Customer Reviews

The China Lover: A Novel

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An engrossing, wonderfully-written historical novel. Here's the premise: In 1940, at the height of Japan's military aggression during World War II, a movie called "China Nights" won the hearts of countless Japanese soldiers and patriots who were riveted by the stirring singing voice of the young girl who plays a Chinese orphan rescued by a Japanese officer who both loves and beats her. The singer became enormously popular, a symbol of subservience to Japan's self-image of benevolent but iron rule over Asia.

After Japan lost the war, the singer was accused of treason for helping her wartime captors. To escape execution, she revealed a secret -- that she was actually Japanese and had followed orders to pretend to be Chinese. She escaped to Japan and reinvented herself as a successful film actress, Yoshiko Yamaguchi, though she used the first name Shirley when she made it to Hollywood and Broadway.

Ian Buruma, a film buff and an accomplished writer of nonfiction about Asia, delivers a lushly rendered piece of historical fiction. Buruma conveys the exhilaration and devastation of Japan's military folly and its resulting moral hangover through the lens of the film world at the time. With a sharp yet generous eye, Buruma explores the moods and sensibilities of the movie business in wartime Shanghai and postwar Tokyo.

His novel seems to revel in and see through the filmmaking and its role in shaping memory and history. It's a cinematic story, in topic and form, made richer by the fertile emotional terrain of its fallible protagonists.

The story begins in Manchuria, narrated by a cultural official named Sato, whose day job is to promote cultural events that win over Chinese hearts and minds and whose nighttime pursuits satisfy a prodigious appetite for bedding Chinese actresses. As a Japanese patriot, Sato sneers at the haughty European colonials and is thrilled by news of Pearl Harbor.

Yet Sato is fascinated by the mysteries and challenges of life in a foreign culture, which fuel and soothe his restless nature. He also observes the realities of war with stark clarity, seeing Japan's military police as sadistic thugs whose real goal is to profit from illicit schemes and lawlessly exercise power over the helpless.

"The China Lover" overflows with intriguing characters, particularly Amakasu, a shadowy official who supervises Japan's propaganda efforts in China. I kept visualizing the oily haired fixer supreme who called the shots in the film "The Last Emperor" and put a pistol to his temple at the end.

Eventually, I put this novel down to look him up and discovered that Amakasu was indeed a true historical figure.

The second part of the book shifts to postwar Tokyo and is narrated by a young American soldier, Sidney, who works in the film censor's office, a perfect vantage point for watching a golden era of filmmaking begin to germinate. Buruma seems to know every nook and cranny of this landscape. Akira Kurosawa, Frank Capra, Truman Capote and others make charming, understated cameo appearances that give the story power.

In Tokyo, Yamaguchi refuses to acknowledge her wartime past and personifies Japan's painful mixture of denial, humility and determination to work her way out of previous moral failings of the war, all under the eye of a MacArthur-led occupation by the Americans. Those swirling pressures seem to get funneled into the creativity of film studios, with palpable results. "It was the natural flow of images, the beautifully timed cuts, and the camera work, which was intimate without being intrusive," Buruma writes. "There were few close-ups, and no false glamour. Here was life itself being discreetly but closely observed."

After a tempestuous marriage to a headstrong architect, Yamaguchi remarries and moves abroad, effectively disappearing from the public eye. Yet she reappears in the 1960s and reinvents herself again, this time as a TV journalist for a daytime program aimed at Japanese housewives, "What a Weird World: Yoshiko Yamaguchi Reports From the Front Line."

She ventures to Vietnam and Beirut to report on war and terrorism and focuses on the moral crimes she sees. The third section of this novel is improbably yet persuasively narrated by a Japanese terrorist who is jailed in Beirut in the 1970s when a band of Japanese radicals gets caught. (Yamaguchi later became a member of parliament for the conservative ruling party. She still lives in Tokyo.)

This novel, while finely drawn and true to the spirit of the history it covers, falls short in a couple of places. The character of Yamaguchi comes across as earnest and sincere, but she is just not as compelling as the narrators, who each see the moral compromises in others and in themselves. She feels flat in comparison. And though the characterization of each narrator is distinct, their voices all sound suspiciously like . . . Buruma's. It's a trade-off: Buruma's sharp insights and historical perspective tumble off the tongues of each narrator, and I was grateful for them, but sometimes they feel too smart for the mouth from which they spring.

Like many historic events, Japan's aggression in Asia during World War II is often remembered by the way we saw it depicted on film, whether in "The Bridge on the River Kwai," "Letters From Iwo Jima" or even in the black-and-white clips of old newsreels. Buruma knows the persuasive pull -- and the misleading simplicity -- that film can have on memory and history. His novel takes us deep into events of the 20th century and shows us with vivid strokes what it felt like.

If you like intricate plots, interesting characters, foreign settings, and historical accuracy, this is a book for you. I knew absolutely nothing about Japanese/Chinese relations or Manchuria during the war and I must admit I had to reread chapters in the first part of the book to gather an understanding of the history of the times, but after that I was totally pulled in.

The first chapter is so compelling and demonstrates the effect stories and imagination can have on the human condition. And then as the book unfolds, one begins to see how stories (movies) can have an effect on an entire nation; are they stories for the imagination or propaganda or both.

Although Ri Koran (or Shirley Yamaguchi or whatever her name could be) is the center of the story, the three men that tell her story at three different times in her life are the most interesting. They provide perfect foils to her personality as she evolves from someone who is knowingly manipulated to someone who manipulates those around her. All of this set in three different parts of the world in vastly different circumstances.

I loved this book. I loved the fact that real historical characters play a part (Truman Capote comes to mind), and the authenticity of the historical events as they unfolded in China, Japan, United States, and Lebanon. There are so many characters in this book and so many little unique connections between them, it was a fascinating read.

The previous reviews are detailed (and largely on the mark) so I won't go over the same ground, but I would highly recommend the book if you have a historical interest in Japan. Though heavily fictionalized, you get a feel for a Japan attempting to re-create itself in Manchuria. And if you know anything about Ri Koran and the songs she made famous (put "Ri Koran" into youtube), the book is even more enjoyable. Lastly, you can use this book as a jumping off point for further reading about the legacy of Japan in Manchuria (now Changchun, China) --- Japanese buildings are still part of its downtown, as well as its colonization of Taiwan (which predated the Manchurian misadventure). You have to wonder how things would be today, if Japan had been as successful in its colonial efforts as, say, England had been.

This is an enjoyable rather clever novel which manages to link the Japanese invasion of China and establishment of a puppet state in Manchuria, the American occupation of Japan, the war in Vietnam and the Palestinian struggle through the life of a Chinese-born Japanese woman who spent much of her life in the US.

It is based on a real character, a singer and actress known as Li Xianglan in China, Ri Koran in Japan and Shirley Yamaguchi in the US. She also worked in television as a presenter and was elected to the Japanese parliament.*

Obviously, a story like this is not easy to tell and the writer chose to have each part of her life told by different narrators - two Japanese and one American.

As a result, she is seen through the eyes of the observer and the reader learns more about him than her. One of the narrators is homosexual although what that brings to a story that is complicated enough is a mystery to me.

This approach works fairly well in the first two sections, set in Manchuria and Japan.

The Manchuria part is particularly good in terms of descriptions of events and characters, including real people.

The Japanese part is also quite good although it is a bit ham-fisted in its attempts to contrast the creation of postwar Japan with its strong American influence and the traditional Japan of tea ceremonies and samurai swordsmen.

However, the last section is a waste of paper. The narrator is a Japanese terrorist in prison for attacking an Israeli airport and killing civilians just as Japanese soldiers had done in China 40 years earlier. Shirley interviews him and there is a weak attempt to compare the Palestinian struggle against Israel with China's struggle against Japan.

It is so out of synch with the rest of the book that it should have been omitted and brings one of the most interesting books I have read in a long time to a feeble end.

*She bears an uncanny resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor in one picture.

A work of fiction, this interesting novel follows the real-life Japanese star Yoshiko Yamaguchi through the eyes of three men who are all captivated by her. The first part of the book takes place in China during the Japanese occupation before and during the Pacific War. Born in 1920 in the Japanese puppet state, Manchukuo, Yamaguchi is fluent in both her native language and Chinese. Blessed with exotic beauty and a lovely singing voice, she is soon to be used by the Japanese military propaganda machinery as a singer and actor in movies propagating the benevolence of the occupation to the occupied lands. By design of her militaristic masters she is required to hide her Japanese origins and ends up playing the part of a Chinese woman falling in love with handsome and good Japanese officers over and over again. Her rising star and success in Mukden and Shanghai under the name Ri Koran is witnessed by a kindly Japanese man working as producer in the film industry who knows her real identity. Highly critical of his militaristic compatriots, Mr. Sato's fortunes wax and wane in the treacherous wartime China but he remains always protective of Ri Koran who herself grows used to her own power over men of many walks of life.

Once the war is over, the heroine returns to Japan with dreams of hitting the big time in USA. She reinvents herself as Shirley Yamaguchi, playing the role of a beautiful Japanese woman this time falling in love with American soldiers in the movies. Her transformation is observed by a young homosexual fan from Ohio serving in the film censorship department of General MacArthur's occupation forces. He watches Shirley's debut on the Ed Sullivan show in a New York apartment in a party where the famous Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi is present. In real life, Noguchi and Yamaguchi fell for each other and were married in 1951. The second part of the book circles around Yamaguchi's American ambitions, her tumultuous marriage with Noguchi in the coastal former capital of Kamakura, and the decadent world of occupation Tokyo where the often moronic American officers try to change the country's culture in their own moralistic ways (one can't help noting a certain resemblance to later doomed projects to democraticise Iraq and the rest of the Middle East).

In the third and final part of the book, Yoshiko Yamaguchi has again transformed herself. Having married an up-and-coming diplomat, Yamaguchi renewed her commitment to the plight of the developing countries and oppressed people around the world turning herself into a popular TV journalist. Her intentions as pure as always and her heart in the right place, she again naively allowed powerful men to manipulate herself. She was charmed by men like Yasser Arafat, Kim Il Sung, Colonel Gaddafi, even Idi Amin, whom she met through her wide travels as a journalist. This time her story is related through a Japanese Red Army member lingering in a Lebanese jail.

Ian Buruma, a professor at New York's Bard College and a renowned scholar of Japanese and Chinese cultural history, has crafted a very interesting story that weaves fact and fiction into a seamless whole. He manages to relate the story to the big historical narrative of Japan from the 1930s to the 1970s, incorporating much of fascinating detail and real-life events (the iconic Noguchi comes across as a self-centred idealist). One of the themes of the book relates to movies, a topic that Buruma knows intimately. Apart from the protagonist being an actress in her first career, all three men whose stories the fiction part of the book tells are movie buffs. Each one of them makes clever cameo appearances in the section that follows their story, but never again do they meet with Yamaguchi: she is done with them by that time. The book also has a constant erotic overtone, without ever becoming overtly explicit (well, not too crudely explicit at least).

Yoshiko Yamaguchi's life has been a long and eventful one. She reinvented herself several times, from a Chinese singer and actress to a Japanese-American one, to a TV journalist and, finally, to a national politician in Japan. In 1974 she ran successfully for the Japanese Diet, where she was initially sponsored by the notoriously corrupt prime minister and money politician Kakuei Tanaka. The question whether she was indeed always manipulated by powerful men or whether she used them for her own purposes is probably moot. Most likely, both are true. She is still alive and living in Tokyo at the age of 89.

It's the unique structure of this book, told in three parts by three different first person narrators that excite the reader. Each narrator tells his own story with the three connected to their relationship with a different phase of a true person, Yamaguchi Yoshiko who uses a different name and persona during each phase of her life. The three stories cover Japanese history from before WWII until the present time as well as numerous ties to films and there making during each time period. The book opens with the Japanese loving all things Chinese just before WWII where the reader meets the first of the three narrators each providing their own unique viewpoints. They are a surrogate father, a gay film critic, and a jailed terrorist (who does not think of himself that way). The book is probably easiest to category as historic fiction, perhaps a fictional biography (although the author interviewed Yoshiko in researching the book), and lastly a uniquely entertaining page turner that through three separate stories keeps the reader constantly learning and thinking. Yoshiko apparently reinvented herself many times through out her life and that is what the book does very well with its unique first person viewpoints. It's a bit of fun that each of the first two narrators appear very slightly in the following narrators own story. At one time I thought I did not like fiction told in the first person but all that has changed recently. Buruma has taught me that first person can even be turned on its head to provide an incredible and inventive experience. My only small complaint is that each narrator seems to share the similar voice of Mr. Burmua. (Note: My wife also read this while on vacation and gave it raves too.)

I have an interest in Li Xianglan way before I knew about this novel. Actually I read other people's reviews on this novel as well as an interview with the author before I bought the book. The author is,of course, free to incorporate anything about Li into his fictional character. For those who intend to find out something about Li through this book, it would be a mixed blessing. True, the author did capture some aspects of her life, but reading the fiction also suggests some aspects of the author as a white Westerner who has a "certain" fascination of Asian women. Casual remarks made through the characters reveal some of this attitude. There is also a hint from his interview that the author does not react as most people do in regard to the Nanking Massacre. The reader can draw his/her opinion as to whether this has anything to do with the novel.

I loved "The China Lover", which I had the good luck to read in advance of publication. The book is a vividly imagined account of an episode in far eastern history quite unknown to most western readers, a subtle and haunting commentary on the relation between life, literature and film, the work of a writer of unique range and astonishing erudition.