The Best of Japan: Innovations, Present and...

The Best of Japan: Innovations, Present and Future, edited by Moritaka Matsumura (Kodansha/Harper & Row: $24.95). This catalogue of Japanese products recently given the Nikkei newspaper award for excellence is great fun to read--alternately telling, humorous and amazing (disposable lens-equipped film, a car that measures faults in the road with the front wheels and then uses a microcomputer to adjust the air suspension of the rear wheels to absorb even the tiniest shock). Yet, while most Americans will see “The Best of Japan” as a brochure of wonders suggesting that the future is here and living in Tokyo, the Japanese view it altogether differently--for them, it is a hopeful tract, for their nation’s economic dominance in the world is being undermined by a strong yen, trade restrictions in the United States and growing competition from South Korea and Taiwan, where labor is cheaper.

Japan’s economic success has been based largely on sustained growth in mass production. Now, with competition curtailing growth, the Japanese are finding new strategies. The emphasis today is on creating technology, not copying it. Since this is essentially a publicit2032165729in the United States to determine which inventions actually originated in Japan. But these gadgets remain interesting for the way they show similarities between our two cultures (a company official who thought it would be fun “for people to lead the life of cats” invented a concept even dumber than Cabbage Patch Dolls--a fake cat’s paw that curls electronically; 980,000 paws were sold in six months) and differences (a “community oriented shopping center has fairy-tale architecture, a round-roofed gymnasium, a community church, statues of traditional local deities, 20,000 trees and shrubs and a musical fountain).

Awakenings, Oliver Sacks (Summit: $18.95; hardcover reprint). As with Oliver Sacks’ other spirited ruminations on man, medicine and mind--from “A Leg to Stand On” to “A Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales”--this book works on several levels. Sacks wrote “Awakenings” in 1973 to demonstrate the effectiveness of the drug L-DOPA in helping patients battle Parkinson’s disease. On this level, the book is somewhat dry, recounting before and after stories that attest to moderate degrees of success. But “Awakenings” is, on a much livelier level, an attack on the way neurologists envisioned Parkinson’s disease as simply a motor disorder, ignoring the fact that most patients also experienced “a corresponding slowness or stickiness of mind, with the thought-stream as slow and sluggish as the motor stream.” The neurologists erred, Sacks writes, because they “tended to see the motor, the intellectual, the perceptual, and the emotional in quite separate and non-communicating compartments of the brain and, given a concept or prejudice like this, could not see an awakening, could not see or describe things as a whole.” Since the cognitive and emotional confusion was difficult to pinpoint, it was not sufficiently empirical and thus was overlooked.

Sacks doesn’t state this directly in the original edition, and the reason is ironic; had he done so, this book would have been deemed normative (non-empirical) by the scientific Establishment and thus ignored. But in a lively preface composed for this edition, lengthy enough to turn this book into a speculation on the way medicine is practiced and perceived today, Sacks speaks his mind more directly: “We rationalize, we dissimilate, we pretend that modern medicine is a rational science . . . but we have only to tap its glossy veneer for it to split wide open and reveal to us its roots and foundations, its old dark heart of metaphysics, mysticism, magic and myth.”

Our Mutual Room: Modern Literary Portraits of the Opposite Sex, edited by Emily Ellison and Jane B. Hill (Peachtree Publishers, 494 Armour Circle, N.E., Atlanta, Ga. 30324: $14.95). The “mutual room” of the title refers to Moses Soyer’s 1935 painting “Artists at the WPA,” which shows men and women drawing and talking near canvas and easel. As the editors see it, Soyer’s depiction of harmony in the midst of the Great Depression suggests that artistic camaraderie between the sexes can help us through baffling times. Yet, while interplay between the sexes is the solution, it is also the problem, for the characters in the novels excerpted here suffer from a confusion over male and female roles that emerged after the sexual revolution. Many of today’s women authors, the editors point out, “create male characters who are drifting, who seem dangerously lost, while male writers create female characters whose danger comes from being so anchored. The men want stability, the women want escape.”

How have we managed to sink into this social mire after the promise of the 1960s? A likely explanation was forwarded last year by Reynolds Price, who contends that contemporary writers are actually far more reluctant to cross the gender gap than were Henry James, Emily Bronte, Mary Shelley and Willa Cather, not to mention the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater. Price blames this modern reluctance on a backlash against the role confusion created by the women’s movement. The editors convincingly refute Price’s claim that male writers are more willing to cross the gap than women, but Price’s belief that we are still wandering is left unchallenged. Instead, “Our Mutual Room” ends with the unrealistic hope that the empathy displayed by modern American writers will in itself be enough to suggest viable answers. (Perhaps the high degree of awareness of underlying male anxieties displayed by women authors in these pages will only heighten male insecurities.) The book’s impact also is diminished by the editors’ decision not to ground contemporary American images in history or in world culture. All in all, though, the stories in “Our Mutual Room” spotlight changes in sex roles today more effectively than many nonfiction pop sociology texts. Requiem on Cerro Maravilla: The Police Murders in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Government Cover-up, Manuel Suarez (Waterfront Press, 52 Maple Ave., Maplewood, N.J. 07040: $9.95). Despite statements by members of the U.S. Department of Justice and aggressive, credible reporting by Manuel Suarez, a staff writer for the San Juan Star in Puerto Rico and a correspondent for The New York Times, our government’s possible complicity in covering up the investigation of the Cerro Maravilla murders remains one of the Caribbean region’s best-kept secrets. Cerro Maravilla is a mountaintop in southern Puerto Rico where, on July 25, 1978, Puerto Rican police killed two young independistas , political radicals fighting for the island’s independence from the United States. FBI investigators and Carlos Romero Barcelo, the governor and leader of a party that wants Puerto Rico to become a U.S. state, found no wrongdoing after several “in-depth” investigations. After Suarez, citizens and members of the Puerto Rican Senate all found numerous inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the FBI and Romero Barcelo reports, however, several police officers were convicted and imprisoned for luring the independistas to the deserted mountaintop. Many in the island nation still suspect higher level involvement, though, and so the investigation continues in full force today. While the murders might seem old news, this book remains interesting as a study of how the Monroe Doctrine has evolved and why Latin Americans both love and hate their behemoth neighbor in the north.