Divided loyalties on the eve of war

Martin Cruz Smith’s readers have come to expect vivid prose, engaging characters and meticulous research into the settings of his thrillers -- Russia in “Gorky Park,” Cuba in “Havana Bay.” They won’t be disappointed by “December 6,” set in Tokyo on the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Smith’s hero, Harry Niles, is the son of missionaries who grows up in Japan, absorbs its culture and speaks its language -- but, because he is a gaijin, or foreigner, he never quite fits in. In school, when his fellow students drill with wooden bayonets, Harry is used as a target. He becomes a consummate survivor.

Harry is embarrassed by his parents, who are self-righteous and smugly ignorant of the Japanese they aim to convert. Visits to America leave him feeling no less an outsider. As a boy, he seeks out other marginal people and finds them in Tokyo’s colorful Asakusa district: theater managers, chorus girls, yakuza (organized-crime figures) and gamblers.

By the time “December 6” opens, Harry is 30 and renowned both for his slick business dealings and his cynicism. He owns a nightclub, the Happy Paris, where one of his two mistresses, a former geisha and communist agitator named Michiko, is the star. His other mistress, Alice Beechum, is the wife of a British diplomat. Harry’s friends in high places include Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, a sometime poker partner who is planning to bomb Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto, aware of America’s superior industrial capacity, is reluctant to go to war. Japan is short of oil because of a U.S. embargo. For an attack on Pearl Harbor to at least temporarily even the odds, the Japanese must blow up the naval oil storage tanks there. Harry concocts a scheme to make the Japanese high command worry that some tanks remain hidden. Uncertainty, he hopes, will cause more delay.

Harry’s reward for trying to preserve peace between his two countries is the distrust of both. The U.S. Embassy crosses him off its list of people to evacuate. Japanese police tail him everywhere.

Colonel Ishigami, an army officer who lost face when Harry, dealing in black-market goods in China, rescued several Chinese captives that Ishigami was about to behead with a samurai sword during the Rape of Nanking, is back in Tokyo and itching for revenge. Hardly less to be feared is Michiko, who suspects that Harry is skipping town (in fact, he plans to flee with Alice) and would rather kill him than let him go.

Smith can’t change history. We know what happened at Pearl Harbor, and how the war would end. To maintain suspense, he creates converging plot lines. The chapters set in late 1941 alternate with flashbacks into Harry’s past. We see him become a man of divided national and romantic loyalties, an ostentatious tough guy, a closet humanitarian. On Dec. 6, he has to choose -- or so it seems.

Like Junichiro Tanizaki, whose “The Makioka Sisters” lovingly chronicles life in Osaka up until the moment the bombs begin to fall, Smith re-creates a world of wood-and-paper houses, of bittersweet romance, of artistic freedom, that is doomed by Japanese militarism and American incendiaries alike. Harry has seen Tokyo burn after the great earthquake of 1923. He knows that the city -- that all of Japan -- is just tinder waiting to be lighted.

Smith’s portrait of this time and place, as with Tanizaki’s, is stunningly detailed. It’s hard to imagine that he could pack any more information about prewar Japan into a 340-page thriller. The difference is that Tanizaki relaxed and made his characters universal. Smith stuffs his characters so full of national traits of one kind or another that there’s no room for anything else.

Thrillers, after all, have limitations -- even accomplished examples such as this one. Harry is complex, but he also has to be a hero, cool, quick-witted and irresistible to women. His foresight, like our hindsight, is 20-20. He’s sure how the war will end before it starts, whereas in real life, few on either side of the Pacific could have had that much certitude, come Dec. 7.