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BOOK
REVIEW
Japan's right rising from Koizumi's
ashes
Dragon Dance, by
Peter Tasker
Reviewed by Gary LaMoshi
 Prime Minister Junichiro
Koizumi's proposed structural reforms could cure Japan's
lingering economic slump - but they could also plunge
the economy from recession into depression. US
cheerleading for the reforms, overseas vulture funds
ready to pounce, plus Japan's history suggest a
nationalist backlash if the economy crashes, and growing
regional rival China may be tempted to exploit the
situation.
That's the scenario for fund
manager/novelist Peter Tasker's new thriller Dragon
Dance, published in English this week after a
rousing July debut in Japanese.
Set in
post-crash Japan of 2006, Tasker's fourth novel centers
on veteran rock idol and Upper House member Tsuyoshi
Nozawa, described variously in the book as "a cross
between Bruce Springsteen and Benito Mussolini" and
Japan's Eva Peron. Backed by disciples of industrialist
Suichiro Morikawa's shadowy postgraduate institute,
Nozawa stands on the verge of the toppling the political
orthodoxy with his new ultranationalist party.
Popular songs advocating his Japan-first
policies power Nozawa's mass appeal. Followers burn
their passports and eschew imports. Nozawa advocates
nuclear arms for Japan in place of its alliance with the
US. A string of "accidents", created by Japan's most
wanted terrorist of the Red Army Faction era and her
daughter in cahoots with Beijing, blast Nozawa's pet
issues on to the front pages.
Veteran journalist
Martine Meyer, fluent in Japanese and karate (she
doesn't unleash her fists of fury here, though perhaps
in the movie version ... ), finds herself at the heart
of the Nozawa story through a series of exclusive
interviews for her Tribune newspaper, part of the global
InfoCorp media empire, and a series of e-mail messages
from a secret admirer foreshadowing terror attacks.
Meyer labors to unravel the mystery as Nozawa's
political stock rises relentlessly. Similarly, readers
will find themselves furiously turning pages toward the
surprise conclusion. Tasker has crafted a compelling
yarn that mixes politics, economics and international
intrigue.
People in the finance world know
Tasker as a fund manager who, like his journalist
character, is fluent in Japanese language and culture.
His previous three novels have all featured stronger
connections to Tasker's day job in the financial world
than Dragon Dance, but in some sense the roots
are the same. "As a money manager and a writer, you have
very different responsibilities," Tasker said in an
interview with Asia Times Online. "But both draw from
the same core of knowledge, experience and instinct. In
both cases you have to be sincere and call it the way
you see it.
"I see my novels as another way of
getting to the 'Japan story'. I'm also conscious that
they should stand as novels, hopefully entertaining to
people who don't know or care much about Japan."
One complaint about Tasker's novels from
Japan-savvy readers is that his romans a clef
leave the clefs on the table. Even the
Japan-challenged will easily identify Dragon
Dance's ubiquitous Starjacks coffee chain and
InfoCorp chairman Warwick Fletcher, his son Mark the
CEO, and Fletcher pere's wife Jenny Leung, a
Chinese national half his age who tries to supplant Mark
as the mogul's corporate heir. Her attempt to win over
Mark while her husband lay dying provides the novel's
finest comic relief.
These recognizable figures
enhance the novel and its power rather than detract from
it. Dragon Dance doesn't descend into literalism
as it seeks to rise to literature. Above these devices,
the plot twists through London, Shanghai, and Beverly
Hills but centers on metropolitan Tokyo where Tasker, an
Oxford graduate, has lived 20 years. The novel gives a
strong sense of Japanese culture and attitudes, and it
strikes a deep, largely unexplored chord from Japanese
history.
Dragon Dance draws potential
parallels from Japan's Showa era where misguided
government policies in response to an economic crisis in
the 1920s led to military rule and imperialism in the
1930s. Ultranationalism could again emerge from the
ashes of economic disaster, based on "a substratum of
particularist belief - we, the Japanese, are different
from the rest of the world - that exists right across
the political spectrum", according to Tasker.
"Ordinary citizens are apolitical but intensely
proud of their nationality and culture. Postwar, this
was channeled into economic achievement, which was never
really about getting rich and pursuing happiness, but
establishing the credentials of Japan as a great nation.
Now that the wheels have come off the economic miracle,
that pride and energy has to find another mode of
expression."
This cultural nationalism finding
its expression in a slickly marketed, venerable rock 'n'
roller doesn't seem far-fetched to Tasker. "In a
media-saturated, celebrity-obsessed society, politics
melds into showbiz, and showbiz melds into politics.
These days to be a successful nationalist, you can't be
some po-faced theoretician. You have to be a brand, as
Pim Fortuyn was in Holland."
Tasker is also
critical of US policy-makers for becoming so closely
identified as advocates of Koizumi's potentially
devastating economic-reform policies. "There's always
been a predilection for conspiracy theories here, and
that the US is pushing Koizumi to crash-land the economy
in order to benefit vulture funds is a view now heard
from normally quite sensible people, businessmen and
mainstream politicians."
In Dragon Dance,
celebrity demagogue Nozawa paints the US as a bully
thwarting Japan's destiny. Whether that destiny leads to
(literally) violent shifts within Japan and to China
ascending as the major power in the region - and the
most trusted one internationally - is a major focus of
the book. It's not a bad focus for policy-makers in
Japan and across the globe either; Tasker's novel
provides one frighteningly reasonable and readable
scenario to ponder.
Dragon Dance, by
Peter Tasker, Kondansha America, 2002, New York. ISBN:
4-7700-2948-9. Price: US$22.95, 272 pages.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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