Asian Thriller Probes Old East-West Sore Spot

The provocative title is a tip-off: Richard Setlowe’s fifth novel is a thriller with a theme. He asserts that the mass “seduction” of Japanese women by U.S. servicemen--continuing long after the formal military occupation of Japan ended in 1952--had profound effects on Japanese society. It was bitterly resented by Japanese men, he says, and is a hidden cause of friction between the two countries even today.

Setlowe’s aptly named hero, Peter Saxon, finds this out when he travels to Japan to negotiate a merger between InterNatCom, an American media conglomerate, and Kuribayashi, a Japanese electronics firm. The aim is to create an entity that will “control the world” of high-definition, interactive TV in the 21st century.

The negotiations are supposed to be secret, but the day before Saxon arrives, his contact in the Ministry of International Trade and Industry is butchered by a right-wing extremist with a samurai sword. Yakuza thugs follow and threaten him. And Kuribayashi executives, though polite, seem strangely reluctant to OK a deal Saxon believes will benefit both sides.

Even more unsettling: Michiko Hara, the wife of Saxon’s host at Kuribayashi, bears a striking resemblance to Lilli, the cabaret girl he loved in 1964-65, when he was a Navy pilot flying reconnaissance missions over Vietnam.

By chance--or is it?--Saxon’s translator takes him to the Black Rose, the same nightclub where he met Lilli. Now rich Japanese men are entertained by Russian blonds posing as Malibu surfer girls, and American men are consigned to a “gaijin ghetto” with second-tier hostesses such as Mari Midori, love child of an African American airman and a Japanese woman. Saxon is moved by Mari’s story of discrimination and wants to help her, but soon she too is murdered.

All this reawakens Saxon’s long-slumbering memories: being shot down over North Vietnam and saved by his fellow pilot and best friend, Tommy Cochran; nearly losing his leg and being nursed back to health and sanity by Lilli, who herself was scarred as an infant during the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo in 1945; then witnessing Cochran’s sexual mutilation by Junko, the mentally unstable girlfriend Cochran was about to leave.

Michiko’s nervousness in Saxon’s presence convinces him that she is indeed Lilli. And even if she isn’t, whoever is trying to block the merger seems to know everything about his past. In fact, out of all InterNatCom’s lawyers, he may have been picked precisely because of that past, to trigger a scandal and cause the negotiations to fail.

Setlowe, who teaches in the UCLA Writers’ Program, tells this story crisply. The Vietnam War chapters are well-researched and exciting, and his description of Japan seems accurate as far as it goes (which, in a thriller, needn’t be too far). But Saxon, in his 50s still able to think on his feet and swap punches with bad guys, is too much the standard, jut-jawed hero to be interesting, despite his tragic memories. And “Sexual Occupation” is guilty of two miscalculations:

One is that readers will care whether the merger goes through or not. Much space is taken up with boosterish talk about the fortunes to be made by broadcasting Hollywood movies over 500 channels worldwide. It hasn’t been that long since Americans were fretting about why they couldn’t make cars as good as Toyotas and Hondas. Now Yankee arrogance is back, with Setlowe/Saxon indulging in the same kind of one-upmanship for which he chides the Japanese.

The other is that thesis. It surely has some validity. Rich countries have always preyed sexually on poorer ones. And it may be that the Japanese, with their World War II “comfort ladies” and their contemporary “sex tours” of Thailand and the Philippines, see these things more in terms of national pride and humiliation than did the average GI in Japan, focused on his individual loneliness and love and an infatuation with the culture that James Michener described powerfully, if naively, in “Sayonara.” A nonfiction book on the subject might be a useful corrective to American attitudes. But for a thriller, it’s a heavy load to carry.