The China Lover Hardcover - 2008

by Ian Buruma

A transfixing portrait of a woman and a nation eagerly burying thepast to transform the future.

In his enthralling new novel, Ian Buruma uses thelife of the starlet Yamaguchi Yoshiko as a lens through whichto understand the lure of erotic fantasies in the conquest ofnations. The China Lover reveals the catastrophic results whentheater and politics blend in a lethal manner.

In her earliest days Ri Koran a Japanese girl,born in Manchuria, who sang and acted in Japanese andChinese was forced to keep her Japanese identity a secret, tobecome a Manchurian singer and movie star playing Chinesebeauties who fell in love with brave Japanese empire builders. InU.S.-occupied Tokyo, she returned to the screen as YamaguchiYoshiko, starring in films approved by American censors anddesigned to promote American-style democracy.

Before long, she decided to reinvent herself yet againby moving to the United States. Three months after Japanand the United States signed a peace treaty in San Francisco,Yamaguchi rededicated herself to pursuing a career in Americanmovies, this time as Shirley Yamaguchi, playing exotic Japanesebeauties falling in love with American soldiers. But she was notjust the subject of male fantasies on the cinema screen. Shemarried the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, whowanted her to be the perfect traditional Japanese woman. Whenher many roles, in life and in film, proved impossible to reconcile,Shirley left Noguchi, retired as an actress, and married apromising young Japanese diplomat.

At the outset of the 1970's, the life of YamaguchiYoshiko took another dramatic turn. As host of a Japanese televisionshow for housewives, Yoshiko accepted an assignment inthe Middle East, where she met Yassir Arafat and a prominentPalestinian terrorist. A member of her crew, affiliated with theJapanese Red Army, would return to commit a terrible crimewhile Yoshiko became a founding member of the Japanese-Palestinian Friendship Association, and ended her career as apolitician in the right-wing ruling party of Japan.

In Buruma's reimagining of the life of YamaguchiYoshiko, a Japanese torn among patriotism for her parents'homeland, wordly ambition, and sympathy for the Chinese, shewould reflect almost exactly the twists and turns in the historyof modern Japan.