The China Lover, By Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma's new book is an ambitious novel of ideas and ideology that opens with Japan's guileful military adventuring, sweeps through the venality of America's post-war occupation of Japan and bows out with a Japanese cell of pro-Palestinian revolutionaries. Threading these three discrete sections together is the vulnerable but resilient figure of Yoshiko Yamaguchi, a movie star whose extraordinary and varied life is based on a historical figure of the same name.

In 1940, the Japanese Kanto Army is policing unruly Manchukuo (a puppet state carved out of Manchuria after "a Sino-Japanese one-night stand"), which acts as a buffer against Russian aggression. To mollify rebellious Manchurians, the Kanto top brass pluck naive young Yoshiko Yamaguchi from local radio to act in propagandist films under the screen name Ri Koran. Her messages of a pan-Asian harmony under the protective mantle of the Japanese Emperor play well in Tokyo but leave her open to Chinese allegations of treason after Japan's surrender. Sato Daisuke, her doting minder, struggles to pick a safe path for her through the viciousness of Japan's political collapse.

Sidney Vanoven is fleeing a terminal Midwestern adolescence when he fetches up as a censor in American-occupied Tokyo. Immersing himself in the country's cinematic heritage, Vanoven discovers, adores and becomes something of an unlikely mentor to Shirley Yoshimoto, the post-war reincarnation of Ri Koran. By the third section, Yoshimoto has become a popular but sincere journalist, who manages to combine an almost gullible optimism with her abiding ideal of promoting peace.

Buruma's choreography of names and events across this intricate, 30-plus year saga is generally deft and consistent. Slightly more cumbersome is the handling of the political context that confines the various characters. It often feels as though their intense personalities, exuberant or anguished, are straining at the anchor of convoluted plotting. Buruma's characters are passionate and intimate, despite his epic scale, but each section contains enough material and interest for a novel in itself, which gives The China Lover a density that needs persistence for reward.

Buruma's central characters all manifest a strong disaffection from the ideology of their upbringing and have much to say, or suggest, about national identity, cultural hegemony and domination, the power of aesthetics, freedom, revolution and responsibility; but the congested story throws up intriguing ideas without fully getting to grips with them. The motif of a frog sitting at the bottom of a well is repeatedly used to signal and condemn cultural myopia, which feels like the intellectual core of this novel. A jaded Vanoven dismisses Japanese political life as "a system of irresponsibility" while Yoshiko, in zealous journalist mode, laments Japan's reluctance to learn from its own past. Both notions resonate strongly with Haruki Murakami's sober judgement of Japan's elite (after 1995's Aum Shinrikyo terrorist attack on Tokyo's Underground) as face-saving, inward looking and responsibility-ducking.

These ideas could bear more penetration, but still make thoughtful reading between the more lurid entertainments of Sato's beguiling priapic career, or the queeny Vanoven's brazen, gleeful digressions on his voracious fellating of diffident Japanese men. Sato's dislike of the "clammy oppressiveness" of 1940s Tokyo recalls the delicate rendering of Japan's brittle bellicosity in One Morning Like a Bird, Andrew Miller's recent novel of the same period. Miller spears that country's queasy sense of self while Buruma's broader canvas is thronged with the cultural confusion of ritual manners masking dollar-negotiable morality.