Utopia on the Amazon : BRAZIL-MARU, <i> By Karen Tei Yamashita (Coffee House Press: $19.95; 248 pp.)</i>

Karen Tei Yamashita has a big talent. And she has a talent for bigness, which isn’t necessarily the same thing. Her first novel, “Through the Arc of the Rain Forest,” was a jungle of genres, a dense interweaving of realism and fantasy, a satire on nothing less than modern industrial civilization. “Brazil-Maru,” a more conventional novel, takes on another sprawling subject: Japanese immigration to Brazil.

The details are exotic, but the story is familiar. Like many a utopian community in 19th-Century America, the group of Japanese Christians that lands in Sao Paulo in 1925 wants to do more than clear the forest, plant rice and succeed economically. It is influenced by Rousseau and Tolstoy as well as by Japanese spiritual ideals. It aims to create a “new civilization”--to be, in its rural isolation, a beacon to the world.

Then, just as on the American frontier, things go wrong, and not only because of material difficulties or the inevitable corruption of the dream. Though the settlers of Esperanca have left Japan for something different, they work as hard as they can to re-create Japan in Brazil. This alienates them from Brazilian society, even as the farming life leaves their children too ill-educated to compete back in Japan.

When World War II breaks out, the local Brazilian political boss, a friend of Esperanca’s founder, protects the Japanese from harm. After the war, however, many settlers refuse to believe that Japan has lost. They swarm to the coast to celebrate “victory” and await the imperial warships said to be en route to repatriate them. They invest in worthless yen offered by unscrupulous banks, and form death squads to enforce their view of reality. “It was at that moment that the war ended,” one colonist says, “that it began for the Japanese in Brazil.”

Here is where Yamashita’s talent for bigness shows itself. She folds all this history into a narrative that never loses its momentum; she describes the typical rise and fall of a typical community in terms of its residents’ comic, touching, often startling particulars.

The story is filtered through five narrators: a boy nicknamed Emile in hopes that he will grow up to be like Rousseau’s “natural man”; the wife of the colony’s leader, Kantaro Uno; Uno himself; an emotionally disturbed boy who sees the colony go bankrupt and split in two, and a Brazilianized youth of the third generation who views the surviving settlers as a stubborn, unassimilated remnant.

Except for the disturbed boy, Genji, they all sound much alike, though their views differ. This is partly a stylistic flaw but also a sign of how much the colony is dominated by the personality of a single man--Uno. (Is his name a bilingual pun on “One”?) Pioneer photographer, baseball star, man on horseback, radical individualist in a group-oriented culture, he is Esperanca’s inspiration and its doom. He expands the colony from a collection of family farms into an agribusiness cooperative capable of supplying chickens and eggs to world markets; then he mortgages everything to finance his fling with a mistress in Sao Paulo.

After the crash--which forces his longtime friend Emile to desert him, and ruins the colony’s Brazilian protector, among many other people--Uno calls himself a “great sinner” but is basically unrepentant. “I have always lived my life with great feeling and emotion,” he says. “There can be no other way to live life well. . . . The accomplishments of my lifetime cannot be measured or evaluated by common sense.”

His wife Haru grudgingly agrees: “Everything Kantaro did in his life, he did because he wanted to. When you think of it, that is not something many people can say. Most people, especially women, are forced to do things because of circumstances, because they have children. . . . But Kantaro never cared about circumstances. Funny, but it was because he was that sort of man that people have loved him so much.”

Yamashita, too, is a visionary. She empathizes enough with Uno to make him the equal of the indictment she levels against him; this tension is what propels the novel. Uno, though, identifies the collective dream with himself; he can betray the collective without losing his idealism because, in some sense, it’s still his dream he’s pursuing. Yamashita, a well-traveled native of Los Angeles, wants to shake us out of such self-absorption. In “Rain Forest,” she stressed our destructive impact on the planet; here she awakens us to an obscure but major piece of history (a million Japanese now live in Brazil) that parallels our own.

A writer’s progress may be like a walker’s: moving forward by rocking sideways with each step. In “Brazil-Maru,” Yamashita corrects the wild excesses of her first novel at the cost of restraining her imagination. Such a gift can’t be held in check for long. Expect the next Yamashita novel to be a synthesis of the two--something even bigger.