The China Lover Book

Ian Buruma is one of the last of a dying breed, the public intellectual in the tradition of thinkers like George Orwell, H. L. Mencken, and Edmund Wilson. Buruma is fluent in Dutch, English, German, Chinese, and Japanese. He has a wide range of interests like literature, film, history, and politics. He has written books with subjects as diverse as Japanese history, Chinese dissidents, Dutch Muslims, Japanese and German postwar guilt, an appreciation of English culture, and the conflict between the Occident and the Orient among others. In his most recent novel, The China Lover, he is able to indulge in all of these interests as back story in the fictional recounting of the life of Li Xianglan, Ri Koran, Shirley Yamaguchi'the Japanese girl born Yamaguchi Yoshiko in Manchuria.

There are three sections, and the first section is narrated by the decadent and worldly Daisuke Sato, who has recruited Ri Koran for propaganda dissemination. He has a great love for China and a misguided belief in the idea of a unified Asia through the benevolence of Japan. I think that Buruma shows his affection/interest for China. When Japan loses Manchuria and the war the novel shifts to Tokyo.

The next section takes place in Tokyo and is narrated by a thinly veiled Donald Richie, as a gay movie critic named Sidney Vanoven from Ohio who is obsessed with Japan and film. He is a fan of the former Ri Koran and befriends her. At his stage she takes on a new image as "Shirley" Yamaguchi doing propaganda for the invading army to doing films approved by the occupation in postwar Japan realistically rendered with all the specific details. She also marries a Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi, and this give Burma opportunities to wax on about the differences between "pure" Japanese and foreigners who will never be fully accepted into the culture. Her next move is to Hollywood where she ends her film career as a failure.

In the last section, a student writer Kenichi Sato lands a job as journalist Yoshiko (Shirley) Yamaguchi's head writer. He has formerly worked in pink films that had a political bent and was friends with a member of an avant-garde theater troupe (much like Burma himself in his youth). The new career as a journalist allows Buruma to bring the characters into the Middle East among true believer terrorists in Lebanon.

The novel is a summation of Buruma's life, intellectual specialties, and interests artistically rendered in a fascinating story of a woman who witnessed many significant events in her lifetime. I really enjoyed the novel and was impressed by the fact-base details of each section.