[Towers is an American educator, novelist, and critic. In the following excerpt, he observes that, although Boyle's satire is "more farcical than witty," East Is East is a funny book, particularly in its portrayal of the protagonist, Hiro Tanaka.]

T. Coraghessan Boyle's third novel, World's End, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1988. It is a long, complex work, a kind of mock history of a Hudson River community that jumps backward and forward from the 1660s to the 1960s. Often satirical, full of grotesque and comically horrendous incidents, World's End is reminiscent in tone of John Barth's densely written historical pastiche, The Sot-Weed Factor, though Boyle's prose is far more readable. His new novel, East Is East, is shorter than World's End and more topical, dealing as it does with the cross-cultural blind spots afflicting a hapless Japanese and his American protector-persecutors. It is also, I think, funnier.

The victim is Hiro (hero?) Tanaka, the overweight, food-obsessed, red-haired offspring of a Japanese mother and a hippie American father who was "so dirty and hairy … that he could have grown turnips behind his ears." Hiro, whose father disappeared before his birth and whose mother died six months after, has had a miserable childhood in Kyoto, taunted by his schoolmates as "a half-breed, a happa, a high-nose and butter-stinker—and an orphan to boot—forever a foreigner in his own society." To compensate for his feelings of inferiority, he becomes a devotee of the heroic and rigorous seventeenth century Samurai code of Jocho Yamamoto and its latter-day interpreter, Yukio Mishima, who committed hari kari in protest against contemporary degeneracy. But Hiro also yearns to see America, to "see the cowboys and hookers and wild Indians, maybe even discover his father in some gleaming, spacious ranch house and sit down to cheeseburgers with him":

If the Japanese were a pure race, intolerant of miscegenation to the point of fanaticism, the Americans, he knew, were a polyglot tribe, mutts and mulattoes and worse—or better, depending on your point of view. In America you could be one part Negro, two parts Serbo-Croatian and three parts Eskimo and walk down the street with your head held high.

Such is the poor naif who signs on to a Japanese freighter and then jumps ship off the coast of Georgia.

Tupelo Island, where Hiro comes ashore, is swampy, insect-and reptile-infested, and inhabited by rednecks, Gullah-speaking blacks, and a community of well-to-do retirees. More important, Tupelo is the seat of Thanatopsis House, an artist's colony very much like Yaddo, which has been established by a patrician Southerner, Septima Lights, on her late husband's ancestral estate. The catastrophic relations between Hiro, the inhabitants of the island, and especially one of the artist guests at Thanatopsis House produce the baleful comedy of East Is East. Misunderstanding is piled upon misunderstanding, and the luckless Hiro, who longs only for a square meal and some way to reach the mainland, finds himself a fugitive from justice, accused, among other things, of arson and murder, and hounded by idiotic immigration inspectors and brutal southern sheriffs. Finally Hiro is allowed to escape from the swamps of Tupelo (in the trunk of Septima's Mercedes) only to find himself deposited in the greatest swamp of them all, the Okefenokee. Can this really be, he wonders, the "mainrand" of America?

As important to the novel as Hiro himself is a writer at Thanatopsis named Ruth Dershowitz. Thirty-four but admitting to twenty-nine, Ruth has put in time at the creative writing programs of Iowa and Irvine, has spent a summer at Bread Loaf, and has published four "intense and gloomy" stories in the quarterlies. La Dershowitz, as she is called, is consumed with envy and ambition; she is only too aware that she owes her presence at Thanatopsis not to her literary achievements but to the fact that she is the lover of Septima's son. It is through this striving, insecure woman that we meet the other residents of Thanatopsis in their little world of status-seeking, sexual manipulations, and one-upmanship. And it is to her woodland studio (called Hart Crane—all the studios at Thanatopsis are named after famous suicides) that the hunted, starving, filthy, insect-lacerated Hiro makes his way, thereby joining the novel's two centers of interest and providing one of its major misunderstandings.

Boyle's approach to literary satire is clearly broad rather than subtle, more farcical than witty. Boyle obviously has a good time setting up and knocking down the resident artists of Thanatopsis. One of the things La Dershowitz most eagerly pursues is the approval of Irving Thalamus, "whose trade-in-stock" is "urban Jewish angst," and what she most dreads is the arrival of her rival, Jane Shine, whose flamboyant good looks and sex-dripping fiction have led her to a series of triumphs both literary and romantic. Another resident is Laura Grobian, described as "the doyenne of the dark-eyed, semi-mysterious upper-middle-class former-bohemian school of WASP novelists, famous for a bloodless 209 page trilogy set in 1967 San Francisco." Unfortunately artists' colonies, like academic communities, have lately been the butt of so much heavy-handed ridicule that one shrinks from yet another account of the petty-mindedness and sexual sloppiness of supposedly gifted people. Eventually, the series of humiliations to which La Dershowitz is subjected comes to seem more mean-spirited than amusing.

The strength of East Is East lies in the story of Hiro, where Boyle's previously demonstrated talent for comicgrotesque invention comes into play. One of the funniest episodes occurs when a rich, garrulous, Japanophile old woman, Ambly Wooster, takes Hiro into her beach house under the impression that he is Seiji Ozawa. The cultural confusions multiply, as do the vigorously narrated mishaps that befall Hiro in his desperate attempts to leave the island and reach the City of Brotherly Love. While there is a considerable degree of Waugh-like cruelty in the fate Boyle metes out to his antihero, who follows the example of Mishima to its bloody conclusion, Hiro himself is engaging enough to provide a pathos at the end that in no way clashes with the comedy that precedes it. This is an exuberant reworking of the innocents-abroad theme that goes back at least as far as Voltaire's L'lngénu.