AMERICA, FROM RIGHT TO LEFT

By Pico Iyer

THE FIRST ALL BUT UNFAILING rule of foreign books about Japan is that they exult in the perspective of a bewildered outsider, not quite sure whether to be excited or exasperated by the science-fictive surfaces of that alien world. The second is that they find a focus for their mingled fascination and frustration in an unfathomable Japanese love object. The gracious and redeeming delight of Audrey Hepburn's Neck (Pocket Books; 290 pages; $21), a first novel by Alan Brown, an American, is that it turns all the standard tropes--and expectations--on their head by presenting Japan from the inside out, and yet with a sympathetic freshness that most longtime expatriates have long ago abandoned.

Daringly, Brown, a Fulbright scholar who lived in Tokyo for seven years, delivers his entire tale through the wide eyes of Toshi, a dreamy young illustrator from a northern village who loves America in part because he knows so little about it. He takes to drinking milk, goes to Tokyo to study at the Very Romantic English Academy (English schools in Japan really do have names like that) and falls in with various foreigners who return the compliment by idealizing him: Jane, a tattooed English teacher in red cowboy boots who mistakes intensity for intimacy; and Paul, a refined advertising agent who collects Japanese boys as if they were woodcuts.

Inhabiting Toshi's heart and soul with absolute conviction, Brown shows us how Americans might look to a confused admirer, with their "blue-tinged complexions," their "crayon-colored eyes," their habit of wishing on everything, even "when breaking dried chicken bones." In effect, he turns the usual "The Japanese are so strange!" cliche inside out. Toshi's unsteady American girlfriend suddenly says things like, "You think I'm awful, don't you? I am, I'm dreadful and I'm not pretty," and, where the Japanese tend to present images of happy families, Toshi notes, Americans "offer up their unhappy childhoods like movie plots, or like gifts." All this is set against the backdrop of the Crown Prince's dating Brooke Shields, protesting farmers dumping foreign rice, and "laid-off Toyota workers burn[ing] AMERICA=AIDS into the brush on the southern slope of Mount Fuji." While cultures fight, their products flirt.

Brown evokes the sleek surrealism of Tokyo--where dogs are rented by the hour and people eat green-tea tiramisu cake--with economical aplomb. Even better, he offsets such Tomorrowland aspects with lyrical images of Toshi's rural home, where women eat grilled eel while watching Audrey Hepburn and go looking for candleweed and ghost mushrooms. Toshi is as much a foreigner in Tokyo as any American might be, yet his two worlds are knit together with an exacting precision, with fishermen's nets "the color of dried persimmon," and an American's blanket having "the color of squid just pulled from the sea." Like Audrey Hepburn, perhaps, Brown's art is meticulous and precise beneath its haunting surface.

As the book continues, we pass through many of the rites of an American coming-of-age story--a confounding love affair, memories of a distant childhood, a visit from a parent, the unfolding of family secrets--but all seen in a Japanese context, as if Brown had written an all-American tale to be read from right to left. And Toshi, with his shy charm, proves much more like Audrey Hepburn than any of the foreigners he meets. Going to bed with a dream and waking up with a nightmare, he begins to plumb the ironies of loving a culture that has destroyed many of his relatives. Gently, with sensitivity and tact, the very notion of "foreignness" is peeled away to some deeper level where passports don't apply. With the beautiful control of a born novelist, Brown shows us that clarity, as much as charity, begins abroad.

--By Pico Iyer