BOOK REVIEW : A Teen-Age Visitor’s Picture of America : STRAWBERRY ROAD <i> By Yoshimi Ishikawa Translated by Eve Zimmerman</i> ; Kodansha International, $18.95, 256 pages

Swept to our shores by the current wave of interest in Pacific Rim literature, “Strawberry Road” is an autobiographical account of four years in the life of an 18-year-old Japanese boy who immigrates to California in 1965.

Ishikawa has just graduated from high school when he sails from his pastoral home on one of Japan’s outer islands to join the brother who has become a strawberry farmer near Stockton.

His plan is to learn English in an American high school and help his brother in the fields. Like many Japanese of his generation, his ideas of this country have been formed by magazine ads, movies and letters home from previous immigrants.

Ishikawa’s notions are more explicit than most--filled out and enhanced by his observations of the American soldiers stationed on his home island. Though he admits that he had begun “to feel the animosity toward the United States” shared by his contemporaries, “yet somehow America still attracted me,” and he is thrilled when his application for a student visa is approved.

As translated from the Japanese, the prose is so matter-of-fact as to be virtually without effect. Written a quarter-century after the events described, the book is curiously bland, as if the author’s memories had faded to mere impressions.

Though some, like Ishikawa’s first sight of his brother’s house, remain strikingly vivid, others seem to resist his efforts to recapture their original colors.

Matters aren’t helped by the phonetic rendering of Japanese English, as in “Gibu mee hambaagu” and “My housu isu sutroberi fieldo,” an overly quaint device that both confuses and embarrasses the American reader.

At best, Ishikawa’s style is utilitarian: “A scuffed-up table sat in the center of the room, and muddy work boots and work clothes rose in a pile next to a sofa riddled with holes. Shovels, old tires, and carpentry tools were scattered everywhere.”

At second best, the language becomes a cliche festival, the observations on American culture trite and superficial:

“People who have left their mother countries behind and settled here can never run away from home. To regain what you once had, only bigger and better, is what it means to be an American.”

Ishikawa has the usual adolescent adventures: gradually earning the admiration of his schoolmates by his proficiency at baseball, meeting a sophisticated Japanese divorcee who efficiently takes charge of his sexual education, forming attachments to a variety of eccentric individuals, but never entirely finding the elusive America of his boyhood dreams.

At the end of his sojourn, he wonders “which America was the true one--the America of the photos, the America before my eyes, or the America of the farm? I sat riveted, a kaleidoscope of images flashing before my eyes. For an instant I was struck by an odd fancy that America exists only in the mind.”

Despite these stylistic shortcomings, “Strawberry Road” effectively illuminates an all-but-forgotten phase of the Japanese immigrant experience, the brief but intense era of striving, struggle and deprivation preceding the powerful economic presence so evident a mere quarter-century later.

After returning to Japan and earning a law degree, Ishikawa became a journalist and author, and is presently writing a historical novel. Catering to the current Japanese interest in all things American, “Strawberry Road” has been enormously successful in Japan, inspiring the publishers to produce this English version timed to coincide with the release of a film adaptation.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Just Desserts” by Patti Massman and Susan Rosser (Crown) .