Love, Japanese Style : PINK SAMURAI: Love, Marriage and Sex in Contemporary Japan <i> By Nicholas Bornoff</i> , <i> (Pocket Books: $22.95; 492 pp., illustrated) </i>

On Page 267 of Nicholas Bornoff’s “Pink Samurai,” well after his thoughtful look at the Japanese creation myths, Heian Era courtship rituals and the history of Tokyo’s Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, the intrepid author at last pays a visit to a Kawasaki bath and “massage parlor,” one of the many such establishments that make up Japan’s famous “Soapland.”

“You don’t mind wearing a condom, do you?” the genial tout at the door asks him. “On the contrary,” replies the author. Inside, he is introduced to Shirahama, “a rather thickset doll of a woman in her early thirties,” with a winsomeness enhanced by “a hint of provocative irony denoting the seasoned whore.” The author is led upstairs, “following a rump tightly sheathed in silken purple,” although “the edge is taken off any carnal musings by orthodox remarks about the weather.”

The author is bathed, massaged and treated to the soapy, body-to-body “lather dance.” The 30 minutes culminate with intercourse, followed by an additional hour of “amazingly skilled oral and manual sexual massage.” And yet, the author is as deeply impressed by Shirahama’s diligence as he is by her technique. “While there is absolutely no pretense of emotional involvement to keep the client coming back for more,” Bornoff writes, “there is none of the terse French ‘ Depeche-toi mon cheri ,’ or the whining US/British, ‘I ain’t got all day.’ If a job is worth doing to the Japanese, it’s worth doing properly; Shirahama wouldn’t even think of counting the cracks in the ceiling.”

Other Western writers in Japan have traveled the country’s sexual byways before, most notably John David Morley in “Pictures of the Water Trade” and Ian Buruma in “Behind the Mask.” But Bornoff, a British-born, onetime Paris filmmaker who lived in Tokyo for 11 years, has established himself as nothing less than the Odysseus of Japanese sex. “Pink Samurai” is an encyclopedic, entertaining, sobering and sometimes brilliant look at the sexual mores, past and present, of a rigid society in which the escape routes, as Bornoff writes, “are apt to go to the extremes.”

The West knows very little about the world of Japanese sex, other than a misunderstanding of the role of geisha (shared by most Japanese, too) and a vague sense that the society is both licentious and puritanical. Indeed, Japan is a country where an acceptable sexual fantasy is the gang rape of a 17-year-old, as evidenced by the subway-riding businessmen devouring Japan’s popular sex-and-splatter comic books--but where a team of 200 women censors is assigned to scratch out the pubic hair in the 30,000 foreign porno magazines that arrive each month at the customs office in Yokohama.

Bornoff says his book is an attempt to shed light on these paradoxes and their precedents. Japan, he writes, is free from the Christian notion of sin; hence its sexual manifestations are correctly referred to as “pinkku,” or pink, and not the “blue” of the apparently color-blind and guilt-ridden English-speaking world. But Japan also is captive to strict Confucian codes of conduct. Sex education is far behind that in the West, and an office worker, gay or not, might miss out on a promotion if he does not marry.

Love hotels, fertility festivals, S&M;, erotic woodblock prints, coprophilia, the no-panties coffee shops, porn videos, the magnifying glasses handed to male patrons at live sex shows--Bornoff has it all. This book is everything you ever wanted to know about Japanese sex, and some things you never, ever conceived of asking.

Even so, critics will point out that much of Bornoff’s material covers familiar ground--another foreigner writing about the live-sex shows, and so on. On one level, this is true, but Bornoff is above all a fantastic reporter. Instead of just attending a live sex show in the nudo gekijo , or nude theater, where seriously inebriated members of the audience are invited to have intercourse (if they can) with women on stage, Bornoff goes backstage and talks to the women themselves. It is their voices, and the voices of so many other women in Japan’s sex trade, that resonate throughout the book.

As one foreign woman who performs on stage tells him: “I’d rather do this than turn tricks anyday. It’s a lot safer, even in Japan. In the theatre, the guy can’t do anything dangerous. There’s something else that makes it all easier too: sex on-stage is not like having real sex at all.”

Bornoff also chats with Yukari, a geisha who entertains in the private restaurants of Tokyo’s elite Akasaka section, currently much in favor with ruling party politicians. She has dedicated her life to the pursuit of feminine perfection--playing the traditional instrument called a shamisen, learning how to loosen up stiff Japanese tycoons over business dinners, purchasing the correct kimonos (for as much as $16,000 each) for seasonal occasions. “It costs a fortune to keep yourself in clothes,” Yukari laments, complaining that cleaning a kimono costs nearly $100, while stain removal is $40 per blotch. “Sooner or later,” says Yukari, “a geisha has to get herself a danna .”

In this case, her danna , or patron, is the 40-year-old married heir to a huge family business. But Yukari never would have dreamed of going to bed with her patron on the first night they met; etiquette requires that there be a formal and lengthy courtship first. Now she and her danna spend weekends together, freely socializing in jeans and T-shirts among friends; they have been together five years, and the relationship is tantamount to marriage.

Bornoff doesn’t tell us whether the legal wife of Yukari’s patron knows of the geisha’s existence. In fact, it doesn’t matter. In Japan’s upper echelon (the only section of society that can afford geishas), men always have been allowed concubines.

Bornoff speaks to members of Tokyo’s gay community as well, and discovers that Japanese homosexuals are dealing with the gradual and relatively minor spread of AIDS in Japan by xenophobia, not condoms. Foreigners simply are turned away from the door at gay clubs and bars. “As with a cat crossing the road with its eyes closed,” Bornoff writes, “there seems to be a childish idea that if gaijin (foreigners) are excluded from Japan’s warm, comfortable womb of mercantile sex, AIDS will simply go away.”

After almost 500 pages, Bornoff concludes his romp on a bleak note, observing that the two sexes don’t really know how to talk to each other in a country where men view women as either housewives or mistresses, and where women view their workaholic, absentee, prostitute-visiting husbands as something to be put up with when they collapse at home on Sundays and bellow for tea.

While Bornoff says that his bias is toward individual freedom, in the end he seems distressed that Japanese sex is so divided between procreation at home and the passions beyond the threshold. But he seems to be an optimist, too, and points to a few signs of change. Young Japanese are less apt to go out drinking in the tight corporate circle, as their fathers do; these days they go out drinking with both sexes, and on something resembling the American date.

“That deep change in the air in Japan is clearer at the end of the 20th century than ever before,” Bornoff writes. “Whether it is again a superficial matter of plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose depends entirely upon the Japanese themselves, and how much they are prepared to swing things as a whole by shaping their destinies in their own, individual hands.”