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The China Lover |
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| Book: Hardcover | 5.98 x 9.01in | 400 pages | ISBN 9781594201943 | 18 Sep 2008 | The Penguin Press | 18 - AND UP |
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A transfixing portrait of a woman and a nation eagerly burying the past to transform the future.
In his enthralling new novel, Ian Buruma uses the life of the starlet Yamaguchi Yoshiko as a lens through which to understand the lure of erotic fantasies in the conquest of nations. The China Lover reveals the catastrophic results when theater 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 and Chinese—was forced to keep her Japanese identity a secret, to become a Manchurian singer and movie star playing Chinese beauties who fell in love with brave Japanese empire builders. In U.S.-occupied Tokyo, she returned to the screen as Yamaguchi Yoshiko, starring in films approved by American censors and designed to promote American-style democracy.
Before long, she decided to reinvent herself yet again by moving to the United States. Three months after Japan and the United States signed a peace treaty in San Francisco, Yamaguchi rededicated herself to pursuing a career in American movies, this time as Shirley Yamaguchi, playing exotic Japanese beauties falling in love with American soldiers. But she was not just the subject of male fantasies on the cinema screen. She married the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who wanted her to be the perfect traditional Japanese woman. When her many roles, in life and in film, proved impossible to reconcile, Shirley left Noguchi, retired as an actress, and married a promising young Japanese diplomat.
At the outset of the 1970’s, the life of Yamaguchi Yoshiko took another dramatic turn. As host of a Japanese television show for housewives, Yoshiko accepted an assignment in the Middle East, where she met Yassir Arafat and a prominent Palestinian terrorist. A member of her crew, affiliated with the Japanese Red Army, would return to commit a terrible crime while Yoshiko became a founding member of the Japanese- Palestinian Friendship Association, and ended her career as a politician in the right-wing ruling party of Japan.
In Buruma’s reimagining of the life of Yamaguchi Yoshiko, a Japanese torn among patriotism for her parents’ homeland, wordly ambition, and sympathy for the Chinese, she would reflect almost exactly the twists and turns in the history of modern Japan.
"Evocative...brings her world vividly to life...always fascinating."
— The New York Times Book Review
“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 China Lover overflows with intriguing characters…. Buruma seems to know every nook and cranny of this landscape….His novel takes us deep into events of the 20th century and shows us with vivid strokes what it felt like”
—Los Angeles Times
“Lushly informative, cynically interesting.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A truly fantastic subject for a novel”
—New York Observer
“In The China Lover, Buruma has captured the mutable contradictions of her life and made from them a kaleidoscope through which to see a giant swathe of 20th- century history from angles you've never viewed it before. It's a dizzying, dazzling experience.”
—The Seattle Times
“Buruma found his perfect subject in Yoshiko Yamaguchi, the nearly forgotten, once controversial Japanese singer and actress turned journalist and politician. The dark deeds of Tokyo gangsters, the endless horror of Hiroshima, the deep wounds of occupation, the sensuous power of film, and the strange circumstances that induced three Japanese gunmen to launch a terrorist attack on the Tel Aviv airport––all are facets in Buruma’s magnificent saga of war and prejudice, beauty and tyranny, sacrifice and survival.”
—Booklist
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