The title of Clavell's third novel in his continuing Asian saga is the Japanese word for "foreigner." The literal translation is "outside person," hardly a hospitable concept. As fans of the best-selling Shogun will know, for nearly 250 years Japan was closed to the world, foreigners forbidden from its shores. All this changed in 1853, when Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay and demanded that Japan open its doors to American trade.
It is against this background that Gai-Jin is set. The year is 1862, and the place is the foreign settlement in Kanagawa. The settlement is home to a small band of Western traders, military men and diplomats, an arrogant lot convinced of their cultural superiority and determined to bully Japan into Westernizing its ways. Into their masculine midst comes a penniless French beauty, Angelique Richaud, who's in romantic pursuit of Malcolm Struan, the dashing young head of the same trading house that Clavell featured in two of his earlier novels, Taipan and Noble House.
The Japanese characters, living on the brink of civil war as the emperor's supporters plot to overthrow the ruling shogun (military governor), are just as unappealing as the Westerners. They are portrayed as devious and murderous, with little respect for the sanctity of life or rule of law.
East meets West only rarely in Gai-Jin and the two plot lines—the foreign love story and the Japanese political turmoil—seldom intersect. Like Clavell's previous novels, Gai-Jin is strong on plot and weak on characterization. Also like the earlier works, its historical and cultural references are engrossing and presented in entertaining detail. We learn, for example, that in Japan the sexiest part of a woman's body was the nape of the neck. Scholars may have some quibbles—the word gaijin, for instance, probably didn't come into use until around 1875—but the broad portrait is accurate and as colorful as an ancient Kabuki play. (Delacorte, $27.50)
by Susan Squire
In the life of a married couple, no event is more fraught with fear and filled with euphoria than having a baby. In this sometimes uncomfortably intimate yet compulsively readable book, Squire—a journalist and herself the mother of a 4-year-old daughter—chronicles five middle-class duos as they take the rocky, rewarding parenthood trip.
Juliet and Sam are wealthy enough—he's a prominent lawyer—to spend three close-to-idyllic months on a New England coastal island after their first child is born. But the two find themselves bickering over household and parental responsibilities once they return to their real lives in Manhattan. Rob, who is Jewish, and Alex, who was raised Catholic, fight at length before deciding to give their baby boy both a briss (the traditional Jewish ceremony of circumcision) and a baptism. That's just the start of their struggles. Sarah is feisty and ambitious, Michael low-key and nurturing. At bad times she thinks of Michael as "the coward," while he thinks of Sarah as a "major bitch." Erin and Tom find their marriage improves after their baby's birth, contrary to what they expected and what much data supports. Maria and Joe long for a house once their newborn arrives, but have to stay put in a small apartment.
Spanning two years and filled with the kind of tension and drama that drive a good novel, the book perceptively examines a time of immense and irreversible change. (Doubleday, $22.95)
by Rita Mae Brown
Mary Frazier Armstrong is young, rich and beautiful, a successful art dealer and a player in genteel Virginia society. She's also terminally ill and secretly gay. Her decision to reveal herself in eight soul-baring letters sent from her deathbed to family and friends hits her full in the face when it turns out that she has been misinformed and is not at death's door.
Twenty years and 10 books after Brown's first novel, the gay coming-of-age classic Ruby fruit Jungle, Venus Envy is a disappointing attempt to chastise society in the guise of fiction. The characters are cardboard cutouts who spew platitudes, while the plot limps forward, bogged down with pets and golf and flowers. Will everything work out in the end? Sadly, few readers are likely to care. (Bantam, $21.95)
>James Clavell
THE RISING SUN NEVER SETS ON HIS EMPIRE
OVER LUNCH AT THE BEAU-RIVAGE Palace Hotel in Lausanne, Switzerland, near his home, James Clavell looks every inch the successful expatriate British author, down to the navy blazer and the ascot. At first he wants to talk about his books, particularly his latest, Gai-Jin. "Gai-Jin is up to my standard, good, bad or indifferent," he says. "If people read it, they won't be disappointed." Then he wants to talk about the books he has already written, from 1962's King Rat (based on his World War II experiences in a Japanese POW camp) to Shogun to Noble House. And of course, there are the books he wants to write. "I've planned these 12 or 13 novels," he says. "Not that I think I will ever have time, because each one takes about five years."
Gradually, though, it becomes apparent: James Clavell's real subject is James Clavell—and it is one he enjoys. "I didn't plan to be a writer," he says. "I planned to be an officer in the British Army." After the war he discovered the movies and became a writer, director and producer before writing King Rat. He has thoughts about breakfast ("A glass of champagne, preferably pink, at 11 a.m., is a civilized way to start the day"), opinions about Japan ("There, the only sin is failure") and his 42-year marriage ("Like in all families, the woman controls it, whether the man wants to admit it or not"). He becomes coy about just one thing: his age. "Sixty-five, how about that? Not too old or too young," he says. Then Clavell, who is actually 67, qualifies it. "Don't believe everything I tell you. I am a storyteller."
- Contributors:
- Melanie Kirkpatrick,
- Lisa Shea,
- Louisa Ermelino,
- Cathy Nolan.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
