The China Lover: A Novel

We meet Yamaguchi, a beautiful Japanese teenager, in the rough-and-tumble Japanese-occupied Manchuria of the 1930s. She can sing, act and speak fluent Chinese and Japanese, launching her career in Japanese propaganda films. In spite of her Japanese ancestry, she's passed off to audiences as a Chinese songbird. This confusion of identity and national allegiance is shared by the book's principal characters.

When Japan's dreams of ruling an Asian empire crumble with the United States' victory in World War II, Yamaguchi, like all Japanese, must reinvent herself and abandon the political symbol she had become. Inextricably intertwined with Japan's political fortunes, Yamaguchi transforms from Japan's political tool to America's, a beautiful vessel for nation building. She sheds names, personas, lovers, careers and, seemingly, nationalities, as her fame grows in Japan, then in the United States. Yamaguchi eventually files television reports from war-torn locales before serving in the Japanese legislature.

The book employs three sharply drawn narrators linked by the film industry—a slick Japanese operative in China, a gay American soldier and movie lover in Tokyo and a Japanese pornographer-turned-terrorist—all outsiders who reveal different aspects of Yamaguchi and keep things moving.

The story is most exciting in Part One, set in the lawless melting pot of 1930s Manchuria, where Jewish merchants rub elbows with Russian gangsters and Chinese peasants cower from ruthless Japanese occupiers. Buruma deftly sprinkles rich historical detail, from influential books of the period to lovely sketches of village life, with political intrigue and the omnipresence of ceremony and obligation in Japanese culture.

Part Two is also lively, with surprising cameos by American luminaries like Truman Capote, and takes a gentle swipe at the pretension of the mid-century modern art world.

Things start to fall apart in Part Three, in which an aimless porn maker writes scripts for Yamaguchi's TV program. Improbably, the story detours to Palestine in the shortest and most hastily rendered portion of the book. Here, Buruma attempts to link Japanese history with modern revolutions in the Middle East, but the dramatic change of venue and violent denouement overreach.

In the service of a colorful plot, thoughtful theme and engaging characters, Buruma draws upon real figures, namely Yamaguchi herself. It's fascinating to dig for nuggets of historical truth amidst the cinematic sweep of The China Lover.

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