FICTION

TOKYO SKETCHES by Pete Hamill (Kodansha International: $20; 164 pp.) In these 13 short stories, veteran New York journalist Pete Hamill does more than cross the cultural frontier between the United States and Japan; he crosses that other frontier between what the two countries are and what they used to be. A scholar who settled in Tokyo when Americans were swaggering conquerors has become a pitiable hanger-on threatened with eviction from an apartment he no longer can afford. A Midwesterner whose machine-tool firm has succumbed to Japanese competition flies to Tokyo to meet a mysterious “investor” who turns out to be the son of a woman he abandoned there when he was a GI during the Occupation.

Hamill (“Dirty Laundry,” “The Invisible City”) also straddles a third frontier: the one between journalism and fiction. He remains a good reporter. The prose in this collection is crisp, the atmosphere deftly summarized, and each story has at its core a nugget of research, into Japanese literature and films, baseball, boxing, rock ‘n’ roll or the bulky comic books called manga. Given the fiction writer’s license to enter his characters’ minds, however, Hamill finds mostly soap-opera emotions there, and can’t resist the urge to end each story with a big, thumping epiphany.

Sometimes this works. An American teen-ager models his behavior on stoical film samurai; a young female interviewer and an old, blind, black blues singer find common ground only in that most Japanese of emotions, shame. Sometimes it half-works. A gaijin baseball player realizes that, just as his Japanese manager claims, he doesn’t truly love the game; a Japanese boy, disoriented by a stay in the States and by his father’s death, retreats into manga fantasies. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all. Hamill’s love stories are pulpy, and his American journalists are, surprisingly, his most one-dimensional characters--news junkies without the humility that enables others to cross the frontier in spirit as well as in fact.