Samurai on the Run This irresistible novel is T. Coraghessan Boyle's finest yet. It has the vital language and inventiveness of plot that we have come to expect from him, but this time there is a keener focus of intention, a more profound level of empathy than were evident in his previous novels—even the ambitious and highly imaginative “World's End,” which won the 1988 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. A simple plot description of “East is East” makes the novel sound like the mere high jinks of a clever writer: a young Japanese seaman jumps ship off the coast of Georgia and, through a series of mishaps and cultural misunderstandings, finds himself hiding out in an artists' colony from the police and immigration officials. And in the merely clever writer's hands, the book might have been only an entertaining romp with an international twist, a satirical put-down of the foibles and pretensions of artists, both real and manqué , when they “colonize” self-consciously under one roof. But Mr. Boyle, with his consummate artistry, has shaped this story into an absorbing tragedy. That we find ourselves laughing all the way to the increasingly inevitable catastrophe does no in any way blur the book's impact, for ours is the laughter of recognition and revelation, rueful and cleansing. All of us who have ever weighed the desperate desire to belong against the coexisting need for self-respect will recognize ourselves in Mr. Boyle's lowly Japanese sailor as well as in his counterprotagonist, the frantically ambitious young writer Ruth Dershowitz, who becomes Hiro Tanaka's protector and, ultimately, his nemesis. That Hiro—the hero—at last does the honorable, albeit doomed, thing, according to his code, and that Ruth, in marked contrast, joyfully sells out after a brief pang of conscience, results in a double catharsis. When it comes to an ending, the reader gets to have it both ways. Hiro, who plunges from his freighter, the Tokachimaru, as it heads north for Savannah with its cargo of recorders, tractor parts and microwave ovens, and who floats on his life ring toward the shores of his fantasied America, has been shunned his entire life (he's 20) by his Japanese peers because he is “a half-breed, a happa , a high-nose and butter-stinker—and an orphan to boot—forever a foreigner in his own society.” Shortly after he was born, his American hippie father (known only by his nickname, Doggo) deserted his Japanese mother, a bar hostess who then “sank into a shame worse than miscegenation” and eventually drowned herself. “She did what she had to do” is Hiro's Japanese grandfather's stoic comment to the boy regarding his mother's suicide. As Hiro struggles to the Georgia shore, “a pale certificate of flesh” clinging to his cork ring, he carries with him an explosive mix of expectations and values. The America he envisions is composed of impressions from films, books, and popular music. Yet encased in layers of Ziploc bags and taped to his chest, along with some American bills and a faded photograph of his father, is his bible, “The Way of the Samurai.” Hiro has memorized its arcane advice along with its grimmer maxims. (“One should take important considerations lightly. … Small matters should be taken seriously.”; “In a fifty-fifty life or death crises, simply settle it by choosing immediate death.”) When he's in doubt in America—where he dreams of blending into the polyglot “Beantown or the City of Brotherly Love,” where he even dares to hope that he may discover his father “in some gleaming, spacious ranch house and sit down to cheeseburgers with him”—Hiro will seek his direction from Hagakure , the ancient monk Jocho Yamamoto's code of samurai ethics as interpreted by the 20 th -century novelist Yukio Mishima. Jocho and Mishima have been Hiro's magical allies back in Japan , lifting him above the despair caused by the insult sand beatings inflicted by his schoolmates and helping him to draw a sharp critical bead on modern Japanese society: “Where was the glory in being a nation of salary-men in white shirts and western suits making VCRs for the rest of the world like a tribe of trained monkeys? Hiro…saw it clearly: [his classmates] and all the rest of them, they were nothing, eunuchs, wimps, gutless and shameless, and they would grow up t chase after yen and dollars like all the other fools who made fun of him, who singled him out as the pariah. But he wasn't the pariah, they were. To live by the code of Hagakure made him more Japanese then they. …He'd been made to feel inferior all his life, and here was a way to conquer it. … He would fight back … with the oldest weapon in the Japanese arsenal. He would become a modern samurai.” The modern samurai doesn't even get to shore before he collides with the boat in which Ruth Dershowitz is making love with her boyfriend, Saxby Lights, whose mother, Septima, owns and runs an artist's colony, Thanatopsis House, on remote Tupelo Island. (In remembrance of her husband's choice of demise, Septima has named all the studio-cottages after famous artists who have committed suicide.) Ruth, who is staying in the lowliest of these cottages, named Hart Crane, is 34, has published only four :intense and gloomy: stories in little magazines and owes her presence at the colony largely to her romance with the patron's son. But even when she is entwined with Saxby, she is consumed by her mania for fame (“and its unfortunate concomitant, work”) and fueled by the specter of her enemy, the phony, scheming young write Jane Shrine, with her “extraterrestrial eyes” and “iridescent flamenco-dancer's hair,” who has published in The Atlantic and The New Yorker and has a collection of stories out now. Worse still, “her picture was everywhere.” Besides the hated Jane Shine (whose stagy arrival scene is hilarious), Ruth's fellow guests at Thanatopsis House include Irving Thalamus, that one-man institution of Jewish-American letters; the haunted, hollow-cheeked Laura Grobian, doyenee of WASP novelists, who sits ina corner with her sherry and a notebook and worries aloud in a voice of “exotic ruination” about the mass suicides at Masada and Jonestown and Saipan; and the austere, Serious Writer Peter Anserine, who reads European books (“never in translation”) at the silent table during meals. There is also a walleyed composer whose music sounds like “slow death in the metronome factory” and a celebrated “punk sculptress.” Mr. Boyle has fun here, yet the members of his gallery of artists are never just cartoon figures. The renowned Irving Thalamus, for instance, whose patronage Ruth desires, is nursing two crushing personal defeats behind his confident exterior, and even the glossy Jane shine has her breaking point in extremis . The point of view of the novel alternates mainly between Ruth, struggling for her share of the limelight among the luminaries at Thanatopsis House, and the truant Hiro as he flees into darker and deeper terrain, his unintended crimes compounding. He is pursued by an immigration official with his own outcast complex (his skin has been mottled from birth), assisted by a tough and bigoted part-time agent who specializes in “Nips” (and who, amazingly, might possibly be Hiro's father). Before our hero's flight ends, he faces 34 criminal charges, including arson and manslaughter (these being the result of two encounters with the same elderly, superstitious black man and arising out of language deficiencies and woeful cultural ignorance on the part of each). Hiro's hideouts (and his one brief incarceration by the local rednecks' posse) will have included the swamps on Tupelo Island; Ruth Dershowitz' one-room cabin (it is Ruth's exploitation of giving shelter to his momentarily newsworthy figure that will provide her, in a debased way, with her breakthrough as a writer); the palatial home of a dotty, symphony-loving dowager who confuses Hiro with Seiji Ozawa; an old slaveholding cell; and, ultimately, the swamp of swamps (“bastion of cottonmouth, rattlesnake and leech, mother of vegetation, father of mosquito, soul of silt”), the Okefenokee. Hiro's Okefenokee nightmare frames Ruth's twin hells: Jane Shine's triumphal public reading of her work to the guests at Thanatopsis House and Ruth's own disastrous reading the following evening. These ordeals, taking place in such vastly different terrains, are shown by Mr. Boyle to be equally funny and terrible. At last comes the moment of truth for each of the fatefully intertwined characters: Hiro's resultant act is swift and poignant, but somehow not a surprise to us, knowing him as we now do. Ruth's sellout is strangely more shocking, but, we realize upon reflection, thoroughly in keeping with what she has most valued all along. As he lays out the fates of these characters, Mr. Boyle gives us an absolutely stunning work, full of brilliant cross-cultural insights, his unusual virtuoso language and one marvelous scene after another. “East is East” is a novel about the way we appear to others, the way others appear to us and the lengths to which some of us will go to be accepted by others—or to become acceptable to ourselves. |