchi becomes a famous Mandarin language actress and singer in World War 2 China, partially by keeping her Japanese identity a secret. After a brief stint acting in postwar Japan, she moves to Hollywood to try to make a career as Shirley Yamaguchi. She finally returns to Japan to be a journalist and "fight against all the stupid prejudices in this world." Ian Buruma, novelist and Japanese expert, uses her life story as the frame upon which to view different isms of modern Japanese life, trumpeted by different narrators: A Japanese in Manchuria, an American in Post-War Japan, and a Japanese in the Middle East. A fascination with Yamaguchi and an obsession with the cinema bind the narrators together.
The novel opens with the story of Saito Daisuke, who moves to China in the 1930s to seek his fortune. He learns fluent Mandarin, and gets a job searching for local talent for Manchurian film companies. He first recognizes Yamaguchi's appeal and helps catapult her to stardom, but can not save himself when the Japanese empire crumbles.
Part two follows the American Sidney Vanoven in post-war Japan as he obsesses over Japanese language, cinema and men. Working his way into the rarefied film circle, he becomes a friend and confident of Yamaguchi, until he criticizes one of her films during a phone conversation. She hangs up and never speaks with him again.
The third part is narrated by Sato Kenkichi, who meets Yamaguchi in her third incarnation as a television journalist. A former assistant director of porn films, Sato joins the Japanese red army. The novel ends with him languishing in a Beirut prison after murdering a Jewish scientist who supposedly had "plans to build a Jewish bomb that will threaten the lives of all the Arabs."
All three males share the desire to escape their narrow upbringings. For Sato the talent scout, "China, with its vast spaces, its teeming cities, and its five thousand years of civilizations, always represented an escape from the well." He leaves his native village, "a small place in a narrow-minded province of a small country," to meet his destiny in China and to civilize Manchuria. Sato truly believes the Japanese can help the Chinese rid themselves of the imperialist Westerners, and, with Yamaguchi, is one of the book's title characters. He lavishes praise on the cities of Manchuria, especially Mukden, "the most cosmopolitan city in Manchuria, more modern even than Tokyo in its best days."
But it is the Chinese women that draw him to the country. "Where the Western woman is large and coarse, like an overripe fruit, and the Japanese woman is small, shapeless and bland, like cold beancurd, the Chinese woman is a banquet of flavors, spicy, sweet and sour, bitter; she is the finest specimen of a racial selection that found its perfect form after more than five thousand years of civilization."
Vanoven escapes from the narrow mores and homophobia of Bowling Green, Ohio, to a Tokyo that to him is like "the Garden of Eden. He loves the elegance of the Imperial Hotel, and the mundane: "If I ate enough rice, I often mused, I might even start smelling like everybody else. Every time I fell to my knees in worship, no matter how squalid the shrine of the moment, a public toilet, the park, the dank room of a short time hotel, I do so hoping I could possess something of the Japanese."
Sato Kenkichi, the stammering, ungainly third narrator, finds his escape from the complacency of 1960's Japan in radical politics. Through the advice of various people, including the hard drinking fetish porn director known as "the King of Rape," and the now TV reporter Yamaguchi, Sato decides to liberate himself from his narrow island. Yamaguchi says "We Japanese have to make amends. You must do what you think is right. Don't just obey the authorities. Don't be a frog in the Japanese well." To him, this means taking up the militant Palestinian cause.
Buruma does an excellent job of portraying the men as a product of the ideologies of their respective eras. Sato the radical bemoans, "What was our program about the liberation struggle of the Palestinian people if not another kind of entertainment for the rabbits glued to their flickering shrines? To them it was a travelogue, political porn." Sato the talent scout knows the Japanese will be victorious, because "we were fighting for justice and freedom, while the imperialists were just defending their selfish interests, like thieves trespassing on a continent that wasn't theirs."
Yamaguchi's character is not perhaps as well drawn as the men's. Moving from career to career, man to man and competing ideologies, Buruma pours twenty years of Japanese history into her, and she is a bit unrealistic as a result.
Still, The China Lover is a compelling book and Ian Buruma juggles his ideologies and cinema images well. As Sato philosophizes in prison, "The colonization of our minds by the movies offers a certain solace (one is never alone) but it is terrifying too, for their voices drown out your own."
--
Isaac Stone Fish lives in Beijing and is involved in literature and media.
Available in Asia from Paddyfield.com
|
