“By the end of the three different memoirs that make up The China Lover, Shirley Yamaguchi, aka Li Xianglan, aka Ri Koran, appears to be unknowable after all — and that is just right. Our heroine is far less interesting as a person than as a personification. She is, as one of her admirers describes her, “a typical portable shrine”; and revealing how it is made has never been the point of a portable shrine. In a rare departure from his books and critical essays on film, politics, culture and current events, Buruma, a distinguished journalist-scholar and Japanophile, has crafted in The China Lover a fascinating fictional biography — not only of an iconic film star, but of film as an expression of a nation’s culture and psyche. How fitting that he has put into practice at least two of the techniques of Japanese movie-making he mentions: “keeping a distance even in scenes of great emotion” and leaving things “open-ended, like life.” -The Washington Post
