BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : The Japan That We Want to Believe Exists : LOOKING FOR THE LOST: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan by Alan Boothl; Kodansha : $25, 387 pages

Sturdy legs, an acute eye, a thirst for beer, a delight in conversation, an outlook both sympathetic and irreverent--these marked English-born Alan Booth, who was one of Japan’s leading film critics and travel writers for two decades before he died of stomach cancer in 1993 at the age of 46.

A man who liked to take, in that crowded country, the less-beaten path and to do it whenever possible on foot, Booth previously wrote “The Roads to Sata: A 2,000-Mile Walk Through Japan.”

“Looking for the Lost” is his account of three shorter but still arduous hikes.

First, Booth follows the route through far northeastern Honshu that Osamu Dazai, the self-consciously decadent Japanese novelist, described in his 1944 book “Tsugaru”--largely an account of how Dazai managed to get drunk on his hosts’ wartime sake rations.

The Tsugaru region, Booth says, is “known for the hardness of its winters, the tenacity of its traditions, the drama of its summer festivals, the survival of its shamans, its impenetrable dialect, the dourly purposeful character of its people and . . . for a way of life that most of Japan has tossed away.”

But even in this remote area, which averaged a crop failure every five years for centuries and whose kokeshi dolls memorialize the poverty that forced many parents to kill their babies, big-city ways are taking over, Booth discovers, and traditional culture hangs on only as a tourist attraction.

Second, he follows the route that the remnants of Takamori Saigo’s army took in its retreat through the mountains of Kyushu during the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877 before making a final, suicidal stand in Saigo’s home city of Kagoshima.

One of Japan’s tragic heroes--sort of a Robert E. Lee figure--Saigo had commanded the forces that ousted the shoguns in the Meiji Restoration of 1868. But loyalty to the disgruntled samurai of his native province led him to mount Japan’s last civil war against the central government he had helped create.

Veneration of Saigo continues, but in a fuzzy way that Booth links to two Japanese characteristics: a tendency to make heroes out of mavericks whom nobody would really want to emulate, and a willingness to blur history--”even--or rather especially--the recent history of the 1930s and 1940s”--when it threatens to become inconvenient.

Third, Booth climbs from Nagoya into Japan’s central mountains along the route the legendary Heike clan might have taken after its defeat by the Genji clan in 1185. This area, almost inaccessible before the 1920s, contains evidence of the past, such as thatch-roofed houses, handmade paper and local brands of sake, but nothing that he can confidently connect to courtiers fleeing the collapse of Japan’s most elegant era.

The common theme of the three journeys is “what almost every Westerner who comes to Japan in the first flush of Oriental infatuation thinks he will find at every turn and grows bitter over when he realizes he won’t.”

Booth came to Japan in 1970 to study Noh drama, which he believed to be a living force and found instead to be “pickled in formaldehyde.” By the time he wrote “Looking for the Lost,” he was no longer infatuated. He pokes fun at his perambulating self, blistered, drenched, frozen and baked; he doesn’t hesitate to mock the absurdities that Japanese society, like any other, has in abundance.

But neither is he a Paul Theroux, dripping scorn on the places he visits. He is as much an insider in Japan as it is possible for a foreigner to be. Fluent in the language, he mixes comfortably with the people he meets on the road.

Besides, Booth’s choice of historical subjects gives this book a deeper resonance that betrays his true sympathy with the Japanese:

“Decline, despondency, and helplessness in the face of uncaring fate are exactly the states and sentiments out of which the bulk of Japan’s literary heritage, as well as a sizable chunk of its national character, are constructed.”

Then he reveals, in the last paragraph of “Looking for the Lost,” that his journeys ended with a “niggling in my stomach,” and that he must have written this lively book in growing awareness of the cancer that would kill him.