Michael Crichton's Rising Sun, judging from its enormous sales (first on The New York Times's best-seller list for three weeks and still second as of April 19), could be the only book about Japan many Americans will ever read. If this is true, its portrayal of the Japanese as inscrutable, technologically proficient, predatory aliens who communicate through telepathy, subsist on unpalatable foods, manipulate everything and everyone and enjoy kinky, violent sex with white women will be more influential in shaping opinions about Japan and the Japanese than any of the more thoughtful and insightful books recently published.

Rising Sun is a thriller revolving around the postcoital murder of Cheryl Austin, a Texas blonde, on a conference table at the Nakamoto Tower in downtown L.A., the U.S. headquarters of the fictitious Nakamoto keiretsu (holding company). As detectives Peter Smith and John Connor unravel the mystery, every character they encounter puts in his two yen about Japan-U.S. relations. And each speaks in improbable paragraphs of exposition familiar to readers of revisionist Japan experts Chalmers Johnson, Clyde Prestowitz, James Fallows or Pat Choate.

There has been for some time a demand for perfidious, post-cold war villains, and Crichton's Japanese are the supply.

Crichton has brought to the surface an idea that has been lurking for some years in America's collective pop-culture unconscious: The Japanese are evil. The Japanese have been accused of bearing the responsibility for any or all of the following: unemployment, budget deficits, the declining industrial base, trade imbalances, low savings rates, unfair trading, high real estate prices and, now, low real estate prices. And to all this Crichton adds the final indignity. In Rising Sun, Japanese men have sex exclusively with white women, whom they force to live in subjugation in secret locales. ("We demand reciprocity," a Lee Iacocca might insist.) By making the leap into the realm of hysteria—an appropriate cover for the paperback might be a caricature of World War II-era Prime Minister Tojo skulking off into Rockefeller Center with Doris Day over one shoulder and an eighteen-inch dildo sheathed where his samurai sword would have been—Crichton has changed the context in which I, and I suspect others, will perceive what is written about Japan and the Japanese.

Suddenly, revisionist Japan experts like Prestowitz or Johnson, who have been criticized by some as Japan-bashers, seem moderate and reasonable—as George Bush appears reasonable when compared with Pat Buchanan. Prior to Rising Sun, those Americans who bothered to think about tensions in Japan-U.S. relations focused on economic matters: opening rice markets, for example, or accusations of semiconductor dumping. At worst, there were the racist insults clumsily blurted out by Japanese politicians who sometimes forget they have become actors on the international media stage. (I suspect some American politicians harbor reciprocal xenophobic views on the Japanese but are far too media-savvy to voice them.)

But Crichton's novel suggests that if the Japanese finally buy up enough of America they will not only have their way with our cultural treasures (Columbia's or MCA's debatable status as treasures notwithstanding), they will also have their way with our women—which means, of course, blonde women. The threat sounds familiar—it is a time-worn and chillingly effective cry that rallies white men to string innocent men of color from trees. Savor this quote from Rising Sun spoken by Julia Young, a "beautiful" girl with a Southern accent who lives in a bettaku, a "love residence" kept by Japanese executives in Westwood, California:

"These guys come over from Tokyo, and even if they have a shokai, an introduction, you still have to be careful. They think nothing of dropping ten or twenty thousand in a night. It's like a tip for them. Leave it on the dresser. But then, what they want to do—at least some of them … their wishes, their desires, it's just as natural as leaving the tip. It's completely natural to them. I mean, I don't mind a little golden shower or whatever, handcuffs, you know. Maybe a little spanking if I like the guy. But I won't let anyone cut me. I don't care how much money. None of those things with knives or swords…. A lot of them, they are so polite, so correct, but when they get turned on, they have this … way…. They're strange people."

The Japanese in Rising Sun are portrayed as aliens, as perfidious and threatening as the virus from outer space in Crichton's The Andromeda Strain. If African-Americans or Jewish-Americans were portrayed in a similarly negative caricature, there would be storms of protest. Unfortunately, Rising Sun received a positive front-page review in The New York Times Book Review. Recessionary America's need for a scapegoat has created an atmosphere of fear of Japan. "We are definitely at war with Japan," says fictional character John Connor.

In this climate, thoughtful books about Japan, like In the Realm of a Dying Emperor, by Norma Field, or The Outnation, by Jonathan Rauch, can be too easily overlooked. Field, an associate professor of East Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago, was born to an American father and Japanese mother in occupied Japan. In the Realm of a Dying Emperor is a skillful rendering of her feelings about returning to the land of her birth—a nation that was, in many ways, exclusionary and cruel to outsiders like herself. It is also a tale about three Japanese: a flag burner, a widow and Nagasaki's outspoken Mayor Hitoshi Motoshima, who in their own ways fought the rigid conformity that envelops too much of Japanese life. Field's description of flag burner Chibana Shoichi's home of Okinawa, an island still struggling to come to terms with its World War II history as a battle site where 250,000 people died, is vivid and moving. She thought-provokingly juxtaposes scenes of Okinawa's unique status as a formerly independent nation, now "occupied" (small o) by the Japanese while previously having been "Occupied" (big O) by the Americans, with Emperor Hirohito's (the dying emperor of the title) endless blood transfusions and rectal bleeding, and with the posture of "self-restraint" that settled over Japan during his prolonged decline. It was considered bad taste to celebrate lavishly or show exuberant joy during the Emperor's illness. (I was in Japan at the time and recall one curious example of "self-restraint." Mitsukoshi department store found itself in a quandary over its Christmas wrapping paper, which had the unrestrained word "Merry" printed before "Christmas." Disseminating the word "Merry," even in English, would be in very bad taste during a season of self-restraint. The solution was to print new wrapping paper with the more restrained adjective "Holy" preceding "Christmas.")

That Field's book is an intelligent, if critical, look at Japan should come as a relief. But could the Japanese, even in her account, be seen as congenitally creepy? "The sophisticated cynics do not see that they cannot disengage by choice," she writes at one point. "In their submission to an education that robbed them of their childhood, that holds their own children hostage through secret records passed from school to school, reinforcing an ever more tyrannical regimen of competition, in their surrender to a crushing routine of work and commute, they are participants in a compulsory game."

Before reading Rising Sun I would not have been struck by a passage like that. Now I must pause. Crichton's sensationalism has made me wary of even legitimate criticism of Japan. Have I become the Anti-Crichton? Now I worry that Americans will detect evidence of Japanese dastardliness in every subtle observation of their differentness—in the way they bow instead of shake hands, in the way they eat raw fish, and so on.

The Outnation is an interesting book of aphorisms gleaned from Jonathan Rauch's six-month stay in Japan. But why, in the course of an otherwise acute and perceptive discussion, does Rauch feel compelled to explain that the Japanese aren't clones and that "this is immediately evident even if you are unused to looking at Asians and still haven't noticed that the hair comes in infinite fine gradations of blackness: black-black, brown-black, dark brown, even reddish brown." Is Rauch making a valid point? Or has Rising Sun made me excessively sensitive?

It seems to me that an honorable writer like Rauch, who clearly wants to understand, should not explain to Americans that the Japanese are not clones. A few years ago I would have said that we had outgrown stereotypes and fear. But the climate has apparently changed, thanks to the likes of Iacocca and now to Crichton.

Rauch eloquently expresses the same sentiment: "There was no dark secret. The Japanese are precisely as mysterious and unique as my aunt in Hackensack. I came to Japan wanting to know how I ought to feel about the place. I left knowing only how not to feel. Frightened: that is how not to feel."