Eastern approaches
If you are trying to determine whether a story is truth or fiction, strangeness is no guide, because truth is only intermittently stranger than fiction; but neatness may work. Truth is rarely as neatly structured, as prone to boil life down into allegories and metaphors, as fiction is.
One of the disconcerting features of Ian Buruma's novel The China Lover is the excessive, almost schematic neatness of the way its characters embody its themes. Buruma has already explored Japanese identity, especially Japanese views of the west, in non-fiction: in The Wages of Guilt, about attitudes to the Second World War in Germany and Japan, in the collection of essays The Missionary and the Libertine and, most recently, in Occidentalism, written with Avishai Margalit - a swipe, as the title suggests, at Edward Said's Orientalism in which the authors showed, with reference to the Middle East as well as Asia, that the practice of reducing other cultures to an exotic, decadent "Other" cuts both ways.
The China Lover dramatises the same themes through the life of Yamaguchi Yoshiko (surname first in the Japanese style), alias Li Xianglan, alias Ri Koran, alias Shirley Yamaguchi. Born in 1920 in Manchuria, daughter of a man who teaches Chinese to Japanese railway employees, Yamaguchi is trained as a singer by an exiled White Russian aristocrat before being taken up by the Japanese-run film studios in the puppet state of Manchukuo. Under the name Li Xianglan (to the Japanese, "Ri Koran"), she is promoted as a Chinese film star, her true nationality kept secret so that she can better represent the harmony between Asiatic nations. Adored in Japan, Li is loathed in China after a scene in which she responds to a slap from a Japanese army officer by falling into his arms. To Japanese audiences, this is romantic: to the Chinese, merely servile.
After the war, she adopts the name Shirley Yamaguchi and pursues a Hollywood career, with limited success - the high point playing the love-interest in a film about western gangsters set in Tokyo, reviled in Japan for crass misrepresentations of local culture. She is married for a time to a celebrated Japanese-American sculptor engaged in designing a monument to the victims of Hiroshima. In the late 1960s, at last under her own name, she presents a television current affairs series for housewives; her own experiences having left her distrustful of militarism and imperialism, she gives the show an idealistic slant, obtaining interviews with such anti-imperialist icons as Yasser Arafat, Kim Il-sung, Colonel Gaddafi and Idi Amin.
Even though the plot is packed with colour and incident, it feels overdetermined - Yamaguchi seems too perfectly invented a symbol of a fragmented, flailing national identity. Except, as I clocked about a third of the way through, she isn't invented at all: she is real. Indeed, she is still alive, and the details of her career are taken from her autobiography and from interviews with Buruma. Throughout the book, the most unlikely events and characters turn out to be lifted straight from the historical record: the boss of the Manchurian film studios notorious for having, as an army officer, strangled the family of a supposed communist with his bare hands; the Sixties rebels whose confused notions about the US and international Zionist conspiracy take them from Tokyo to a PLO training camp. Buruma slides his fictional framework into history with astonishing deftness.
However, his respectful attitude towards history leaves the book short on breathing space. The story falls into three sections, in each of which Yamaguchi is seen through the eyes of a different (male) narrator. The first part, up to 1945, is related by Sato Daisuke, a fixer for the Japanese authorities, instrumental in launching her career, and a self-deceiving idealist to whom Japan's vicious reign in Manchukuo is a struggle against western dictatorship. The story is taken up by Sidney Vanoven, young, American, homosexual, working for the Occupation authorities overseeing Japanese cinema. His idealism is far easier to sympathise with than Sato's, though their roles are curiously alike.
The most weakly realised of the narrators is Sato Kenkichi (presumably kin to the other Sato: they are from the same remote province, though the relationship is kept vague), a producer on Yamaguchi's show and another kind of idealist. He ends up at an Israeli airport firing a sub-machine gun at Christian pilgrims. Though Yamaguchi is at the centre of all their stories, she remains at a distance, Buruma being commendably reluctant to distort her life; but so do the narrators themselves, and that creates a problem.
The difficulty lies partly in Buruma's prose - elegant and precise, but also somewhat impersonal - and partly in the way he uses the erotic to encapsulate political and cultural affinities: Daisuke's creepy seductions of Chinese women, Sidney's feverish blow jobs in Tokyo parks, Kenkichi's schoolboy crush on a fellow terrorist. Rather than creating any intimacy between reader and character, the dry peculiarity of their accounts is alienating.
And yet, despite its failure to show or provoke empathy, The China Lover is an extraordinary feat of applied intelligence, and (I worry I haven't made this clear) gripping. Read it, then go and rent Sam Fuller's House of Bamboo and see Shirley Yamaguchi in action.
