New Madame Butterfly

SAYONARA (243 pp.)--James Michener --Random House ($3.50).

In Sayonara, James (tales of the South Pacific} Michener mounts a soap opera on a soapbox. Placing his latest novel in Japan, he has rescored Puccini's Madame Butterfly for strings, brass, airplanes, and a social conscience. His latter-day Lieut.

Pinkerton, U.S.N., is Major Lloyd Gruver, Air Force jet ace; his Butterfly. Hana-ogi, a dancer. Gruver and Hana-ogi love and lose each other at the color line. With many an audible aside, Author Michener labors the worthy moral of their story: U.S. color snobbery will unfailingly lose friends and alienate people in the Far East.

Brusque, 28-year-old Lloyd Gruver, a West Pointer with seven MIGs to his credit, is ordered by the squadron medic to take a rest in Japan. Confident that he belongs to a superior race, Gruver at first is disgusted to see American boys taking an interest in and even marrying Japanese girls with butterball shapes, burlap dresses and gold teeth. But he soon serves as best man at a Japanese-American wedding, and the groom, an airman from Gruver's outfit, drops a tantalizing hint: "G.I.s married to Jap girls always look as if they knew a big, important secret." Through the newlyweds, Lloyd meets willowy, honey-skinned Hana-ogi, who teaches him the Japanese women's big secret ("They make their men feel important").

Hana-ogi is the lead dancer in an all-girl troupe governed by austere rules of conduct. But Lloyd and Hana-ogi break all the rules and become lovers. The affair that results is an obstacle race with tragedy. Social pressures bedevil the pair; so do officers' wives, Army regulations and Lloyd's father ("Y'can't send half-Jap boys to the Point"). Finally, Hana-ogi is sent to another dancing post and Lloyd is railroaded back to the U.S. and his pre-fling fiancee, a general's daughter. He is a sadder and presumably a wiser man.

Along the way, Author Michener dishes up a short-order Cook's tour of Japanese art, food, culture, idiom. His habit of breaking into pidgin English brings even his love scenes ("Oh, Rroyd, I rub you berry sweet") close to low comedy. For the rest, Michener is so busy swatting interracial injustice that he beats the life out of his story long before it is time to say sayonara, Japanese for goodbye.

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