What Makes Junzo Run? : A SPRING LIKE ANY OTHER <i> By Takashi Tsujii</i> , <i> Translated from the Japanese by Beth Cary</i> , <i> (Kodansha International: $19.95; 248 pp.) </i>

“What imprisoned me was the organization I myself had built. This organization had become one of the knots in an invisible net cast over the world, enveloping this fifty-second-floor office. . . . I am, however, pushed forward by the feeling that I must scrupulously fulfill my obligations. I keep running without knowing why.”

So reflects Junzo, the middle-aged narrator of this affecting, polished novel, who presides over the Maruwa department store, hotel and realty empire, just as the book’s author, Seiji Tsutsumi (whose literary pseudonym is Takashi Tsujii), in real life runs the Saison group, a powerful conglomerate that includes the Intercontinental Hotel chain.

Imagine a hauntingly confessional first-person novel, filled with self-doubts and interior probings, written by Lee Iacocca or Sam Walton. You’re right, it’s difficult to picture their having a rich inner life, much less presenting it to the public in shades of poetic uncertainty. Not that we can assume that the character Junzo is identical with his author. Still, given the strong tradition in Japanese literature of thinly veiled autobiographical fiction, it is not unlikely that the two men have much in common. Both, we know, are tycoons and published poets.

In Junzo’s words: “People sometimes ask me ‘How do you switch gears?’ and ‘Do you do your writing in the middle of the night?’ It’s true that I write at night, but I don’t think I’m good at switching gears. Neither do I unify the two halves of my personality by sheer force of will. The stronger a person’s will, the more likely it is that such a person will be overcome by his contradictions and snap. Actually, I’m very negligent and leave everything to take its own course. If I wasn’t like this, my two mutually contradictory selves would come into head-on conflict with each other. And yet, someone else must eventually bear the brunt of my always letting things drift.”

Junzo is all too aware of his weak spots. He regards himself as vague, daydreaming, hence ultimately untrustworthy. Beset by anxieties, a lonely “rootless plant,” he spaces out and then becomes angry and disgusted with himself. His mistress, maddened by his passivity, tells him he is not good at making a woman happy, and he agrees. His once-distinguished family is falling apart: His willful sister is off in France, having abandoned her children; his mentally disturbed nephew wants only to live in America; his domineering father is dead; his mother is too busy with her poetry and gardening. “What was clear was that someone had to act as a core around whom everyone could gather. And it was also clear that in reality I neither wanted nor was able to be that core.”

The novel is taken up with Junzo’s attempts to analyze how he got to this unsatisfying impasse. Now in his 50s, he contemplates past, present and future and finds all equally baffling and painful.

In this respect, Takashi/Seiji’s novel is directly in line with much 20th-Century Japanese fiction--from Soseki through Kawabata, Tanizaki, Dazai and Mishima--which seems to focus to a surprising extent on the problem of the paralyzed ego-damaged male. Usually the protagonist’s uncertainties are attacked by others as self-indulgent egotism, a refusal to play one’s communal role, and the reader is left to puzzle out to what extent they may be right.

Equally characteristic of modern Japanese fiction is the book’s gossamer delicacy. Its movement is not so much narrative as poetic, a method of indirection and abrupt topic shift that pulls the reader into unexpected snowdrifts and sudden whirlpools of feeling. Observations about weather give over to psychological probing; mild recollections are punctuated with perverse, violent and unsavory moments. The rewards of this method are certain uncanny, heart-stopping images (like the undershirt floating in the hotel sink, which the narrator sees as an emblem of his tired body).

It needs to be said, though, that “A Spring Like Any Other” is not on the level of great Japanese novels, partly because Takashi is not as masterful a sentence-writer--his prose style, sincere though it may be, drifts occasionally toward the flat and naive--but also because the book finally lacks sufficient narrative payoff. For all their indirections, a Soseki or Kawabata could brilliantly maneuver the storm clouds above their passive hero’s head until some sort of release had to detonate. While it is true that a few new things do happen in the “present” of this novel--Junzo finally volunteers to live with his mistress and her child, and she rebuffs the offer; provisions are made for his nephew’s treatment in America--for the most part we are left where we began, with the narrator ruminating outward from the middle of his life.

These ruminations, to a large extent, start going around in circles. Too often, Junzo seems to be belaboring the point of his split selves, his masks, his detachment, without deepening the analysis. Not only is the hero stuck but the author seems to be, too. The static nature of the introspection begins to smack of self-protection, and the repetition of the same self-dismay comes to resemble untranscended narcissism. Maybe that is the author’s point, but it still feels like a way of evading a true test of the main character’s mettle, which could only come about by placing him in narratively risky situations.

Still, the novel remains consistently absorbing. Some of its best passages take us behind the scenes of Japanese business practices: the ritual breakfast meetings, the corporate intrigues, the advertising strategies, the land deals, the resentment and surprising awe of America. Another revelation is the impact of American psycho-pieties about feelings on these repressed, stoical people.

There is wry comedy in the collision between the psychologists’ demands that family members “break through the coldness” and the stubbornness of the individuals being harangued. Such touches make this novel fascinating reading, from an anthropological as well as a literary stand-point.